Román Leão

Category: Reviews

  • Angel Down—Daniel Kraus

    I was not emotionally prepared for Daniel Kraus’ 2025 book, Angel Down. I can’t remember what drove me to pick it up in the first place, although it lives firmly within my wheelhouse. Man’s inhumanity to man? Check. The utter indifference of heaven? Check. Biblical allusions that don’t turn out like what you’ve been led to believe. Oh, yea.



    Had I looked up Kraus’ CV before jumping in, I would have noticed his bona fides as a past collaborator with such masters of the filmic horror genre no less than George A. Romero and Guillermo del Toro. Even so, I should have been tipped off by the cover blurb by one of my favorite authors of this decade, Stephen Graham Jones.

    There is a scene in Jones’ The Only Good Indian that still haunts me five years after I read it. Perhaps the saving grace of the depth of real horror that Kraus serves up from the trenches of the Western Front is that the senses become so overwhelmed that nothing sticks. In the immortal words of Johnny Cash, speaking on yet another war, Drive on, it don’t mean nothin’. Can you become shell-shocked from a novel?

    My favorite stories all have a memorable anti-hero, this book has five… well, four and a total innocent that is unfairly lumped in with the rest. These doughboys are saddled with a suicide mission precisely due to their expendability. Their vainglorious commanding officer, the only character that rings a little hollow, sends the mismatched quintet out to the middle of No Man’s Land as the division retreats as a way to rid himself of them all in one fell swoop.

    The relentless style that Kraus employs, as if the entire book were one run-on sentence, propels the reader headlong through the narrative, as if you, too, were scrambling over the broken pieces of men and machines in a desperate bid to save… oneself? A wayward angel? All of mankind? In the end, the effect is one of exhausted fatalism. “Them that die’ll be the lucky ones,” as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Long John Silver famously stated.

    Krause is capable of dark flights of poetic abstraction as well, as best shown when our final anti-hero is driven into the center of the Earth, to Hell itself, in a peek behind the curtain that rivals the mechanical dread of Ken Kesey’s Combine, the machine behind the scene in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

  • Put on This Record: hyphenated-man—Mike Watt & the Missingmen [2010]

    To be familiar with punk rock veteran Mike Watt is to know and appreciate his idiosyncrasies, moreover, to have learned to expect him to make those left turns that light out for the territories and sometimes veer into the weeds. The thing about left turns, however, is if you make enough of them, you end up heading in the same direction that you started.

    Ever since forming the seminal ’80s punk band, the Minutemen, with his boyhood chum and dueling partner D. Boon and surfer/rhythmatist George Hurley, Watt has consistently taken the road less traveled by. The Minutemen are infamous for incorporating jazz, funk, hard core, Beat poetry—along with the kitchen sink—into their own personal strain of musical and philosophical expression. For a group that eschewed branding and easy cut-and-paste sloganeering, if it could be said that they had a motto, it was, “Punk is whatever we made it to be.”

    Watt and his various co-conspirators have always viewed punk rock as a big tent sort of affair. The whole reason this type of music and scene appealed to three dudes from San Pedro, California was its lack of inherent rules. In keeping with that spirit, Watt recorded this, his third concept album, or “opera,” in 2010. The first opus, Contemplating the Engine Room, used his father’s experience on Navy submarines as a metaphor for his own life in an Econoline van, and the second, The Secondman’s Middle Stand, mapped his near-death sickness onto Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Both of these works were very personal in nature, and in the case of the last one, perhaps a little too personal at times—but, hey, nobody said punk is supposed to make you comfortable.

    This time out, Watt enlisted guitarist Tom Watson and drummer Raul Morales, collectively called the Missingmen, to help create a cycle of 30 “little songs” that were inspired in part by the proto-surrealist paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. On his website, hootpage.com, Watt wrote that the punchy, ultra-lean tunes owe much to the Minutemen’s econo credo of “no filler, right to point, and distilled down to the bare nada.” Specifically, it was the documentary, We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen, that finally got this restless artist to slow down and take a look back, allowing him to recognize something beautiful and utterly vital in the short form.

    At the virtual needle drop, the album leaps out of your speakers/ear buds with arrow-pierced-egg-man. Clocking a mere 1:19, the song is a clarion call from the pit, a diseased chunk of meat thrown over the wall to help spread the contagion. Watt’s bass is greased up and firing on all cylinders. After playing the conservative sideman with the Stooges for a few years before this—as if anything Stooge-related could be called conservative—it’s great to hear him playing, if not more aggressively, then more dynamically.

    Interestingly enough, the bass was the last piece of this particular puzzle to be added. This time out, Watt wrote on D. Boon’s Fender Telecaster, showed the Missingmen how the songs went, then retreated to later respond to what they had come up with. If he didn’t “chimp” (or “write about” in Pedro-speak) this unorthodox method, I would have never guessed that this music was anything but organically grown. It sounds like three guys jamming in a sweaty-ass shed and hollerin’ about 16th century religious art from the Netherlands. As one does.

    The tendency to play “spot the influenced influence” as is hard to resist as Watt’s music has touched so many fellow artists over the years, just as playing within an ever-widening sphere of musicians has continued to color his own work. On bird-in-the-helmet-man, I hear echoes of Albert Bouchard and early Patti Smith-infected BÖC, while belly-stabbed-man’s “gut kicked – hard / truth hits – hard / emotions gush – but no word hole” is a Pop Group Amnesty Report from the depths of hell.

    If I had to call a break-out single for “alternative” radio play (as if there were anything resembling a valid record and/or radio industry anymore) it would have to be the Trees Outside the Academy-era Thurston Mooresque hollowed-out-man with its pleasant droning melody, relentless drive, and totally fucked-up lyrics. “Now the hat that’s worn is like a horse track / pairs of peckers promenadin’ ’round a sack / a swollen bagpipe waitin’ for the ear-knife / castrate hack,” makes a perfect Sonic flip side to Sister’sTuff Gnarl, a connection made more overt when one considers the cover on Watt’s own Ball-Hog or Tugboat record.

    The song that most evokes the spirit of Pedro for me is, appropriately enough, finger-pointing-man. Here, Watt’s lyrics sound like they could have been torn from his own Spiels Of A Minuteman folio. “Conviction’s like some affliction / without the clout of some doubt / it’s fuckin’ nonsense / ignorin’ content / and letting’ the mouth just spout.”

    The sharp angularity of Tom Watson’s chording juxtaposed with the singsong delivery of funnel-capped-man, brings to mind San Francisco’s own Deerhoof, in fact, the first time I saw Raul Morales play, I was reminded of the ’Hoof’s Greg Saunier—if not stylistically, through their respective jazz-inflected approaches—in the giddy zeal that they both seem to take in playing drums.

    Over the years, Watt’s vocal delivery has become more like his bass playing, a distinctive and singular expression of his muse. Printing out the hyphenated-man lyrics from the hootpage may help you find your way inside Watt’s vision, or you can just let the Missingmen’s churning accompaniment propel you headlong down their peculiar rabbit hole.

    Using one of Bosch’s less fantastical icons as an avatar, Watt lays out the impetus for the opera in own-horn-blowing-man, while keeping one eye out for any hint of lurking solipsism. “Go figure the trigger / to really holler, fuckin’ holler / and hoist yeah, foist / expression from repression / not badge-buffin’ or baggin’ wind / but to get out what’s stuck within.”

  • The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future—Stephen March

    It has only been three years since Canadian writer Stephen March took a hard look at his country’s downstairs neighbor and found us… well, let’s just say that we aren’t going to get our deposit back. Like a tenant that has decided to start cooking meth in the kitchen at night, what the United States does affects the entire building, and March smartly surmised that the future of the American experiment would best be sussed somewhat from arm’s length.

    When one is fully immersed in the the circular firing squad of 21-century American politics, it is difficult to shift one’s eyes anywhere than your neighbor’s trigger finger. As an outsider, March peered through the front window, and what he found is disturbing.

    March walks us through traditional, and very familiar-sounding, lead-ups to civil conflict. Economic and environmental instability worsens every year? Check. Political gamesmanship overrides all other governmental concerns? Checkedy motherfuckin’ check. Under those sorts of strains, March points out that even long-established national identities can fracture with shocking speed. Iraq in 2006 had a “relatively high” Shia/Sunni rate of intermarriage. “The supposedly permanent and intractable religious rift was a relic from antiquity,” he writes. “Then it wasn’t.”

    Our Canadian judge sees the cleaving of national purpose as a done deal, a problem inherent in the very founding of the union. “There is very much a Red America and a Blue America,” he writes. “They occupy different societies with different values, and their political parties are emissaries of that difference.”

    “Democrats represent a multicultural country grounded in liberal democracy,” he illustrates. “Republicans represent a white country grounded in the sanctity of property. America cannot operate as both at once.” But, man, it is fun to point fingers. March points his own finger at media empires who make fortunes on what Friedrich Nietzsche called the pleasure of contempt. “Blaming one side offers a perverse species of hope,” March admits. “Such hopes are not only reckless, but irresponsible.”

    As a foreigner, March is in the position to say what would be unthinkable to the average American. “The U.S. system is an archaic mode of government totally unsuited to the realities of the 21st century. The forces tearing America apart are both radically modern and as old as the country itself… bloody revolution and the threat of secession are essential to the American experiment.”

    After detailing several scenarios that might touch off a conflagration—some of which, such as the movement of outside National Guard troops into another state’s territory, and assassination, albeit, still attempted and ancillary at this time—March warns that once started, civil wars are really hard to stop. He writes that in 50 years of counterinsurgency we still have not learned that “violence that imposes order to control violence produces more violence and more disorder.” You can not achieve pacification by murdering people. I think Bob Dylan said that.

    Even if you were compelled to go that route, the overwhelming force of the state is useless against stochastic resistance. “A succession of winning firefights makes exactly no difference.” Lt. General Daniel Bolger, author of Why We Lost: A General’s Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars writes. “The local people have to run their own government.”

    March goes further, saying that it is impossible to de-radicalize the next generation while at the same time taking away their most basic rights. “It’s hard to find youth so stupid that you can kill and imprison their parents and tell them you love them afterward. It didn’t work in Iraq and Afghanistan. It won’t work in the United States.” 


    “This is the other thing that would occur,” writes retired colonel Peter Manor, “massive detention centers across the United States where people who were suspected of being disloyal… would be warehoused on a massive scale.” The U.S. is already the most incarcerated society in the world. A civil war would explode those numbers. Who would support or pay for that? Let’s not even get into the political morass of donor states vs. recipient states.

    The traditional intractability of the American populace may be the key to avoiding this scenario all together, given the hopelessness of fighting it out. “If you’re in a situation where you’re using armed force to try and quell a population, you’re either going to have to kill a bunch of them, or you’re going to pull out and let them have local control,” writes Lt. General Bolger. “You’re never going to talk them into seeing it your way.” The typical conclusion of insurgency conflicts is not victory by either side but exhaustion by all.

    Even the paperwork is daunting. March points out that uncertainty over small questions of daily life is a major reason why Scotland and Quebec are not independent nations today. Pensions, passports, national debt, dual citizenship, the military… are all things that would quickly become a bureaucratic nightmare.

    Once again, March leans into his innate Canadianess to say what an American would not. “At this point in history… much of the U.S. Constitution simply does not apply to reality. Democrats and Republicans alike worship the document as a sacred text, indulging a delirious sentimentality that was the precise opposite of what the framers envisioned as the necessary basis for responsible government.”

    He goes on, “Americans worship ancestors whose lives were spent overthrowing ancestor worship; they pointlessly adhere to a tradition whose achievement was the overthrow of pointless traditions.” March, perhaps naively, calls for a new Constitutional Convention, not understanding the very real possibility for real chaos to ensue, not grasping that there is always more to lose.

    March does understand that the failure of the American experiment, and he does claim that it is failing, would left the world a lessor place. “The world needs America,” he writes. “It needs the idea of America… [a place] where contradictions that lead to genocide elsewhere flourish into prosperity.”

    He does believe that the problems that plague our society at this point in our history are not beyond the capacity of the American people to solve. “There is one hope, however, that must be rejected outright: the hope that everything will work out by itself, that America will bumble along into better times,” March warns. “It won’t.”

    “If history has shown us anything, it’s that the world doesn’t have any necessary nations,” March sounds the alarm. “Once again, the hope for America is Americans.” Let’s not let him, the world, and ourselves, down.

  • Put on This Record: The Wörld is Yours—Motörhead [2010]

    There are three things in life you can be sure of: death, taxes, and Motörhead. When this album dropped, it felt like the Devil’s favorite band was everywhere. A documentary, Lemmy: 49% Motherf**ker, 51% Son Of A Bitch, was burning cigarette holes in the screen, and this punishing new album was shredding speakers across the globe. Lemmy Kilmister and the lads were having quite a year, unbelievably, their 35th in existence.



    The Wörld is Yours roars out of the garage with Born to Lose, as classic a Motörhead trope as speed, sex, and well… death, preferably from too much speed and sex. Drummer Mikkey Dee’s pummeling double bass footwork underscores Lemmy’s proletariat philosophical musings: Right now / right here / lose your mind / but show no fear / Burn slow / no excuse / so unkind / born to lose. How the band waited 20 albums and 35 years to write a song called Born to Lose is an utter mystery.

    Road testing this album, I kept reaching for the volume knob, turning it up by turns through I Know How to Die, Get Back in Line, and Devils in My Head until the drivers of cars I started passing on the freeway were looking kind of scared.

    Motörhead has never been a “message” band, but if they ever had a point, it is this: everything eventually fails you except rock ’n’ roll. Get Back in Line, especially, showcases just what the band does better than just about anyone else standing: an unrelenting riff, a hypersonic beat, and a bass player that’s big, pissed off, and wired out of his warty skull.

    The trio does not slow down until the fifth track in, Rock ’n’ Roll Music. For any other band, this would be a highlight and probably the hardest song on the album. That’s Motörhead’s curse, they set the bar pretty high—high enough that a boilerplate boogie about rock, just doesn’t make the cut. Maybe Kilmister, et al., were still aiming at illusive, non-existent radio play, a strategy that dogged their 1992’s outing, March or Die. I don’t come to this table, however, looking for subtlety. No worries though, the band comes slamming back with the next track, Waiting for the Snake, which paints (what else?) a fatalistic picture of the state of modern society.

    The album takes an even darker turn with Brotherhood of Man. There’s no way to describe this song other than: Heavy as Fuck. When Lemmy grunts, Now your time has come / a storm of iron in the sky / War and murder come again / lucky if you die, you damn well get off your ass and lock the front door.



    Bye Bye Bitch Bye Bye is prototypical Motörhead, and just about the most perfect album closer I can imagine. Guitarist Philip Campbell, on board since 1986’s Orgasmatron, lets loose with everything he has left, leaving your speakers smoking, and your ears ringing. The way God, or Lemmy, intended.

    RIP Ian Fraser Kilmister (1945–2015)

  • Daytripper—Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá

    Originally published as a 10-issue series, this compilation makes up one of the most imaginative, and ultimately moving, graphic novels I’ve yet encountered. The Brazilian twin bothers Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá have delivered a truly heartfelt story that transcends the comic book genre, while taking advantage of the graphic format to capture the wonder of the human experience in line and masterful use of color.

    Daytripper is the story of Brás de Oliva Domingoes who, when we meet him, is an obit writer for the São Paulo Journal. He toils at the daily, smokes, and works on his novel—struggling under the shadow of his father, a famous author.

    When he stops in at a neighborhood bar, on his way to his dad’s speaking engagement, he blunders into a robbery and, as the brothers put it, “Just like Shakespeare, Brás died on his birthday. He was 32 years old.”

    That’s when things get interesting. Daytripper is all about false starts (and stops), might-have-beens, the roads taken and not taken. The ensuing chapters that flesh out the life of Brás jump forward and backward in time, each illuminating a day that is no less wonderful for all its tragedy.

    There is a feeling of destiny and a sense of magical realism that pervades the story and leads the reader to ask, “Is he dreaming? Am I dreaming?” The line between real and unreal is blurred, and in the end doesn’t matter. It’s all real. It’s all good.

  • The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings—Lew Welch

    Scanning the used books over at the wonderful Book Passage in Corte Madera, I came across several faded paperbacks by Beat writer Lew Welch. One of the lesser-known Beats, Welch is probably best known as the other hopeless drunk in Jack Kerouac’s majestically depressing Big Sur.

    Flipping through his work, however, I found Welch to be a gifted poet with a value system more in line with the nascent hippie movement that was emerging in the mid-to-late-’60s. That Welch disappeared into the woods around Nevada City with his 30-30 after writing a goodbye note only adds to the mystery of this important writer I had somehow missed during my fascination with all things Beat.

    Welch’s brief, lyrical chapbook The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings, originally published in 1969, and reprinted with three additional poems by Berkeley’s Sand Dollar in 1970, features a stunning wrap-around scratch board illustration of the Marin Headlands with a slightly more provincial San Francisco peeking (peaking?) over the hills.

    The title poem, the first in a pair of bookends that feature the mountain, intones the mantra: This is the last Place. There is nowhere else to go, as Welch boils down the western movement of humankind. Centuries and hordes of us, from every quarter of the earth, now piling up, and each wave going back to get some more. Buddy, you have no idea.

    The last poem, Song of the Turkey Buzzard, looks deeper into a riddle posed in a triptych of Zen-like koans (complete with commentary by Welsh’s literary alter−ego, the Red Monk): If you spend as much time on the Mountain as you should, She will always give you a Sentient Being to ride… What do you ride? (There is one right answer for every person, and only that person can really know what it is)

    Of course Welch, like anyone would, wishes for a cool totem animal like a mountain lion, but the mountain has other ideas: Praises, Tamalpais, Perfect in Wisdom and Beauty, She of the Wheeling Birds. Throughout the course of the poem, the mountain throws some pretty clear hints at him until in the second canto, he finally acquiesces, and given his final act two scant years later, it begs one to wonder if he hadn’t been planning it all along.

    With proper ceremony disembowel what I no longer need, that it might more quickly rot and tempt my new form NOT THE BRONZE CASKET BUT THE BRAZEN WING SOARING FOREVER ABOVE THEE O PERFECT O SWEETEST WATER O GLORIOUS WHEELING BIRD

    Sand Dollar

  • The Day I First Believed—Wally Lamb

    Former Oprah Book Club golden boy Wally Lamb took his time writing his third novel, The Day I First Believed, a harrowing look at violence and the effect it has on those caught in its collateral snare. Lamb’s much anticipated follow-up to 1998’s I Know This Much is True is an engaging, terrifying, and at times, nauseating rollercoaster ride, even going as far as to include the feeling when the ride suddenly stops and you kind of lurch out toward the parking lot, dizzy, discombobulated, and trying not to hurl.

    The first half of The Day I First Believed deals with the real world events of the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School. The novel’s protagonist, Caelum Quirk and his wife Maureen both work at the school, although Caelum is called away by the imminent death of an aunt on the East Coast and Maureen is left to live through the shooting on her own. She does survive, but is seriously psychologically traumatized by the experience.

    I remember when the shooting happened, and like everyone, I was shaken up, but I had already been out of high school for 15 years at the time and I think the immediacy of what happened was a little lost on me. Ten years later, I found myself back on campus, this time as a teacher, and the impact of Lamb’s narration scared the living shit out of me.

    Lamb uses snatches of diary entries, news reports, and transcripts of the taunting videos the two gunmen made before going on their rampage to good effect in the first half of the book, it’s in the second half when he resorts to a similar technique to introduce side plots dealing with the Quirk family history that the whole thing lurches to a halt.

    Dana and I saw Lamb speak at Corte Madera’s Book Passage after I had finished the novel, but she hadn’t. I was hoping to glean some sort of insight into what Lamb was trying to do with the second half of this novel, without standing up and asking him straight up, “What the hell?”

    We both found Lamb to be very personable, engaging, and a great storyteller. He mentioned the idea of the labyrinth as the story’s overarching metaphor, and personally, I think he became a little lost in his own maze.

    He mentioned how he inhabits his characters when he is writing, and if what I experienced just reading the first half of the novel is any indication of what that must have been like, perhaps he wandered a little off the reservation. I hope he makes it back.

  • Superworse—Ben Greenman

    If there is one thing you could say about this slowly aging, psychedelically dented, slightly cynical romantic, it’s that I likes me some metafiction. When Dave Eggers and his crew started up McSweeney’s back in ’98, I thought I had died and gone to a well-lighted, non-denominational heaven (which for some reason, looked a lot like Portland).

    Author Ben Greenman is an editor at the New Yorker and apparently indulges his non-monocled side writing for indie cred publications like McSweeney’s and Nerve. His 2004 novel, Superworse, is supposedly a paperback “remix” of his 2001 hardback effort, Superbad. It’s hard to know to what extent this is true as the novel itself is a Gordian knot of self-reference and too-clever-by-half literary winks and nods. Just the way I like ’em.

    Without giving too much away, the conceit of Superworse is that an old instructor of Greenman’s, one Laurence Onge, is asked to edit the original novel for the soft cover release by Soft Skull Press. Onge is a bit of a megalomaniac and sees references to his history with the author under every well-turned phrase. Onge had gone as far to impose a series of Greenman’s musical numbers onto the earlier version of the book, which have been removed here “at the request of the author.”

    When Greenman quits shuffling the cards and playing with the intricate structure of the 19 chapters of the book, he writes a good short story. Pieces like the twice-removed western, The Theft of a Knife, or the 13th century Florintine political drama, No Friend of Mine, show Greenman’s gift for set and setting, as well as psychological abstraction. Even the more traditionally structured stories in Superworse all leave the reader with a faint sense of unease. Nothing in Greenman’s stories is ever really resolved; we are only seeing as much of the drama as the author thinks we need to see.

    The feeling of vertigo is muted in shorter, McSweenyesque, sketches like, Notes on Revising Last Night’s Dream, and the superlative, What 100 People, Real, and Fake, Believe about Dolores, which masterfully maps the rise and fall of a relationship through short observations from friends, historical and literary figures, and… Superman, who simply believes “that the underwear she wore was the same as the underwear that Lois Lane wore.”

    To illustrate the extent that Greenman, or Onge, or Greenman/Onge has gone to tie all this together, the first nine chapters and the last nine are separated by a pivotal 10th chapter entitled Notes to a Paper You Wouldn’t Understand in which a series of footnotes thematically echo their corresponding chapters while they ostensibly relate minutiae about an absent piece about… well, who really cares, you get the idea. If this all sounds like your cup of mud, well, I’ll see you at the bar.

    Also by this author:
    What He’s Poised to Do: Stories

  • Put on This Record: Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl—Van Morrison [2009]

    On the list of things I never thought I’d see (or hear), Van Morrison revisiting his seminal 1968 album, Astral Weeks, has lived at the top of the leaderboard for more years than I’d care to count.

    Over the years, the Man has developed a thick-skinned persona that holds stardom and the chasing of an easy buck at a disdainful arm’s length. He is not going to be your trained monkey, no matter how badly you might want it. You want another Moondance? Bollocks. I wouldn’t presume to ask Morrison to look backward any more than I’d ask for his autograph while getting ice cream at Fusco’s.

    However, a closer read of his journey reveals threads that tie disparate pieces of his career together, an ever-present turning toward certain tropes: the streets of Belfast, the green hills and mountain streams of an Irish dream state, a town called Paradise; it all weaves together to create one of the richest imaginary tapestries of any artist living or dead.

    Morrison has said he has always wanted to properly record this group of songs with a string section—the way he heard it in his head back in ’68. Right off the top, the violin prominently featured on the lead track, Astral Weeks, adds to the sonorous gravitas of the original.

    The master’s voice has deepened with age and has taken on more of the characteristics of a band instrument—at times honking like a tenor sax, at others, vibrating and humming low like a cello cradled between the legs of a ginger lass, or more appropriately, an aging Dublin transvestite.

    Which leads me to the most striking difference between the original album and the new performance: the sequence. Morrison has shifted around the order of songs, which fits the dream-like nature of the record. Astral Weeks always struck me as ephemeral, the more you tried to grab it on to it and put it in a box, the more likely it was to turn to smoke.

    To me, the two final songs after Madame George always felt like a coda, or a post-coital afterglow. In any case, coming right after such a masterful vision of humanity at its most exposed and fragile, they weren’t exactly in the best light to be recognized as the subtle masterpieces that they are.

    Slim Slow Slider and Ballerina are recast here as shamanistic trance state-inducing chants guiding the listener toward the heavy hitters of Sweet Thing and Madame George respectively and the state of bliss that Astral Weeks always promised.

    I’m not going to ruin the surprise of all of the little tweaks and changes that Morrison has made to these songs. The hungry 22-year-old singer-songwriter had become a 62-year-old veteran by this time, and some perspective was bound to creep in.

    Half the fun of diving into the updated versions is comparing them to old mental tapes earned from spinning the original record hundreds, or possibly thousands, of times over the years.

    It’s rare for an artist to fully grasp what a particular work means to its admirers—to be able to put his or herself outside a personal memory of the process and see what others see, hear what others hear. I’ve read interviews in which Morrison claimed to not know where these songs came from, and listening to these fresh interpretations, I tend to believe him.

  • Gun, with Occasional Music—Jonathan Lethem

    One of my favorite things about Jonathan Lethem’s work is the sense of fun he imparts when playing with the expectations of genre. His first novel, Gun with Occasional Music, takes the noir of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and fuses it with the dystopian science fiction of Philip K. Dick and William Gibson, with a little William S. Burroughs thrown in for leavening.

    The life of Gun’s protagonist, futuristic flat foot Conrad Metcalf, gets complicated when his client on a simple peep job ends up murdered. The problem compounds exponentially when the number one suspect, after Metcalf himself, shows up to hire the detective to find the real killer.

    This brings unwanted heat from the Inquisitor’s Office, an all-seeing, not-so-secret police force that has the power to remove “karma points” from citizens as they see fit. To let one’s karma fall to zero is to become a non-person and awards the unlucky a trip to the (literal) freezer. Further complicating matters, is the fact that everyone is hooked on the government-supplied drugs “Forgettol” and “Acceptol” which makes getting a straight answer from anyone an interesting challenge.

    Not satisfied with a run-of-the-mill paranoid run through one of our possible paths, Lethem ups the ante with super-evolved talking animals, including a gun-toting kangaroo (inspired by a Chandler quote reproduced at the top of the story), a concubine sheep, and disturbing “babyheads,” human toddlers who have had the same mutagenic fast-forward applied to them, making them little alcoholic fatalist assholes. Which tracks.

    In 2020, literally moments before COVID fucked everything sideways, the movie trades were abuzz with news that the book was under development for a television series. Johan Renck, best known for his harrowing Chernobyl, was named as director, with Jason Bateman’s Aggregate Films producing. It has been crickets since then, however.

    Talking kangaroos and the like are tricky to pull off without looking ridiculous, and like the creatures in David Cronenberg’s 1991 take on Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, perhaps left to the individual widescreens in our heads.

    Also by this author:
    Chronic City: A Novel
    The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye

  • The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster—Richard Brautigan

    I was a huge Richard Brautigan fan in my early 20s and I spent many rainy days haunting the used bookstores of the Pacific Northwest looking for any of his books I might of missed. Come to think of it, I still can’t imagine a better way to spend a rainy day at any age. As anyone who has read at least one Brautigan can tell you, he can be fantastically whimsical, childishly naïve, brilliantly insightful, and seriously depressed; sometimes all at once.

    While some of Brautigan’s poetry reads very much like a product of its time (1957–68), it’s also quite often outside of time—almost Zen in its simplicity and directness. As I’ve gotten older I had almost let slip the sublime memory of giving a copy of Your Catfish Friend to a girl I figured needed to read it. I remember thinking that Brautigan had captured exactly how I felt and that he must have written the poem just to give me the words to express myself at that moment. Sadly, I don’t recall it having any great effect, which may have had something to do with why he was chronically bummed out.

    It’s a small step from recognizing the potential power of the right words and a little insight in someone else’s work and trying your own hand at writing. I can blame Brautigan as much as anyone for giving me the idea that I could write poetry, kind of the same influence that Mike Watt would have on my music a little later on.

    Start your own band. Write your own poem. Be someone’s catfish friend.

  • What He’s Poised to Do: Stories—Ben Greenman

    Ben Greenman’s wistful collection of short stories, What He’s Poised to Do, begins at a remove. For a book that both posits and ponders the importance of interpersonal communication, Greenman chooses to keep readers at arm’s length—at least until he’s gotten to know you better. His use of characters identified only by third-person pronouns in the title piece underlines the faceless isolation that an unhappy businessman out on the road feels as he engages in a cool affair with a woman who works at his hotel.

    There is an echo of the relationship between Lydia and Ricardo Reis in Jose Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis in that even within an ongoing carnal relationship, Greenman’s guest remains alienated from everyone to a debilitating extent. The businessman’s one remaining open conduit of exchange is the series of postcards he writes the woman, his wife, and his son. Even this method of expressing his feelings stumps him at the end of the story, revealing that Greenman’s title is, if not ironic, then overly optimistic.

    “He sits down at the desk, finds a pen, and holds it over a postcard, uncertain exactly what he’s poised to do.”

    Greenman underscores this theme throughout the collection by postmarking the first page of each story, indicating the date and place from which it was sent. Even a cursory glance at the contents page gives the reader a pretty good idea of the breadth of Greenman’s stages for his universal passion play; settings range from North Africa, in 1851, to Atlanta, in 2015, and everywhere (and when) in between—including the imagined Lunar City, in 1989, and the confounding Australindia, in 1921.

    One standout piece, To Kill the Pink, is written from Harlem in 1964 at a time when both racial and personal boundaries were burning. Greenman writes as an African-American man who, after a tragic incident, decides to travel to Malawi to better understand his heritage and the extraordinary woman he loves. When he asks her how a “twenty-four-year-old black girl who’s never been out of New York City” knows so much about the world, she replies, “I always paid attention… while you were busy studying the human comedy, I was trying to figure out the human drama.”

    “You’re the sad mask; I’m the happy mask,” he answers. “Takes both of us to put on a play.”

    While Greenman’s gift for whimsy does surface from time-to-time, owing perhaps to the impossibility to cage such a formidable beast, he is wearing his sad mask for much of What He’s Poised to Do.

    “I write often about sadness and loneliness … the only cure, I think, is intimacy,” Greenman writes in About the Author, “which is what the people in my stories are struggling to achieve.”

    It is telling that Greenman’s stories revolve around written correspondence, a form of communication quite possibly in danger of becoming archaic. How will future generations understand us, or how will we ultimately understand ourselves, if our written interactions diminish to texts scattered on the digital wind?

    If there is a lesson to be had from this book, it’s this: Go write a letter to someone you love.

    Also by this author:
    Superworse

  • The Time Machine Did It—John Swartzwelder

    After receiving this slim volume as a gift, I devoured it in one day—laughing my butt off throughout. As the cover so discreetly points out (this fact and the title are the only elements on the front of the book), Swartzwelder is better known as the author of 59 episodes of The Simpsons. The same twisted sense of humor that made the Swartzwelder years so hilarious is in full effect here.

    Pretty much everything you need to know is right there on that minimalist cover: there is going to be a time machine involved, and Swartzwelder has proven himself to be a very twisted individual. 59 times, in fact.

    The antics of Frank Burly, the world’s stupidest private investigator, found me searching for my Simpsons guide to see who penned “Time and Punishment,” the Treehouse of Horror episode where Homer inadvertently builds a time machine while trying to fix the toaster.

    It wasn’t Swartzwelder who wrote it, and maybe this is his way of getting back for not being invited to that party. Whatever his motivation, it’s a hit, and I’m looking forward to cracking open the next episode… ’erm, book.

  • Genesis Angels: The Saga of Lew Welch & the Beat Generation—Aram Saroyan

    At the behest of poet Ted Berrigan, a young Aram Saroyan interviewed a becalmed and nearly forgotten Jack Kerouac in 1967 for the Paris Review. Saroyan describes this meeting much later in an article for The Poetry Foundation. It is a watershed moment, one generation testing the next, and Saroyan walks away with Jack’s benediction, “You’ll do, Saroyan.”

    I doubt that Kerouac had in mind for the young writer to go forth and pen the History of the Beats, but 12 years later, Saroyan attempted just that. Perhaps the tired Kerouac recognized a comrade-in-arms, as Saroyan’s sensibilities would have fit right in with the tea-loving, electrified wordslingers of the past. His official biography for his collected papers at the University of Connecticut Libraries reads, “In the late 1960s Saroyan experimented with marijuana and began to develop a career as a poet.” Sounds about right; let’s go!

    Genesis Angels is no straight-ahead biography, but a long prose poem in its own right. Saroyan attempts to capture the feeling of the era, the mad rush toward an uncertain future and away from a stifling mid-century American mindset that had all but disappeared by the time he started his journey.

    Saroyan identifies the Eisenhower years with the monster movies that were throwing their own existential warnings up on the screens of the ’50s and early ’60s. “We were being condemned to endure a complete rescheduling of human experience: our routines no longer in any relation to the planet or the landscape or our neighbors. We had willingly locked ourselves up with comfort and convenience and suffered an immediate transformation. It was we ourselves who had become The Thing, The Blob, inside our private Houses of Wax.”

    The degree that Saroyan is successful in capturing the Beat gestalt, from the far remove of 1979, depends on how susceptible you are to that particular brand of amphetamine-driven patter. Me? I can’t get enough.

    On Jack Kerouac meeting Neal Cassidy: “Now this is where it did combust because what happened was Jack saw Neal and listened to his wild, never-get-a-word-in-edgewise, spontaneous patte… this man was a rapid, word chasing man chasing word chasing man chasing time chasing space—lookout! just like his driving—saved by exposure and the rare posture of ecstatic brotherhood.”

    On Allen Ginsburg: “Allen had the conceptual center of the universe in his belly and breath… so that then he could inhale and exhale planets, and snow storms, windows, and paper towels, Mickey Mouse and Hollywood, tits, and cocks, ambushes, and semesters, toothbrushes, and Coca-Cola—the whole litterbug earth with Indians and business man and women giving birth, inside his nature, and available.”

    Strangely absent from this cluttered stage is Welch himself. Whether outshined by the titanic personalities around him, or just a quiet guy whose poems did the speaking for him, I didn’t come away with any better sense of the man than when I started. This isn’t a deficit in research; the University of Connecticut’s Saroyan collection contains a recorded interview with Welch and David Meltzer from 1969, and Saroyan himself interviewed poet Joanne Kryger about Welch in 1977, presumably while doing research for the book.

    Perhaps the problem is that—like a total eclipse, or some other natural rarity—Welch began disappearing as soon as he appeared. You have to catch these things when they happen or you’re out of luck. Until next time.

    Saroyan best captures Welch’s spirit in a few throw away lines describing the importance of becoming a poet:

    Be a poet and save the world forever.
    And don’t forget to take a sweater.
    Put this flower in the peanut bottle with some cold water.
    It’ll be here when you get home.
    That’s the way the universe works.

  • Put on This Record: Funland—Unknown Instructors [2009]

    Shakespeare had it right. You really can’t trust anyone that doesn’t appreciate music. All of our greatest thinkers eventually seem to come to the conclusion that we are only vibrations in the great void. Call it the Big Bang Theory, call it what you will, but how could one go through life closed to the most primal and necessary form of human expression?

    Into the late spring of our discontent, like a silver dollar dropped down an outhouse shitter, the third, and most cohesive, album from Unknown Instructors—an unlikely supergroup of sorts—could just be the vital blast of L.A. punk you didn’t know the situation was calling for.

    On Funland, the planet’s premier punk rock rhythm section of Mike Watt and George Hurley consistently push each other in more and more complex jams supported by Saccharine Trust guitarist Joe Baiza playing at his most insectoid. Whereas Hurley played pretty straight-ahead on the previous album, producers Baiza, Joe Carducci, and Dan McGuire saved the most Rashied Ali-inspired grooves for its follow up.

    Recorded at the same time as 2006’s The Master’s Voice, Funland is no mere collection of second-rate tracks, but a cohesive work of art that follows a thematic surge. Of course, that theme is loose enough to include Pere Ubu’s père David Thomas (R.I.P.) wailing as if existentially wounded on Afternoon Spent at the Bar, Sunny; while elsewhere, poet Dan McGuire reprises his role as a modern-day Jim Morrison with a real penchant for language rather than just a vehicle for getting more whisky and leather pants.

    McGuire has an eye for the details of the less-than bucolic childhood that many of us aging suburban California kids can relate to. He remembers the forgotten places, the weed-strewn empty lots, and trampled-down hurricane fences, but he’s not the only poet on deck.

    Whereas Voice was a hard-charger right out of the gate with the swirling Swarm, the opening salvo on Funland is Maji Yabai—Japanese slang originally meaning something like, “Oh, shit,” and morphing in recent years into something like “sick” or “bad,” but in a good way—an introspective Watt-spiel.

    This paints the scene in a peculiar midway twilight. The unmerciful heat of the summer sun has finally abated and that belly full of PBR and corndogs isn’t going to hold you. It’s time to make some decisions. As the buzz threatens to loosen its grip, you can opt to reinforce with another semi-cold one, or pop out to the car for something stronger.

    Funland’s hard stuff includes a cover of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band’s Frownland, welding its odd gravitas to the album’s own weird sense of bacchanalian carny freedom. In addition to Thomas’s unique contributions, artist Raymond Pettibon’s unexpected jazz-influenced rap on Lead! proves that his take on Voice’s Twing-Twang wasn’t just an anomalous laugh.

    Pettibon has a surprisingly direct and, dare I say it, swinging delivery that may just cause me to rethink my idea of him as a quiet, misanthropic artist; or someone you might meet working the ring toss. It’s good to remember not to confuse the artist with his art.

    Funland is all about pushing the boundaries of what you think you know about these musicians, and like the famous Tilt-A-Whirl, if you don’t hurl, you just might have the time of your life.

  • Put on This Record: Blows Against the Empire—Paul Kantner and Jefferson Starship [1970]

    Credited to Paul Kantner and Jefferson Starship before there was such a thing, Blows Against the Empire remains one of my all-time favorite albums, the centerpiece to the Planet Earth Rock ’n’ Roll Orchestra (PERRO) experience, itself a loose (very loose) confederation of Bay Area musicians that cross-pollinated David Crosby’s masterful If I Could Only Remember My Name, as well as Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia’s first solo project, Garcia, the first eponymous Graham Nash/David Crosby record, and Nash’s own Songs for Beginners.

    If that heady company doesn’t given you an idea of what’s going on here, Kantner provides some insightful notes along with the 2005 remastered Legacy release. By the end of the ’60s, Kantner’s band Jefferson Airplane had begun to come apart at the seams. After recording their seminal album, Volunteers, in 1969 and watching as the hippie dream was beaten to death with pool cues by the Hells Angels at Altamont, the center could not hold.

    Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady had recently become more interested in their side project, Hot Tuna, and Marty Balin, perhaps tired of being arrested and/or punched in the head for a while, had disappeared—leaving Kantner to indulge his space fantasies at Wally Heider’s Studio in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. That’s where the story gets interesting.

    Kantner soon enlisted Grace Slick to help him sketch out some demos for the next Airplane album. According to Kantner’s notes, Slick had been really influenced by the playing of pianofighter-for-hire Nicky Hopkins on Volunteers. Slick’s rhythmic and dramatic grand piano work on Blows Against the Empire help to give the album a cohesive, timeless feel.

    Also wandering in and out of Heider’s at the time were various members of CSN, the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Santana, as well as Jorma’s brother Peter Kaukonen, and Electric Flag bassist Harvey Brooks. Casady later joined the ad-hock group and added his heavier-than-God bass playing (most notably to Slick’s vocal tour de force, Sunrise).

    The new remastering job sounds fantastic, but beware: there is a very disappointing glitch four minutes into the first track, Mau Mau (Amerikon). I have to admit it took listening to the whole album three times in a row to notice it. The upside is that the record sounds so good that I was inspired to listen to it three times in row. Kantner’s dense lyrics helped hide the problem, as I often find myself drifting and riding the groove rather than hanging on every word. It’s a shame that an obnoxious digital goof mars such a great work of art.

    The good news is the bonus tracks help make it well worth upgrading your copy. The “original” version of Let’s Go Together has been restored to the running order whereas the alternate version that had been strangely slipped into the first CD offering is now a bonus track. Kanter’s question “Shall I go off and away to South America? / Shall I put out in my ships to the sea?” owe more to Crosby, Stills, and Kantner’s original vision of escape captured in the Airplane/CSN song, Wooden Ships, and it makes more sense in context of Kantner’s space opera for him to ask “Shall I go off and away to bright Andromeda?”

    Slick’s acoustic demo of Sunrise proves that it is her amazing voice and not the myriad of overdubs that bring on the chills whenever I hear that song. SFX is Garcia and Mickey Hart goofing with musique concrete in much the same way as what became X-M on the album and Spidergawd on Garcia.

    The final track is a live version of Starship from the Fillmore West later that year, although it sounds like latter-day Airplane, the notes don’t reveal what confederation is responsible. The Airplane would drift back together the next year for the uneven but shamefully out-of-print Bark, and hold together for one last primal hurrah, Long John Silver in 1972.

    To paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson, this is the high water mark where the crest of a beautiful wave broke and began to roll back.

    Go to the forest and move.

  • Put on This Record: Another Side of Bob Dylan—Bob Dylan [1964]

    I was 11 years old in 1977 and while punk was exploding elsewhere, I was in a backwater of the San Francisco Bay Area discovering Bob Dylan. My best friend’s dad was an ex-folkie with a guitar and a great collection of vinyl. Whereas my dad still loved and played Little Richard, Fats Domino, and Ray Charles at full volume (at all hours), to enter the neighbors’ house was to glean a small residual bit of the magic and late-night menace of New York and Greenwich Village. Red wine. Mysterious women of Gypsy origin. Bob Dylan.

    I seem to remember the gateway drug for us was Blonde on Blonde with its classic leadoff track Rainy Day Women #12 & 35, but like Bob himself said, we “started out on burgundy, but soon hit the harder stuff.” We were kids raised on AM rock radio, and as such, we understood Dylan after 1965. The classics were still in heavy rotation: Hendrix transforming All Along the Watchtower, The Byrds chiming about Mr. Tambourine Man, Dylan himself spitting out Like a Rolling Stone.

    It was the earlier records that were a revelation.

    The tracks on 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan painted a picture of that world we had only guessed at. Talkin’ World War III Blues introduced us to a world of Cold War paranoia filtered through Woody Guthrie, while Corrina, Corrina reached back to a deep well of traditional music that, even then, we sensed was the secret current; the hidden aquifer of American culture.

    The Times They Are a-Changin’ was a little intense for a couple of suburban kids. It would be a few years before we understood the power in Ballad of Hollis Brown and The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll; even the face staring out in disdainful sepia was off-putting. At the bottom of the pile, however, was a simple black and white cover with a photo that seemed almost like an afterthought. It showed a quite different person than the disapproving fundamentalist folkie from the year previous. This guy seemed to be comfortable in his own skin. This guy was cool.

    When the needle hit the first track, we knew something else was going on here. The Jimmy Rodgers yodel in All I Really Want to Do, along with the song’s platonic admonishments showed a fun side of Dylan that we had missed wading through the heavy hitters. Sure, Rainy Day Women had been fun, but to a 11-year-old, even a serious one, Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands was decidedly not.

    Spanish Harlem Incident laid out the bohemian mise-en-scène we had imagined was out there, but hadn’t yet experienced roaming our backyard kingdoms; but the track that totally captured out imaginations and ensured that we both would be life-long fanatics, was Motorpsycho Nitemare. Dylan’s ability to set a scene and tell a story was, and remains, unparalleled.

    For years, we called each other “unpatriotic rotten doctor commie rats.” Good times.

  • Life—Keith Richards

    Whether or not you will be captivated by Rolling Stones guitarist and all-around bon vivant Keith Richards’ autobiography all the way to the end of its 547 pages swings on a couple of factors.

    Number one: How much do you still like and care about the Rolling Stones?

    Number two: How much you can stomach reading about the sordid intricacies of heroin addiction?

    If those two caveats check out, then this book has a lot to offer in the way of insightful musings on the emergence, “maturation,” and decline of rock ’n’ roll, as well as dispatches from the gutter as harrowing as anything William S. Burroughs phlegmatically coughed up in junk-sick reverie.

    Occasional partner-in-crime Tom Waits puts it best towards the end of the book when he describes Richards as “a frying pan made from one piece of metal. He can heat it up really high and it won’t crack, it just changes color.” Spiritually changing his color from pasty postwar English white to the richer tones of the blues artists he and his friends immortalized became an obsession early on, and one that somehow, against all odds, he managed to pull off.

    Richards recalls fondly of being accepted on the “other side of the tracks” much more openly than in the “Whites Only” areas of the still-segregated American South. Richards writes in his journal about coming to the United States for the first time, “Finally I’m in my element! An incredible band is wailing… so does the sweat and the ribs cooking out back. The only thing that makes me stand out is that I’m white! Wonderfully, no one notices this aberration. I am accepted. I’m made to feel so warm. I am in heaven!”

    This ability to fit in wherever he finds himself belies a truthfully warm and open heart on the part of a young Keith Richards. You never get the sense that this English kid is culture slumming, he has done his homework, paid his dues, and remains respectful and—as an outsider in an uptight society still struggling to shrug off the ’50s—simpatico. At least until the drugs kick in.

    Later in the narrative, Richards bemoans the way that the other half of his musical partnership has become too enamored with controlling all aspects of the now multi-million dollar business interest called the Rolling Stones. This is after spending most of the ’70s in a narcotic fog, forcing his band mates to practice, record, and exist on “Keith time.” He doesn’t seem to realize that he has passive-aggressively set the agenda for years by placing himself outside of the “normal” constrains of time, laws (local, Federal, and international), sleep, etc.

    What saves this tale from being just another tale of debauched rock royalty (not that there’s anything wrong with those) is Richards’ voice. Life is written very much in Keef’s voice, along with reeling asides, obscure English slang, and most of all, heart. As much as they squabble and moan about each other, the Rolling Stones have been tempered by a half-century of dealing with each other’s shit.

    Richards explains, “Mick and I may not be friends—too much wear and tear for that—but we’re the closest of brothers, and that can’t be severed… Best friends are best friends. But brothers fight… At the same time, nobody else can say anything against Mick that I can hear. I’ll slit their throat.” Judging from his track record, and the sticker in his boot, he may end up doing just that.

  • Always Something—Jim Dodge

    I am always hoping that Jim Dodge will surprise us all and finally announce the novel he has long been threatening to finish; his most recent, Stone Junction, dropped in the far-distant reality of 1990. A collection of poetry, Rain on the River: New and Selected Poems and Short Prose, followed twelve years later in 2002, but only served to whet our appetite for his deft wordplay and masterful use and abuse of the English language.

    Whenever I get the itch, now that the all-mighty algorithms know everything, I’ll check in to see what the good ol’ apple picker has been up to. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Idaho’s Limberlost Press, a beautifully archaic letterpress printer of chapbooks, broadsides, and I’m guessing… manifestos, had published a new collection of poems, Always Something, in 2023.

    Limberlost’s publications are artifacts from an anachronistic world of archival-quality papers and hand-sewn assembly—not a shout against the digital darkness, but more of a whispered word of kinship in a sun-dappled meadow, but I digress.

    I recognized one of the poems, the sublime, Owl Feather, from a broadside that Dodge was gracious enough to send me upon the publication of my first novel, welcoming me into the guild ten years ago, so this collection has been simmering for a minute, all the better to let the flavors infuse.
    

    I have no doubt there are powers far beyond us
    Because the grey-and-brown barred wing feather
    From a Great Horned Owl that I found this afternoon
    While walking the old logging road above McKenzie Creek
    Seemed beautiful beyond the ability to behold it…

    Dodge’s capacity for wonder has always been a feature of his personality and his work, it’s in evidence here as is his prankster’s sense of humor. In A Manual of Sabotage, he incites delightful mischief.

    Of course, only a heartfelt kiss can derail a munitions train,
    Explode the tube in a color TV,
    Destroy a computer’s mother board,
    And get you so exited
    You want to feel completely totaled and totally complete.

    Further imaginings should be enough
    To get us together to wreck more stuff.

    I, for one, am ready.

    Limberlost Press



    Also by this author:

    Rain on the River: New and Selected Poems and Short Prose

  • Smile When You’re Lying: Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer—Chuck Thompson

    Former Maxim features editor and all-around bon vivant Chuck Thompson peels back the faux-bamboo veneer of the travel business in a scathing, often hysterically funny, exposé. Thompson bemoans the lack of any kind of authentic point of view in contemporary travel writing while explaining precisely why such a voracious growth industry likes it that way.

    With some clever tips, handy editing advice, and a career’s worth of self-effacing globetrotting disasters to draw from, he serves up some tasty travel tidbits (number one on Thompson’s list of things a writer should never do: describe anything other than food in culinary terms).

    As a former magazine designer, my favorite part of the book is Thompson’s whole-hearted yet utterly doomed attempt to manage a start-up magazine for Travelocity. The sense of dread when consultants show up two weeks before the first issue is due on press is palpable—and spot on. Consultants are like bubonic rats and only bring misery and grim death to any workplace.

    Unlike Holidays in Hell, wherein professional misanthrope P.J. O’Rourke simply reinforces American xenophobic attitudes toward the Third World, Thompson actually dispels many preconceived notions toward places we never go, and portrays the usual hot spots as the crap holes they usually are.

    Thompson and I see eye-to-eye on the questionable appeal of the Caribbean, Graceland, and Las Vegas. I also agree that Eric Clapton, while technically not a vacation destination is somewhat overrated. And thanks to Thompson’s detailed romp through Bangkok’s red-light district, I will never look at Ulysses S. Grant’s signature the same way again.

    Holt Paperbacks

  • The Buzzing—Jim Knipfel

    I don’t know if Jim Knipfel presaged the conspiracy-laden epoch we find now ourselves mired in, or perhaps somehow helped to manifest it—a conspiracy theory in its own right. In 2003’s The Buzzing, we are treated to the sensational spinout of newspaper reporter, Roscoe Baragon, once a globe-trotting newshound who is now content with covering the “freak beat” for the New York Sentinel, itself a not-yet-failing enterprise, but the check is in the mail.

    All the time-honored tropes of noir are present here. Part of the reason Baragon stays at the paper is “the fact that was working in what he assumed was the last office space in New York City in which he would be allowed to smoke at his desk.” Instead of a girl Friday, he has a city forensic pathologist, Emily, who also spends too much time holding down a stool at their favorite dive bar after work.

    Of course, no noir would be complete without a city editor riding our protagonist’s ass about filing a story. Ed Montgomery revels in his roll, “sleeves rolled up, tie undone, a porcine face that grew a magnificent shade of magenta whenever he got angry—and he was almost always angry.”

    As a former newspaperman myself, Knipfel’s time writing for the New York Press helps lend a certain credence to his depiction of the business at the cusp of the information age. Baragon still has to occasionally get off his prodigious posterior to—in the parlance—slap some shoe leather in order to put his increasingly unhinged copy together.

    At one point, lost in conspiratorial mania, he steals an atlas (an atlas!) to physically connect the dots of a far-fetched theory. At this remove, it comes off as quaint, and leads one to wonder just what sort of insane shit someone could concoct if all of the world’s information was at your fingertips. Oh. Oh, yea.

    It would be a disservice to lay out all of the disparate points that Baragon connects like some fucked up The Family Circus dotted-line recap, but let’s just say it ends up containing proverbial multitudes. Godzilla? Check. An undersea toga-wearing real estate cult? Sure, why the fuck not? It is all certainly no stranger than imaging that the Democratic party was running a child sex trafficking ring out of the non-existent basement of a DC pizza parlor.

    It seems that Knipfel has slowed down, his last novel, Residue, was published in 2015. Perhaps the retinitis pigmentosa that has plagued him his whole life has finally caught up with him, although his website claims that “his other senses have been honed to almost superhuman levels, save for those dulled flat by years of chain smoking, alcohol abuse, and punk rock.” It would be a shame if he is sitting these days out as he certainly had our number from the jump.

    “Oh, all the conspiracies were evil and horrible and terrifying, yes—but where would they be without them? There has to be a certain tingle of superiority in knowing you were the only person in the world who really knew what the score was. Conspiracies, mover, also help make the normal redundancies of life a little more bearable. More than bearable even—they made things exciting.”

    Penguin Random House

    Also by this author:
    These Children Who Come at You With Knives, and Other Fairy Tales: Stories

  • Gentleman of the Road: A Tale of Adventure—Michael Chabon

    Since he left the smoky environs of Pittsburg behind, transplanted Berkeley author Michael Chabon has evolved into quite a chameleon—trying out genres in the same way the rest of us might try on hats. His preceding novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, was all about the fedora. With Gentlemen of the Road, Chabon was looking for something a little more… exotic.

    With a scant page count of 200-and-change, Gentlemen is no more than a palate cleanser by Chabonian standards. Its brevity does give the book a momentum that carries its relatively thin conceit forward, whereas a heavier tome may have collapsed under its own weight.

    Chabon’s inspiration for the story was outlined in his working title for the book: Jews with Swords. With Gentlemen, Chabon shoots for an adventure in the old-school style of Robert Lewis Stevenson or Burroughs (Edgar Rice, that is—decidedly not William S. or Augusten).

    The wonderfully rendered illustrations by Prince Valiant artist Gary Gianni help make that classic connection. His depiction of the gaunt, chapeau-obsessed Zelikman with his sword-sized surgical tool (since Jews, by Frankish law, weren’t allowed to bear arms in 950), and his partner in crime—the massive Abyssinian Amram and his ever-present Viking battle axe—took me back to the hours I spent lost in vintage editions of Treasure Island and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe that my grandmother had stashed in her basement.

    My only complaint with Gentlemen is that Chabon seems to be writing by-the-numbers at times. Whereas, I have often been flat-out amazed by his imaginative plot twists, this project seems satisfied to inhabit an exotic landscape and then defer to the dictates of genre. Unless, and I don’t think this was hinted at, the spiritual leader of the Khazars foresaw the entire chain of events—from the fall of the original leader, or bek, onward—and orchestrated them to ensure… well, you’ll just have to read it yourself.

    Random House Books

    Also by this author:
    The Yiddish Policemen’s Union: A Novel

  • Frank’s Bloody Books: A Novel—Mack Green

    Mack Green’s second novel to mine what he learned in his two tours in Southeast Asia, Frank’s Bloody Books is one king hell bastard of a read.

    From the sudden violence from unexpected directions inherent in the war-torn jungle of Vietnam, to the… well, sudden violence from unexpected directions inherent in the jungle of the American South, Green’s protagonist, Half-Pint Crowe struggles to find peace and meaning in this world.

    With a brilliantly imagined and expertly realized cast of characters, this story stalks you like one of the panthers that may or may not still live in the shrinking swampy wilderness. Buoyed by an esoteric trio of totemic books rescued from a fallen comrade, Crowe goes through some shit. Does he come out better for it? Maybe it is all about the ride.

    April Gloaming Publishing

  • The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye—Jonathan Lethem

    This collection of short stories from Berkeley-by-way-of-Brooklyn writer Jonathan Lethem explores the same sort of absurdist science fiction landscape as his novel Amnesia Moon. These seven pieces show the depth and breadth of Lethem’s creativity as he explores the outer reaches of genre.

    The stories that were previously printed in Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine are among the standouts in this collection and speak both to the editor’s catholic (small c) tastes and Lethem’s ability to inhabit vastly different worlds and report back with chilling clarity.

    The Happy Man—the lead off tale of a guy who spends half his time in Hell and the other half trying to make up with his increasingly distant wife and troubled teenage son—sets the tone for the volume. In this troubling story, the reappearance of a ne’er-do-well uncle in his Earth-bound life begins to draw the two worlds into closer proximity. Lethem telegraphs his final blow but it is devastating all the same. The story stays with the reader and reveals the barely-disguised malice in our classic fairy tales.

    Vanilla Dunk, is a slightly futuristic story of professional basketball in a time where the sport is in an advanced state of atrophy and has begun to consume itself like a snake eating its own tail. Powered exosuits give players the sampled skills of the greatest athletes of all time, turning the game into a live fantasy league.

    Lethem uses the post-sport spectacle to probe the issues of race (when a white hotshot draws the much-vaunted skills of Michael Jordan) and fame like a tongue returning to the socket of a broken tooth. This is quite a different tale than The Happy Man and it’s a testament to Lethem’s deft touch that one doesn’t need an understanding, or fondness for that matter, of basketball to enjoy it.

    Not every story in The Wall of the Eye is a slam dunk, but the penultimate tale, The Hardened Criminals, shows what an incredible imagination Lethem possesses. To give away the story’s main conceit would be a crime in and of itself, but it ends up being a chilling indictment of the prison industry and the way that it is designed to strip away the humanity of those stupid, crazy, or unlucky enough to fall under its purview.

    Lethem is a prolific novelist as well as short story writer and at times his prose reads dangerously close to poetry as in this introduction of the prison in The Hardened Criminals:

    The prison was an accomplishment, a monument to human ingenuity, like a dam or an aircraft carrier. At the same time the prison was a disaster, something imposed by nature on the helpless city, a pit gouged by a meteorite, or a forest-fire scar.

    Harcourt Brace & Co.

    Also by this author:
    Chronic City: A Novel
    Gun with Occasional Music

  • The Implacable Order of Things—Jose Luis Peixoto

    I had been on a bit of a discovery voyage of Portuguese literature, riding waves of Saramago, Camões, and Pessoa, when I happened across José Luís Piexoto’s first novel, The Implacable Order of Things, which suddenly and effectively sank it.

    It’s not that Piexoto, a poetical author of great skill and dexterity, is not a good writer; he is. This musing of one of his characters is one of the most beautiful ideas I’ve read in a long time: “I think: perhaps the sky is a huge sea of fresh water and we, instead of walking under it, walk on top of it; perhaps we see everything upside down and earth is a kind of sky, so that when we die, when we die, we fall and sink into the sky.”

    It’s not that I was unfamiliar with the fatalistic tendencies of my peeps, either; I am. Intimately. After all, the Portuguese invented fado, the saddest music on the whole planet. The space that Piexoto creates, however, is a whole ’nother sun-scorched ball of dirt.

    In Piexoto’s world, the Sun itself is more than the beneficent stellar body that we know and love, it is an omnipresent, malicious torturer, drying up even the smallest hope in an oppressive blast furnace of despair.

    In this dying—grindingly poor—village, even the devil seems trapped, forced to downscale his machinations to petty manipulations of the insecurities and jealousies of simple villagers. God himself has already caught the last ass out of town, abandoning the church and ecclesiastical duties to the devil who, to his credit, attends to all weddings and funerals with a huge grin, knowing all too well that no matter what people do, they are fated only to become more miserable as the days drag on.

    Peixoto employs a bit of magical realism that gives the whole book the feel of fable or of some sort of black scripture. The story starts out with the devil hinting very strongly to a shepherd that his wife is having an affair with a giant (who in reality has been raping her since her father died). The shepherd tells him to let the giant know that if he sees him around, he is going to smash in his face. This leads, predictably, to the shepherd getting beaten to within an inch of his life.

    As soon as the shepherd is well enough to walk again, he is right back downtown looking for trouble, and the giant, once again, beats him within an inch of his life. The miserable denizens of Peixoto’s world are lacking any sense of free will and often are dragged toward their unhappy fates by limbs that seem to be driven by nothing but a howling sense of entropy. The only character who takes matters into its own… well, teeth, in this case, is the shepherd’s faithful dog.

    When its master finally confronts the horror of his situation and hangs himself, the dog rounds up all the other dogs in the village and tears the giant limb from limb. Score one for the dog. By the second half of the book, we have burned through the first generation and are on to watching their progeny wither in the brutal heat.

    When we get to the one-legged, one-armed carpenter who grasps at happiness by marrying a blind prostitute after getting her pregnant—only to lose them both in childbirth, saw off his own leg, and burn down his (now no-legged) self and his shop for good measure—I started to get the sense that this book had become no more than misery porn. How much worse could things get? Worse. Implacably worse. Worse until the world itself (mercifully for the reader, but without a shred of pity for anyone else) grinds to a halt.

    Score one for the devil.

    Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

  • Memory Wall: Stories—Anthony Doerr

    One of the elusive pleasures of reading is discovering an author that has somehow slipped through your own personal cracks, a writer that once found, seems to have been working just for you all along, you were just too busy or preoccupied to notice.

    The best part of finally finding each other, even if unbeknownst to the other party, is much the same as in any new relationship; there are stories to be told, histories to be learned—the literary equivalent of a new continent to be explored.

    In Anthony Doerr’s case, the quest covers the entire globe—poking into corners of the world you may have missed. Doerr’s collection of short stories, Memory Wall, wanders from South Africa to Wyoming, from a Korean no man’s land to a soon-to-be flooded Chinese village, and from post-Soviet Lithuania to the horror of World War II Germany.

    As far-flung as his narratives may be, there remains a common human thread that keeps all places from seeming alien, or so very different from home.

    This collection is bookended by two novellas dealing with two very different women at the end of their respective lives. The title piece carefully extends a toe into the realm of science fiction as a suburban Cape Town resident—suffering from Alzheimer’s—desperately tries to hang on to her memories by having them recorded on discs to be played back at will.

    The “memory wall” is both the disorganized map-cum-art project that she constructs in an attempt to make sense of a life quickly becoming a series of digitized vignettes as well as the literal rock cliffs that her late amateur paleontologist husband prowled, searching for proof of a deeper permanence.

    The story takes an unexpected turn when two men break into the woman’s house to play through her memories looking for clues to a major find that her husband may have made right before he died. The men soon figure out that it’s pretty easy to burglarize someone who isn’t going to remember that you were there. The subtext of a cultural power imbalance becomes glaringly apparent as the younger of the two men experiences the woman’s disconnected memories.

    We soon learn that she wasn’t all that nice of a person, which was an interesting way for Doerr to go since, up until then, we were feeling quite sorry for the woman. At that point, loyalties realign, and the young man becomes the hero/sacrificial lamb to root for.

    The final story, Afterworld, is a ghost story of sorts and deals with a Holocaust survivor whose epileptic fits have given her a window into another world that has both sustained and haunted her throughout her life. A Jewish orphan in Hamburg at the worst possible time to be either of those things, Esther Gramm’s out-of-body experiences afford her insights that the other orphan girls don’t fully appreciate until it is much too late.

    While having a fit, she has a vision of the bleak future and brings back an explanation of how other people’s memories keep us tethered to this world, “In another world, folded inside the living world, we wait. We wait until everyone who knew us as children has died. And when the last one of them dies, we finally die our third death.”

    Not everything is grim, however, as Esther also catches a glimpse of those ready to move on, an encampment of pilgrims in tents on the edge of a great forest, and sharing this vision ultimately saves her life. Of course, since she remains living, the girls who were murdered by the Nazis are stuck waiting around in a bombed-out limbo, trying in vain to contact her.

    Alone with the aged Esther, her nephew Robert gets her to share her memories of the war for a thesis project he is supposed to be working on, and finally becomes a hero in his own right at the end of the story and Esther’s life.

    Memory is the thread that connects all of the stories in Doerr’s book in much the same way it connects everyone in real life. Whether you cherish them, are losing them, or are haunted by them, memories are what make us who we are as well as what makes the world itself.

    “Every hour, Robert thinks, all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves. But during that same hour children are moving about, surveying territory that seems to them entirely new. They push back the darkness; they scatter memories behind them like bread crumbs. The world is remade.” Poetry.

    Scribner

  • Chronic City: A Novel—Jonathan Lethem

    Jonathan Lethem, Brooklyn native and de-facto chronicler of life in the borough, caught a lot of flak for placing his novel Don’t Love Me Yet (gasp!) in Los Angeles. In Chronic City he casts his gaze back to the city that never sleeps, although his version of Manhattan is, as you might imagine, a little off beam.

    Lethem has a gift for blending literary genres. His fiction always has a smattering of science fiction; his noir, a shadow of the metaphysical. In between 2007’s geographically-maligned book and this novel, he even took a stab at reviving the forgotten superhero, Omega the Unknown for Marvel Comics, and it is the comic book that informs this novel; it’s characters are, by choice, two-dimensional, and play out all the necessary New York archetypes against a flat back drop of apartments, diners, taxi cabs, and improbable not-so-random violence.

    The novel’s protagonist is an empty vessel named Chase Insteadman, a former child actor who lives off of royalties and making the scene with Manhattan’s rich and even richer. His latest claim to fame, and the one that instills him at all the important parties, is his engagement to an astronaut who is marooned on the International Space Station due to a carpet of space mines that have been sowed underneath its orbit by the Chinese.

    Like a lot of things in the novel, this is taken for granted and nobody seems that interested in doing anything about it. Perhaps, and just perhaps, this is Lethem’s dig at the place the international community finds itself in relation to China’s rising prominence on the world stage. At this point, what could we do if they decided to mine the heavens? Write a strongly worded letter? Stop buying… oh, I don’t know, everything? Tariffs?

    Insteadman’s “lostronaut” writes him letters that are reproduced in The New York Times (albeit in the War-Free edition that seems to be favored by most) so that most people know more about what is going on than he does. Insteadman’s problem is that he can’t quite remember his fiancé or how he became an ornamental table setting.

    There are clues from the beginning that all is not right with Lethem’s island, for one, Lower Manhattan has been enveloped in a mysterious dense fog that never dissipates. Like Don DeLillo’s “air-borne toxic event,” there is a disconnect between what’s real and what is simulated. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (whose position, as the Roy E. Disney Professor in Creative Writing at Pomona, Lethem inherited) has become Obstinate Dust by Ralph Warden Meeker, another overly long book that no one finishes.

    The Muppets have become Gnuppets, which may just be a wink at Gnosticism, loosely defined by Wikipedia as “consisting of various belief systems generally united in the teaching that the material cosmos was created by an imperfect god.” The root of Gnostic belief, gnosis, is further defined as “a form of mystic, revealed, esoteric knowledge through which the spiritual elements of humanity are reminded of their true origins within the superior Godhead, being thus permitted to escape materiality.”

    Insteadman’s catalyst, and a fount of esoteric knowledge, is Perkus Tooth, a stand-in for an aspect of Lethem’s own personality in much the same way as Kilgore Trout took the heat for Kurt Vonnegut. Tooth is a twitchy, well-stoned cartoon in the Lester Bangs mold, and although he bristles at being called a rock critic, is as remembered for a stint at Rolling Stone than for a series of intellectual commando-style broadsides that papered the Bowery back in the day.

    The chronic in the novel’s title, is an allusion to the high-grade marijuana that Tooth, Insteadman, and a former activist-turned-mayoral-fixer, Richard Abneg, imbibe with stunning regularity. The trio’s pot-driven cultural insights and conspiracy theorizing are either the best parts of the book, or the worst, depending on one’s own proclivities. I, for one, loved Tooth’s Marlon Brando obsession and manic drive to “connect the dots.”

    Almost exactly halfway through the book, a game-changing possibility is introduced that ties directly into Gnostic belief and, like religion, either explains everything or nothing at all. Tooth’s homeless associate, Biller, finds work designing “treasure” for a virtual universe called Yet Another World, created in turn by Linus Carter, a brilliant but socially inept designer—an imperfect god.

    A description of Carter’s online universe reads like a Lonely Planet guide to Manhattan itself, a “… paraphrase of reality which welcomed role-players, entrepreneurs, sexual trollers, whatever.” The line between real and unreal becomes even more blurred as Insteadman realizes that “Yet Another World wasn’t the only reality that was expansible. Money has its solvent powers…”

    In the end, our empty hero comes to realize it doesn’t really matter if the island that he knows is indeed real, or if anything actually exists on the other side of the Lincoln Tunnel. He learns the hard way that what is important is the real relationships that we form with other travelers.

    As for Tooth, he is finally permitted to escape the Material World through losing everything and finally finding a kindred spirit, in this case a massive three-legged pit bull named Ava. The dog continues to work healing magic on Insteadman after his own collapse into his own footprint.

    Having inherited the responsibility of walking her, he finally abandons Manhattan’s ubiquitous taxis for a street-level view of his realm. “… it occurred to me how Ava’s paces, her bold and patient pissings, must have been immensely comforting to Perkus, and in a sense familiar. Ava’s a kind of broadsider herself, famous within a circle of correspondents, invisible to those who don’t care.”

    Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

    Also by this author:
    Gun with Occasional Music
    The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye

  • When That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison—Greil Marcus

    Funnily enough, considering the subject and theme of this book, reading übercritic Greil Marcus is a lot like listening to Van Morrison. The experience can be illuminating, frustrating, transcendent, and solipsistic—often in the same paragraph or song.

    Like Morrison, Marcus has been following his own path for quite some time, and anyone who has a passing familiarity with either of them will always be able to find the gold hidden down a backstreet or way up top a flight of fancy.

    My struggle with Marcus is that his exhortations can be the definition of pedantic, referencing far-flung obscure artists and works in order to make a point that no one can truly argue with, having no idea who or what he’s is talking about.

    On the other hand, like listening to Morrison himself, if you’re willing to put in the work, you can be turned on to artists, books, movies, etc. that may later become indispensable to your life. What Marcus does here is doubly off-putting, as he spends a great deal of time extolling the virtues of tracks and performances of Morrison’s that are unavailable anywhere but bootlegs, a stream that Morrison spends a great deal of energy to dam, enlisting the services of Web Sheriff to scour the internet of any traces of illicit music.

    I was lucky enough to have a copy of the 1971 KSAN Pacific High Studios show which is referenced pretty heavily, but as far as Caledonia Soul Music, which according to Marcus is the key to the whole thing, I’ll just have to take his word for it.

    In this book, Marcus eschews most biographical information, much, I can imagine to Morrison’s relief, only pointing out pertinent signposts along the way. The whole focus is on those moments of unforced transcendence that Marcus believes paint a secret map through the jungle of Morrison’s work. As with any great artist—and to put my cards on the table, I believe Morrison to be one of the greatest singers of the last 40 years—what pieces resonate with your soul at any given time is completely subjective.

    I think Marcus is either trying to be cute, or is just being lazy to discount in one fell swoop everything Morrison put out between Common One in 1980, and Tell Me Something in 1996. Marcus talks about looking for the “yarragh” in Morrison’s performances, that moment that transcends language and artifice to, as Morrison once sang, “get down to the real soul, I mean the real soul, people.”

    To take a page from Marcus’ book if I may refer to a performance now out-of-print and unavailable, as a child of the ’70s I knew Morrison primarily as an AM radio hit maker and it wasn’t until PBS ran Van Morrison The Concert, recorded at New York’s Beacon Theater in 1989, that I was exposed to Morrison the mystic.

    I don’t recall which number he used to launch himself into the “yarragh,” but all of a sudden, he was growling and barking, not like a madman, but like a genius. I remember standing in front of the TV just slack-jawed; this was someone who warranted further investigation. All of a sudden I understood why someone like Morrison would rankle against cheap stardom. It wasn’t the fucking point. This, this is the point. And although Marcus’ examples are personal to his own experience, as far as catching the desperately vital point of it all, we really do see eye-to-eye.

    PublicAffairs

  • The Sirens of Titan: A Novel—Kurt Vonnegut

    I have to admit that the main reason I was aware of Vonnegut’s second novel, written in 1959 right after the launch of the space age, was the trivia night nugget that Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead owned the movie rights for years and had actually worked up a script with SNL alum Tom Davis.

    After discovering what an amazing feat of imagination this book is, I can see why self-styled hippie intellectuals like Garcia and Davis were drawn to it. It was quite unlike any other novel, even other Vonnegut books, I have read. At no time while devouring The Sirens of Titan could I ever say to myself, “Oh, I know where this is going.”

    Vonnegut sends up the whims of capitalism with the main character Malachi Constant, the richest man in the world. Constant is a playboy/bon vivant who, for reasons to be revealed, was born with the luck to maintain his lifestyle with very little effort on his part.

    At the beginning of the novel, he is summoned to the mansion of Winston Niles Rumfoord, the first man to fly a private rocket to Mars. Rumfoord is also, or so it’s understood, one of the last—having unwittingly flown into a chrono-synclastic infundibulum, which effectively spread his (and his dog’s) existence throughout sort of a wormhole between the Sun and Betelgeuse. (Now you can start to imagine the types of conversations Garcia and Davis must have had.)

    When Earth happens to transect the glitch, once every 59 days, Rumfoord and his dog materialize at the mansion for a short period of time where he alienates his wife, predicts the future (since he happens to actually be everywhere and when), and generally makes everyone uncomfortable.

    Vonnegut’s description of the first meeting of the two men is a good example of his wonderful use of language in this novel: “Winston Niles Rumfoord’s smile and handshake dismantled Constant’s high opinion of himself as efficiently as carnival roustabouts might dismantle a Ferris wheel.” Granted, this all takes place within the first 20 pages or so.

    Rumfoord (and I couldn’t stop substituting Rumsfeld, especially when we begin to find out how his motives, while being altruistic from his viewpoint, are seriously fucked up) goes on to tell Constant that he will end up traveling to Mars, Mercury, Titan, and end up having a son with Mrs. Rumfoord. Awkward.

    Vonnegut’s savaging of organized religion at the back end of this novel counterbalances his having peeled back the curtain hiding the machinations of the free market in the front. Along the way, Mars attacks, a shipwrecked alien manipulates all of human history in an attempt to get a part, and… just read the damned thing.

    I, for one, don’t need some infundibulated asshat to tell me that I will be revisiting this one again and again.

    Random House Publishing Group

  • Refusing Heaven—Jack Gilbert

    Poet Jack Gilbert, who passed in 2012, was 80 years old when he published this collection of poems in 2005. That’s a long time to observe how life works and Gilbert has spent much of it in introspection. He was there in San Francisco during the first flowering of the Beats, yet he never really became one of the gang.

    To read Gilbert is to realize that he is a man who relishes his space; many of the poems in Refusing Heaven paint a picture of self-imposed exile, whether physically, as in a remote Greek island, or spiritually—hence the title. This tendency to separate himself from his peers does not paint him as a curmudgeon; quite the opposite is true. It seems that Gilbert appreciates the contrast between company and isolation so that each might stand out more clearly in relief.

    In the Buddhist-inflected poem, Happening Apart From What’s Happening Around It, Gilbert starts out by giving practical examples of his philosophy. There is a vividness to eleven years of love because it is over. A clarity of Greece now because I live in Manhattan or New England. Later in the poem he observes a spiritual aspect to this clarity. When I was walking in the mountains with the Japanese man and began to hear the water, he said, “What is the sound of the waterfall?” “Silence,” he finally told me. The stillness I did not notice until the sound of water falling made apparent the silence I had been hearing long before.

    After absorbing this bit of enlightenment, Gilbert then gets to the crux of the matter by positing one of the greatest questions of all time. I ask myself what is the sound of women? What is the word for that still thing I have hunted inside them for so long? In the poem, Moreover, Gilbert finally reveals what he suspects that transitory and elusive thing to be. We are given the trees so we can know what God looks like. And rivers so we might understand Him. We are allowed women so we can get into bed with the Lord, however partial and momentary that is.

    Perhaps it is only with the wisdom that 80 years affords that one can strive to understand women one moment while deftly distilling poetry’s worth and reason down to its essence the next. We lose everything, but make harvest of the consequence it was to us. Memory builds this kingdom from the fragments and approximation. We are gleaners who fill the barn for the winter that comes on.

    Refusing Heaven is a rare chance to experience a poet still in bold command of his powers looking back at what was a long life full of achievement and adversity in equal measure. In the sublime, Failing and Flying, he reminds us that although we tend to focus on the cautionary aspect of the Icarus myth, we forget that he actually did fly quite well. For awhile.

    Gilbert seems to be summing up his feelings about his own looming mortality when he writes: I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph.

    Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

  • A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll never Do Again—David Foster Wallace

    While some authors make you feel stupid for even trying to read them, I’m looking at you, James Joyce, others seem to immediately give the ol’ noggin a boost. While working through this collection of “essays and arguments” by the late David Foster Wallace—sometimes referred to as our generation’s Joyce for his long and obtuse novel Infinite Jest—I made a list of 20 words I had been lamentably unaware of, as well as two that, apparently, he made up: ablated, anaclitic, appurtenance, belletristic, commissure, decoct, enfilade, erumpent, espial, exergue, frottage, hieratic, lalations, otiose, preterite, sedulous, threnody, titivation, ventricose, weltschmerz

    Of those 20 words, I have to say that the most amusing discovery for me was frottage, which I’m sure that some of you already know means, “the act of obtaining sexual stimulation by rubbing against a person or object.” I’m not here to judge; I’m just sayin’. Erumpent is also pretty fun to say, and could actually be onomatopoetic if you were to listen very, very closely.

    As for the two Wallacisms that don’t seem to exist in the English language, some DFW obsessives have pointed out that katexic could be derived from Freud’s katexis referring to “the process by means of which libido energy is tied or placed into the mental representation of a personality, idea, or thing.” In this respect, Wallace’s writing in toto could be viewed as katexic. The energy that must have gone into building such a vocabulary and the means to swing it around as effectively as he did—the creation and subsequent projection of “David Foster Wallace” as a literary force—could easily be imagined as a gloriously sublimated primal urge.

    Plumeocide is another matter. Wordnik member vbogard22 has postulated that “plumeo- could come from the Latin pluma, which means feather or pen [when] added to -cide (Latin, kill) would come to mean something along the lines of ‘death of the pen.’”

    Given Wallace’s tragic end by his own hand, the fact that he may have coined a word for the silencing of a writer is a bit prescient, although I am buoyed by the acknowledgment that the only way to get a writer to shut the hell up is by resorting to plumeocide.

    I was also beguiled, beleaguered, and besotted by Wallace’s use of language, often all at the same time. In much the same way that Wallace thought he was a decent tennis player until he got the opportunity to view the pros in action, I thought that I could, on occasion, craft a clever line. Now I’m reminded that there are players out there operating on a whole different plane.

    I almost forgot to mention that the book is really funny. Cheers to you, DFW, wherever you are.

    Now, about that Goddamned Jest…

    Back Bay Books

  • These Children Who Come at You with Knives, and Other Fairy Tales: Stories—Jim Knipfel

    Everything you need to know about Jim Knipfel is right there on the last page of his latest book: “Jim Knipfel lives in Brooklyn, where he is not welcome in family-friendly establishments.” Knipfel’s collection of short stories, These Children Who Come at You With Knives, goes a long way toward explaining why.

    For a child of the ’70s who grew up on the Twisted Fairy Tales that were the highlight of The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends, this compendium of cracked morality tales reads like a lost season had the cartoon been moved to late night cable and been written by Rod Serling, Jim Thompson, and Hubert Selby, Jr.

    Although there isn’t any redemption to be found in these fairy tales, those looking for nuggets of good advice could easily mine this book for gold: 


    1. Don’t trust princesses.

    2. Don’t piss off a gnome.

    3. Plants ain’t no good. (As we learn in the cleverly titled, Plants Ain’t No Good.)

    4. Don’t let talking horses buy firearms (or frequent hookers).

    5. No, seriously, don’t piss off a gnome.

    Simon & Schuster

    Also by this author:
    The Buzzing

  • (Not That You Asked): Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions—Steve Almond


    I picked up this collection of essays from Boston writer (and Bay Area native) Steve Almond on a total whim and found it to be one of the explosively funny books I’ve read since Ozzy’s autobiography. Almond is just nuts—and honest to a fault—which may or may not be a product of his insanity.

    Not that You Asked is organized thematically with the chapter entitled About My Sexual Failure (Not that You Asked) being the most cringe-worthy of the bunch. In the extended piece Shame On Me (Why My Adolescence Sucked Donkey Cock), we are regaled with tales of his late-blooming sexuality via the water jets in the Almond family hot tub; hand jobs con sharp, inexperienced, fingernails; the family dog’s rooting out of a used condom from the trash and subsequent tug-of-war with Almond’s mother leading to predictable, but no less horrifying results; and getting publicly busted for shoplifting condoms and Sta-Hard gel from Longs Drugs.

    Chestfro Agoniste and My First Fake Tits reveal waxing and breast implants to both be somewhat less wonderful than advertised, the former resulting in this conversation painfully recounted by Almond. “Me: Ow! Please. Please, don’t—Fuck! Her: It’s almost out. Me: You have to do it faster, really—No! Ow! Fuck! Please move to another—that part really—Owwww! Her: Stop being a baby. Me: Please, sweetie. Please, I’m not joking. Her: Lie still. Just fucking lie still and let me— Me: Owwwww! You fucking bitch! You mean fucking bitch!”

    For every writer who has attempted to wince his or her way through a sex scene, Almond offers a 12-step program that lays out some pretty good (and common sense) advice, such as, Step 5 (Real people do not talk in porn clichés): “Most of the time, real people say all kinds of weird, funny things during sex, such as ‘I think I’m losing circulation,’ and ‘I’ve got a cramp in my foot,’ and ‘Oh, sorry!’”

    Given my utter lack of interest in the sport of baseball, it took me awhile to battle my way through one of the longer essays in the collection, Red Sox Anti-Christ, which ended up having some interesting and insightful things to say about sport and its place in a war-loving society such as our own. He equates the coverage of the kick off to the invasion of Iraq with a major sporting event. “Nightly highlight reels charted the day’s major offensive drives. Correspondents offered sand swept on-the-field interviews with our burly combatants, while generals served up bromides fit for a head coach.”

    Almond goes further and takes part of the blame for the unnecessary war onto his own shoulders. “As a fan, I had helped foster a culture governed by the sports mentality, in which winning mattered above all else, and the application of violence was seen as a necessary means to that end rather than a betrayal of our democratic standards.”

    In a chapter entitled In Tribute to My Republican Homeys, Almond turns on the vitriol. Demagogue Days, Or How the Right-Wing Hateocracy Chewed Me Up and Spat Me Out spins the story of how Almond, an adjunct professor at Boston College at the time, resigns over the school’s invitation of Condoleezza Rice to give the commencement speech. Almond uses the format of Dante’s descent into hell to map out all of the insidious devils of punditry that all wanted a piece of him for a brief, terrifying moment.

    With the ability to ride out ridiculous situations with the artistry of a Mavericks surfer (see How Reality TV Ate My Life), one starts to wonder just what would really get to Almond, what would crack his smooth, white chocolate exterior and let the creamy nougat pour forth?

    That force majeure comes in the form of a baby girl, the arrival of whom is hilariously recounted in 10 Ways I Killed My Infant Daughter in Her First 72 Hours of Life. It is this window into the hopes and fears that people have shared from time immemorial, that saves Not That You Asked from being simple a collection of ravings from another smart ass cynic. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

    Random House

    Also by this author:
    Which Brings Me to You

  • The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America—Don Lattin

    While undertaking a course on the psychology of religious conversion at the Graduate Theological Union, Bay Area religion writer Don Lattin cast back in his memory for his own “personal conversion narrative.” Like many of his generation, Lattin had experimented with psychedelics with—in retrospect, predictably—polarized results. What this reflection led Lattin to consider was that his encounters with LSD, both good and bad, were the beginning of a long process of spiritual awakening. A process closer, perhaps, to the journey of Huston Smith (who Lattin personifies as The Teacher), than the more convoluted roads that Timothy Leary (The Trickster), Ram Dass né Richard Alpert (The Seeker), and Andrew Weil (The Healer) traveled.

    Originally called in to help Smith finish his biography, Tales of Wonder, Lattin was approached to tell this story, a fascinating tale of an incredible time in human history. The editors at HarperOne realized they had inadvertently found just the right guy to do it justice. With a subtitle of How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil killed the fifties and ushered in a new age for America, the uninitiated may have the impression that the four men worked in consort toward that goal, however, the interesting push and pull of these four strong and very distinct personalities is what gives this story its legs.

    Weil’s betrayal of Leary and Alpert that resulted in their expulsion from Harvard was the most shocking revelation of the early years of the quartet’s transformation. It is surprising, even with the hindsight that the two men had to leave the confines of the institution—one way or another—to become what they ultimately became, that an enlightened person like Ram Dass could not forgive the young Weil, a man that arguably no longer exists.

    The Harvard Psychedelic Club is a fast-paced read, with faces both famous and infamous popping up throughout the entire ride. The men independently show up with almost Zelig regularity at every important moment that collectively led to a shattering of the calcified paradigm of post-war American culture.

    While Weil was busy becoming the guru of the organic health movement, and Leary was spending a good deal of time and effort staying one step ahead of the law, Smith and Dass explored the Far East, found affirmation and enlightenment in India and Japan, and ultimately brought those lessons and attitudes back to a United States hungry for deeper meaning.

    It is these spiritual ramifications of the psychedelic experience that Lattin considers important, and, like many at the time, he discounts Leary’s messianic tendencies as being antithetical to the possibility of positive change through inner exploration. Leary’s surviving cohorts seem to hold him responsible for the unfortunate cessation of serious scientific research into the use of these drugs at the same time they realize that, as an archetypal “trickster,” he was playing as inevitable a part in the passion play as they had been.

    Lattin sums up the quartet’s tumultuous history in his conclusion as such: “All four of these characters played a role in the social and spiritual changes that made the sixties such a pivotal decade in recent American history. They stirred up the water and then rode a wave of social change. The difference is that Timothy Leary never found… the stability needed to bring those changes into his life in a positive, long-lasting way. Instead of finding an anchor, Leary tried to walk on the water.”

    He then addresses a generation that, for a large part, has turned its back on the lessons learned in the era of questioning “the materialist, consumerist mind-set into which we were raised.” Lattin points out that, “Now more than ever, we need to remember the lessons of that idealistic era. It’s time, once again, to find new ways to live together with equality, justice, and compassion.” Amen, brother.

    HarperOne

  • The Romantic Dogs—Roberto Bolaño

    By the time an English translation of Chilean author Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Savage Detectives was finally released in 2007, he had already passed like a glowing comet, having succumbed to a failing liver in 2003. Bolaño’s novel followed every drunken debauch and whim of a group of young Mexico City poets calling themselves visceral realists, but while the prose was beautifully crafted, the book was starkly short on actual poems.

    His biographers make a point of saying that Bolaño’s first love was poetry. Supposedly he only turned to writing novels at the age of 40 after the birth of his son forced him to give up a more bohemian lifestyle. This collection spans his career from 1980 through 1998, the year The Savage Detectives was first published.

    There are many allusions to the novel and, as in much of his work, some of the same territories are traveled, making this a good companion piece to the novel, or visa versa. Several poems deal with the enigmatic figure of a detective, questioning but never solving the seemingly random and unending violence of South America.

    I dreamt of frozen detectives; Latin American detectives who were trying to keep their eyes open in the middle of the dream. I dreamt of hideous crimes and of careful guys who were wary not to step in pools of blood while taking in the crime scene with a single sweeping glance.

    His fascination with forensics would find full flower in 2666, by many accounts, his crowning achievement. At nearly 900 pages, the book is a mammoth project that Bolaño struggled to finish before he died. It is rumored that he even went as far as to postpone a much-needed liver transplant so as to not break stride on his defining work. This struggle is reflected in one of the most moving poems near the end of The Romantic Dogs.

    Muse, wherever you might go I go. I follow your radiant trail across the long night. Not caring about years or sickness. Not caring about the pain or the effort I must make to follow you.

    New Directions

    Also by this author:
    The Insufferable Gaucho
    The Return
    Savage Detectives: A Novel

  • The Yiddish Policemen’s Union: A Novel—Michael Chabon

    I always feel a little sad upon finishing one of Michael Chabon’s novels. The Berkeley author weaves such wonderfully detailed tapestries of language and imagery that a feeling of loss is inevitable once the Big Finish has come and gone.

    That same feeling pervades The Yiddish Policemen’s Union from the jump as the world the characters have inhabited for 60 years is about to be flung on the trash heap of history. The alternative-history conceit is as follows: after the horror of World War II, and a collapse of the stillborn State of Israel, Jewish refugees were settled in an American Federal District hastily carved out of the Alaskan wilderness—and now the lease is up.

    As alcoholic policeman Meyer Landsman begins the search for who may have killed a fellow tenant of his own down-at-the-heels hotel, he heads toward the basement and this throw-away bit of narration: “[Landsman] checks behind the hot-water tanks, lashed to one another with scraps of steel like comrades in a doomed adventure.” The metaphor could be stretched to represent Landsman himself and his ex-wife/new-supervisor Bina Gelbfish who has been sent to tidy up all the loose ends at Sitka Central, and Landman’s investigation is one big throbbing nerve of a loose end.

    Drowning in the machinations of the District’s Hasidic mafia and a cold ocean of slivovitz, Landsman is haunted by a complex chess problem left by the dead tenant. Is it a clue? Is it just a reflection of his own hang-up caused by his chess champion father’s disappointment in him and resultant suicide? Chabon has explored these themes before. He revels in the arcane details of modern Judaica, and I was waiting past the 200-page mark for his patented Big Gay Character to show (he does, although posthumously).

    As Chabon has repeatedly shown—in his on-going bid to become a one-man Coen Brothers of the literary world, chewing up and spitting out genre after genre—it’s not the materials, plot points, or archetypes you start with, it’s how you play the familiar pieces that wins the game.

    Harper Perennial

    Also by this author:
    Gentleman of the Road: A Tale of Adventure

  • The World Without Us—Alan Weisman

    Mr. McGuire: I just want to say one word to you—just one word.
    Ben: Yes sir.
    Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
    Ben: Yes, I am.
    Mr. McGuire: Plastics.
    Ben: Exactly how do you mean?
    Mr. McGuire: There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?
    Ben: Yes, I will.

    While reading Alan Weisman’s fascinating book, The World Without Us, that scene from The Graduate kept playing in my head. Plastics. It turns out that there is a great, or at the very least, long future for all one billion tons of it as it never really breaks down—pieces just become smaller and smaller and by doing so can be swallowed by organisms at the very bottom of the food chain. Which is bad.

    It was frightening to read how quickly plastics have permeated every aspect of our lives (they’ve only been around since the end of World War II), and just how badly we manage what happens to them when we’re done using them. Weisman describes in detail the great wastes of floating plastic that circle the center of each of the world’s oceans.

    There was something about growing up in the waning years of the Cold War that left an indelible mark on the collective imagination of my fellow Gen Xers and myself. We are suckers for stories of our own destruction. Maybe it was the sight of the Statue of Liberty sticking out of the sand at the end of Planet of the Apes, or just the constant fear of nuclear destruction, but as kids, I think most of us had spent some time thinking about what would happen to the world once all of us were gone.

    Weisman looks at all of the things that may benefit from our demise (almost all other species except those that have been domesticated), and all of the things that will simply go to hell without us here to manage them (it turns out that nuclear reactors, refineries, and power plants don’t really run themselves for very long).

    As we all learned in science class and/or the Discovery Channel, water is the one unstoppable force on Earth. You can try to dam it, pump it, or redirect it, but whatever you choose to try and force it to do, you’ve created yourself a full-time job. Without us around to maintain the infrastructure, it will just be a matter of time before rivers undermine and retake the streets of New York, the delta washes away Houston, and, well, we’ve already seen what could happen to New Orleans.

    The book isn’t all doom and gloom, there are very interesting scientific tidbits scattered throughout that I have not encountered anywhere else. His glimpses of the last remaining piece of the primeval forest that once covered Europe made me want to book a flight to the border of Poland and Belarus.

    The human narrative emerging from the Eastern African Rift Valley really points up how we are all really the same, like it or not. For those that will never wrap their minds around that fact, there is the cold comfort that war is actually beneficial for some species, if only by reducing the number of people degrading the environment.

    The amazing return of several endangered animals to the Korean peninsula’s DMZ echoes an idea by environmentalists from The Rewilding Institute who are committed to developing naturalized corridors crossing each of the continents where wildlife could live, migrate, and hopefully, thrive.

    As for humankind, well… we had better get our house in order. To paraphrase Weisman, we choose not to see the biggest elephant in the planet-sized room, although it’s harder and harder to ignore it. Perhaps the last great hope for us is to reduce current population trends before we experience total environmental collapse. It wouldn’t be the first time the Earth has pushed the reset button, and it won’t be the last, it’s just that we are supposed to be the smart ones.

    Every four days, the population of our small planet rises by one million people. If things continue at the current rate of projection, we should reach a mind-blowing total of nine billion people by the middle of this century. According to Dr. Sergei Scherbov from the Vienna Institute of Demography of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the World Population Program, if families were limited to having only one child, we would be back down to 19th century levels by 2100.

    However, with pronatalism promoters like Elon Musk—14 kids and counting—and Vice President JD Vance pushing the idea that (white) people should have more babies on behalf of the nation, I’m not going to hold my breath.

    ‎Picador Paper

  • The Royal Nonesuch: Or, What Will I Do When I Grow Up?—Glasgow Phillips

    In his frenzied autobiography, Marin County native Glasgow Phillips invites us to peek behind the curtain of the ridiculous freak show that was Hollywood during the dot-com boom and bust years. Most of us who weren’t part of the fool’s gold rush that closed the 20th-century had a feeling the whole thing was smoke and mirrors, but to take that ride with Phillips driving is still a mind-bending rush.

    To his credit, Phillips paints an unvarnished self-portrait and I wasn’t sure that I liked him or even cared enough about what happened to him to read beyond the 100-page mark. On one level Royal Nonesuch is very much the story of a privileged screw-up who pisses away a sizable inheritance hanging out with his crazy friends. It does eventually become apparent, however, that there is something more going on with this guy.

    At one point, Phillips seeks to point up the tawdry truths that lie beneath modern media’s love of death and destruction by producing an online millennial hoax involving an Antichrist-related snuff film. Phillips wrestles with his conscience, and his demons, while frantically scheming for funding and freaking out everyone that comes in contact with the project.

    Tragically, the looming collapse of the mini-media empire that Phillips and his partners have struggled to keep aloft comes at the same time his mother is diagnosed with cancer. The prospect of real loss puts the perceived gains and losses of the boom/bust into tight perspective and Phillips grows, matures, and finally becomes a fully realized person because of it. Good on him.

    Grove Press, Black Cat

  • Rain on the River: New and Selected Poems and Short Prose—Jim Dodge

    Once and a while, if you’re lucky, you just might run into someone who seems like they have it all figured out; someone who by virtue of example shows you another way of looking at the world and your place in it.

    If you casually told them that you were tempted to follow his or her example (and that person wasn’t driven by ego or fanaticism) that person might look at you like you were crazy, then maybe laugh, and try to talk you out of it. That person might even explain to you why you shouldn’t write in second person narrative. For me that person was Jim Dodge.

    I had the extreme pleasure of taking Jim’s creative writing class at Humboldt State back in the early ’90s, and in retrospect, I should have dropped all my other classes and just hung out with him all day. Oh well, live and learn—which is also the message of much of Dodge’s output: any one of his three novels or the flurry of chapbooks and loose poems that follow in his literary wake might teach you that.

    Rain on the River collects Dodge’s short-form musings from the late ’80s through when it was published in 2002, and during which time, Dodge married his long-time companion and became a father. Many of the later poems deal with the incredible sense of amazement he seemed to be dialed into at that point in his life.

    Dodge’s poetry combines the wonder of some of Richard Brautigan’s more innocent works and the natural familiarity of Gary Snyder, a fellow traveler who Dodge attributes with changing the direction of his life. Dodge, a Humboldt fisheries major at the time, went multi-disciplinarian after reading Snyder’s Hay for the Horses. Dodge’s mixture of Zen awareness and working class perception mirrors Snyder’s own sensibilities.

    In Fishing Devil’s Hole at the Peak of Spring, Dodge relates an archetypical steep downhill battle through briar and bramble (and occasional unexpected flower-strewn meadow) to reach a secret fishing hole, only to lose his fish and end up ass-over-teakettle in the freezing water to which he exclaims:

    “Yarrrrrggggggggaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!”
    Yes. Yes by everything holy, yes!
    Even better.

    He writes at his most beatific in a bone-deep closing triptych/manifesto, Holy Shit.

    I believe every atom of creation
    is indelibly printed with divinity.
    I believe in the warm peach
    rolled in the palm of my hand.
    I believe God plays saxophone
    and the Holy Ghost loves to dance.

    Grove Press

    Also by this author:
    Always Something

  • The Confessions of Rick James “Memoirs of a Super Freak”—Rick James

    Jeesus. You cannot accuse Rick James of false advertising, although you probably could have charged him with just about anything else at anytime, and the charges would have stuck.

    It was hard to keep from copy editing James’ autobiography as I read along. Although after a while, the awkward repetition of sentences—and entire paragraphs—began to seem like part of the experience. It was easy to imagine him telling a story and adding the same crazy bit several times in a row.

    Me: “Erm, Mr. James, you just said that.”

    The imaginary Rick James that lives in my head: “Cocaine’s a hell of a drug.”

    The most interesting part of the book for me was the Zelig-like way that James was involved with so many of the people and bands that came to embody the late-’60s rock scene. Who knew?

    Rest in peace, super freak.

    Amber Communications Group

  • The Savage Detectives: A Novel—Roberto Bolaño

    The release of an English translation of Chilean author Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Savage Detectives went head-to-head with the appearance of Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke for 2007’s literary news of the year.

    Lucky for us, Bolaño’s novel turned out to be every bit as great as the hype. Long known and respected by Latin American readers, Bolaño was a bit of mystery for most English monolinguists who, if hip to his writings at all, had to subsist on a few slim volumes published by New Directions.

    With the heavyweight house of Farrar, Straus and Giroux picking up the mantle and feature-length articles in the New Yorker and The New York Review of Books touting the novel’s many charms, Bolaño was the toast of the literary world—four years after his death in Spain of liver failure.

    The Savage Detectives begins in a mid-1970s Mexico City where a young poet, Juan García Madero, is invited to join a mysterious fraternity of writers calling themselves “visceral realists.” To call the group a movement is a bit of a stretch as no one, García Madero especially, knows (or is willing to say) exactly what visceral realism is. This doesn’t stop the group’s leaders, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano (a thin, thinly disguised Bolaño) from conducting purges that would make a Maoist nervous.

    The writers prowl the streets and back alleys of Mexico City, constantly writing, having sex, getting drunk, and ultimately running afoul of a killer pimp and his corrupt police buddies. As one does. Of course, this encapsulation does rough injustice to Bolaño’s kaleidoscope of richly drawn characters, some of which—like rare desert flowers—bloom once, fade, and are never seen again.

    The middle of the book picks up after the poets have returned from the desert where they had been searching for the mysterious poet who started the original visceral realism movement in the 1920s. For the next 400 pages, we see Lima and Belano through the eyes of people who cross paths with them in a 20-year span ending in 1996. This fractured faux-oral biography plays with the notion of identity while giving the disorienting, yet thrilling, feeling of looking at the pair through a many-faceted diamond.

    The final third returns to the Sonoran Desert to tell the story of what happened to Lima, Belano, García Madero, and wayward prostitute Lupe on their search for the elusive Cesárea Tinajero. To paraphrase García Madero: When it was all over, I felt like I knew every inch of that f’ing country. Even more, I felt I was born there.

    Picador

    Also by this author:
    The Insufferable Gaucho
    The Return
    The Romantic Dogs

  • The Insufferable Gaucho—Roberto Bolaño

    In death, Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño has become the Tupac Shakur of the literary world. Since succumbing to liver failure in 2003, he consistently released books for years (including the 900-page masterpiece, 2666). I realize that this incredible feat is due more to the slow process of translation than any powers Bolaño may have developed from beyond the grave, but I really wouldn’t put anything past him.

    The Insufferable Gaucho is a slim but powerful offering of short stories as well as a pair of essays in which he elliptically explores his own approaching mortality and place in the pantheon of Latin American literature. Bolaño’s Police Rat revisits Franz Kafka’s hidden world of Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk. Pepe the Cop, a nephew of Josephine’s who, like his famous aunt, has a sensitivity that raises him a cut above the common rat, is on the tail of a killer in their midst.

    Unfortunately for Pepe—and as we have learned through countless police stories—individuality isn’t necessarily a trait that is appreciated by superior officers. As Josephine’s star wanes, Kafka’s narrator muses, “She is a small episode in the eternal history of our people, and the people will get over the loss of her.”

    One has to wonder if Bolaño was winking at us from his own position as a singing rat of some renown and one fully aware of his own demise. Perhaps it was a poke back at his own growing fame in the years right before he died when he chose the epigram for this book from the end of Kafka’s story: “So perhaps we shall not miss so very much at all.”

    If Martin Scorsese ever decides to direct an animated movie for Pixar, I’d like to see Police Rat on the big screen. I could just imagine Robert De Niro doing the voice-over for Pepe: “Have you ever taken on a weasel? Are you ready to be torn apart by a weasel?” Maybe it’s time for the studio to leave behind Lady and the Trampist fare like Ratatouille, and get fucking real. But I digress.

    In Literature + Illness = Illness, a many-faceted facing of the terminal disease that cut his life short at 50, Bolaño writes, “Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace.” It is a shout back from the ragged edge of things, and about as true as anything I’ve ever heard.

    New Directions

    Also by this author:
    The Return
    The Romantic Dogs
    Savage Detectives: A Novel

  • Sunset Park—Paul Auster

    New Yorker book critic James Wood once wrote an article about quintessential—and now sadly lamented—New York author Paul Auster that masqueraded as a synopsis of a new novel before revealing itself as a parody using the tropes that the writer was known for.

    Intellectual male protagonist with a dark sense of loss? Check. Violent accident? Check. Doppelgangers akimbo? Check Check.

    The back-and-forth argument as to whether Auster was merely doing what postmodernist writers do, i.e., borrow liberally from popular culture as to point out the foibles of modern life and paucity of new ideas in the face of existential crisis, or has succumbed to the greasy but comforting business of slinging familiar fare like a grizzled line cook on the graveyard shift had all but killed my desire to read another Auster novel ever since taking all that in. That was a shame.

    I discovered Auster late and had jumped into the deep end quite quickly, devouring In the Country of Last Things, Leviathan, The Book of Illusions, and Oracle Night in short order. Maybe Wood was right, and Auster had become somewhat of a one-trick pony, but if it’s a good trick, what the hell? The weird thing? Wood’s parody actually sounded pretty good. Which brings us to Sunset Park.

    Auster’s novel starts out like a parody of the parody, sort of a literary “fuck you” to the critics. We find twenty-eight-year-old Miles Heller mucking out foreclosures in Florida in his seventh year of self-imposed exile from his family after dropping out of college. Heller’s dark sense of loss stems from accidentally pushing his stepbrother in front of a speeding car while arguing on the side of a winding road in the Berkshires.

    Heller is pretty screwed up, and although characters male and female seem to be powerless before his supposed charms, he’s not a sympathetic enough protagonist to hang a novel upon. He may have actually offed his brother on purpose, and he is carrying on with—that is to say, sodomizing—a seventeen-year-old Cuban girl.

    It’s easy to see how Heller could have been emotionally stunted by his brother’s death, and the girl, Pilar Sanchez, is about the same age as he was when the break occurred. As hard as Auster tries to give their relationship credibility, gifting Sanchez with above-average intelligence and insatiable curiosity, it is unseemly when she refers to her various orifices as the off-limits mommy hole, and the A-OK funny hole.

    Given that this is an Auster book, this strange relationship is mirrored in the backstory of one of Heller’s roommates once he’s forced to retreat back to New York by a greedy, and possibly jealous, older Sanchez girl upon threat of incarceration for statutory rape.

    An old friend of Heller’s, the bearish Bing Nathan, and a group of like-minded twenty-somethings have opened up a squat in the seedy Sunset Park district just in time for Heller’s exile.

    Ellen Brice, a woman who “projected an aura of anxiety and defeat,” had been impregnated at twenty by a sixteen-year-old who she had supposed to be watching. Brice, while physically and emotionally understated, is perhaps the key to Sunset Park.

    Auster’s novel is ultimately about depression, both national and personal, and the poor judgment that can arise from being in that state of mind. He has placed his box of broken crayons smack down in the financial meltdown of 2008; the national malaise mirrors the feeling of Heller’s peers who have burned through their initial promise, and are now adrift.

    The third squatmate, Alice Bergstrom, is neck deep in her dissertation for Columbia. She has become obsessed by William Wyler’s 1946 film, The Best Years of Our Lives; a film that examines the difficulties soldiers returning from WWII had relating to domestic life once again.

    Heller and company don’t have the monolithic bummer of a world at war, but they do have the collapse of a system that was to provide each and every one of them a chance at the American Dream. It is interesting that among his peers, only the vindictive Sanchez sister, a recent immigrant, has the balls to grab a hold and squeeze what she can out of what little she is presented with.

    Within all this, Auster weaves a thematic thread involving baseball pitchers; especially those who showed great promise then flamed out, often tragically. For my money, if you’re a New York author and you’re going to use baseball as a metaphor to describe the human condition, then you’re going to have to go up against Don DeLillo’s masterful set piece that opens Underworld.

    That masterwork transcended any interest one might, or might not have, in the detailed ephemera of the national sport. In the shadow of DeLillo’s big game, Auster’s pitch falls low and outside. Or maybe that’s the point.

    Henry Holt and Co.

  • Which Brings Me to You—Steve Almond & Julianna Baggott

    After coming dangerously close to blowing hot coffee out of my nose while reading Steve Almond’s Not That You Asked, I decided to dive a little deeper into his (sure to be twisted) oeuvre. Swimming around, I bumped into this book, a novel of letters co-written by sometime (and, as quickly becomes apparent, sometimes not) children’s book author Julianna Baggott.

    It’s a conceit that could have ended up too clever by half, but is so well handled that I kicked myself for not thinking of it first. The story begins—like most Hugh Grant movies—at a wedding. I was hooked after the very first line, “I know my own kind. We’re obvious to each other. I suppose this is true of other kinds, too: military brats, for example, anarchists, mattress salesmen, women who got ponies as birthday gifts.”

    Jane ruminates while spying John standing under a white crepe paper wedding bell, “My own kind. I’m not sure there’s a name for us. I suspect we’re born this way: our hearts screwing in tight, already a little broken. We hate sentimentality and yet we’re deeply sentimental.” Sound like anyone you know?

    The two are drawn to each other like cracked magnets—repelling those they should be attracting, yet powerless to avoid the collision with their harmonious defect.

    After a furtive and aborted liaison in a cloakroom—the pair pulls apart long enough to realize that hooking up with a stranger under a bunch of outerwear would be a mutual mistake in two long, sad trains of mistakes—they hatch a plan to exchange letters confessing their respective tragic love lives. The sense that both of them know that this encounter just may be their last best chance permeates the already stuffy coat check.

    “No e-mail.”

    “Absolutely,” he says. “Real letters. Ink. Paper. The whole deal. We’ll be like the pioneers, waiting by our windows for the Pony Express. In bonnets.”

    John kicks things off with the story of Jodi Dunne, his first love at sixteen. Almond nails the tentative stirrings of romance fighting against the poison tide of peer and familial pressure, social awkwardness, and “erotic incompetence” that make up everyone’s high school years.

    Almond’s doppelganger proves his commitment to the spirit of full disclosure by recounting an unfortunate (and nearly geometrically impossible) incident wherein he ejaculates into his own mouth and gives himself, “as known in porn circles,” the Pirate Eye.

    Now, if I hadn’t read Almond’s harrowing tales of his own sexual awakening, I would have called gratuitous bullshit and might have given up on this character, but that would have been a mistake.

    Jane fires back with her tale of Asbury Park boys and a brooding and doomed muscle car driving boyfriend, and we’re off to the races. “Michael Hanrahan was something that I hoped would happen. In fact, I hoped he’s gone off like a bomb in my life, obliterating most everything except me, still standing, albeit charred and dizzy.”

    By the time we find them back at the wedding, “charred and dizzy” describes the state of both characters having weathered romantic disaster after romantic disaster. Will they be able to put it all behind them and start anew, one more time? Or are their respective personnel files too stuffed with abject failure to recommend advancement? Come to think of it, get Hugh Grant’s agent on the phone!

    ‎Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

    Also by this author:
    (Not That You Asked): Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions

  • Talk Talk—T.C. Boyle

    Like him or not, you can’t call T. Coraghessan Boyle lazy. Talk Talk, his 2006 novel about Dana Halter, a deaf woman who’s had her identity stolen and the resultant single-minded attempt to confront the man who did it, was his 11th novel since 1982’s Water Music.

    Coupled with the eight collections of short stories he had out at the time, that’s a lot of pages. For most of those pages, Boyle has shown himself to be a consummate wordsmith whose plots are always conveyed with an artisan’s sense of shade and nuance as well as a prankster’s sense of the ridiculous.

    Talk Talk starts out like it had been shot out of a cannon, and Boyle adeptly conveys Halter’s headlong crash into the brick wall of a jaded and overworked judicial system. From the time she leaves the house, Halter is behind the eight ball, and we are barely hanging on, along for the ride: “She was running late, always running late, a failing of hers, she knew it, but then she couldn’t find her purse and once she did manage to locate it (underneath her blue corduroy jacket on the coat tree in the front hall), she couldn’t find her keys.”

    Being thrown in jail after a traffic stop quickly reveals what Halter is made of, “she still worked harder than anyone she knew, driving herself with an internal whip that kept all her childhood wounds open and grieving in the flesh.” None of the veritable litany of bad behavior, of course, has anything to do with her. The real her.

    Up until this point, the book is a horrifying trip through a Kafkaesque nightmare of identity theft, incarceration, and the painful aftermath of both. Boyle shows how tenuous our grip on the information we rely on to define ourselves can be in the modern, data-driven era. Boyle further plays with the concept of identity by giving Halter’s nemesis everything that she has worked for her whole life. Deep down, she has always only ever wanted to belong.

    The other Dana Halter, a sociopath who started out as William Wilson, is accepted by the well-heeled Marin County society with whom he rubs elbows. Whether shopping with his Russian immigrant girlfriend, cooking up gourmet dinners in his Sausalito condo overlooking the bay, or going out to the best restaurants, his attitude is, “they knew him here—everybody knew him—and if there was a line of tourists or whoever, they always seated him the minute he walked in the door. Which was the way it should be. His money was good, he tipped large… and his girlfriend was a knockout—they should have paid him just to sit at the bar.”

    Halter soon sleuths Wilson out and enlists her somewhat immature boyfriend Bridger Martin into a half-baked scheme to find and confront the guy. Martin is not the vigilante type—all his life he’d cruised along, “living a video existence, easy in everything and never happier than when he was sunk into the couch with a DVD or spooned into a plush seat in the theater with the opening credits rolling,” but he rises to the occasion, putting his job as a digital effects jockey and, ultimately, his life on the line.

    Wilson, however, is more like Halter than either would ever care to admit. Both of them have a chip on their shoulder the size of a stolen BMW Z4, and both are tenacious as hell—Wilson puts as much sheer determination and willpower into maintaining his farcical life as Halter, or anyone, puts into their real ones.

    Boyle often enjoys giving his anti-heroes the choicest parts, the most glamorous lives. In Talk Talk, he seems to enjoy tossing even that convention on its head. Wilson’s living the good life, but he doesn’t seem to be enjoying it any more than Halter enjoyed mixing with the drunks and prostitutes in the county lockup. The two have finally found, in each other, the perfect foils to blame for their insecurities and frustrations. Of course, Martin and Wilson’s girlfriend Natalia soon get dragged into the maelstrom.

    After a cross-country chase that places the two principals back at the mercy of their respective mothers, Boyle seems to falter and becomes unwilling to bring the hunt to a suitable conclusion. At first I thought that, after embracing the thriller genre, Boyle got nervous about being perceived as a hack and decided to end his book not with a bang but a whimper. Was it the right move for integrity’s sake? Perhaps. Does it deliver the much-needed payoff? No, not all. In fact, it points out the glaring plot hole of what the hell did Halter expect to accomplish by chasing this guy across the continent?

    Then I read somewhere that Boyle’s Ur-moment, when he knew that he had to write fiction, was after reading Robert Coover’s Pricksongs & Descants.

    Coover’s stories are all about the unexpected, the set-up without the payoff we’ve come to anticipate—or all of them at once. Boyle simply left us a trail of breadcrumbs to follow into the forest, and while we were there, we got to think about the nature of identity and look at the scary trees.

    It’s not his fault if we weren’t tossed into an oven by some crazy bitch. Sometimes, shit doesn’t happen. And, that’s OK.

    Viking Adult

  • The Return—Roberto Bolaño

    This collection of the late Chilean author Roberto Bolaño’s short stories reads like a Cliff Notes introduction to the world he traveled in, and in his literature, populated. The Return is stuffed with whores and hit men, poets and porn stars, Communists and black marketers, ghosts and conjurers, and (obviously) detectives.

    The book kicks off with a pair of stories about misplaced foreigners in Russia, one by choice, and the other by bureaucratic snafu. In Snow, a Chilean ex-pat living in Barcelona tells the story of when he was “a trainer’s assistant for a man of dubious and disconcerting moral character” in post-Soviet Moscow.

    Rogelio Estrada falls in with a gangster called “Billy the Kid” né Misha Pavlov and ends up procuring young women for him. “Pavlov’s taste in women was for athletes: long jumpers, sprinters, middle-distance runners, triple jumpers… but his real favorites were the high jumpers. He said they were like gazelles, ideal women, and he wasn’t wrong.”

    Herein lies the rub: one Natalia Chuikova, who Estrada lovingly describes as “five-foot-ten and can’t have weighed more than 120 pounds. She had brown hair, and her simple ponytail gathered all the grace in the world. Her eyes were jet black and she had, I swear, the longest, most beautiful legs I have ever seen.” Let’s just say, that’s not the healthiest attention to detail for a hired goon to have.

    Another Russian Tale follows a Spaniard captured while fighting with the Nazi Germans in a World War II footnote that I was completely unaware of. The Spanish Blue Division was a volunteer force sent by fellow fascist Franco on (according to Wikipedia) “condition they would exclusively fight against Bolshevism (Soviet Communism) on the Eastern Front, and not against the Western Allies or any Western European occupied populations.”

    Within such a historical anomaly lies the kernel of a tragic novel in its own right, but Bolaño purposefully crash lands the premise, turning the man’s fate on a linguistic misunderstanding of a sputtered epithet.

    Detectives, the piece in this collection that best shows off Bolaño’s singular talent is written entirely as an extended dialogue between two policemen pulling duty in a Chilean jail. Bolaño slips in exposition, politics, and world history all without letting the conversation seem forced or false.

    His own literary counterpart, Arturo Belano—co-founder of Visceral Realism and co-hero of The Savage Detectives—makes an appearance as little more than an apparition, but one real enough to shake one of the detectives out of his comfortable stupor.

    In one of the most heartfelt examples of Bolaño’s ability to bring the seedy underbelly of society to life and make it seem as valid a way to live as any other—perhaps even more valid, as hypocrisy must be one of the first vices to burn away in the fires of Earth-bound hell—he chronicles the story of an Italian porn star, Joanna Silvestri, who returns to Los Angeles in 1990 after AIDS has run rampant and rocked the industry. Its “biggest” star, a barely-disguised John Holmes, still haunts the valley, a walking shell of his former self.

    Silvestri knows “Jack” from the old days and looks him up in a tender scene that stands out no less for being surrounded by work-a-day debauchery. Her matter-of-fact accounting of her chosen trade is at first shocking but soon begins to make sense.

    Porn, for the professional who makes it, must end up being just another day at the office, and in the end (no pun intended) don’t we all whore ourselves out in search of the all-mighty dollar?

    And while we’re on the subject, Murdering Whores paints the gruesome picture of a prostitute who singles out a guy coming out of a soccer match, kidnaps him, and tortures him to death. I read somewhere that this collection was originally named after this story: Putas Asesinas. I think it sounds better in Spanish.

    Ghosts real and imagined flit thematically throughout these tales, some of them merely glimpsed and some of them fully present and pissed off. The way that the specter of death hangs over this book, one can’t help but wonder if Bolaño was working through his own approaching mortality, picking it up and observing it from every angle.

    One hopes that he didn’t become like the ghost that narrates the title piece. “I have good news and bad news,” he begins. “The good news is that there is life (of a kind) after this life. The bad news is that Jean-Claude Villeneuve is a necrophiliac.”

    I’ll leave it to the porn star to sum up what Bolaño finally discovered while turning his imminent death into The Return. “I’m tempted to tell him that we are all ghosts, that all of us have gone too soon into the world of ghost movies, but he’s a good man and I don’t want to hurt him, so I keep it to myself. Anyway, who’s to say he doesn’t already know?”

    New Directions

    Also by this author:
    The Insufferable Gaucho
    The Romantic Dogs
    Savage Detectives: A Novel

  • Ask the Dust—John Fante

    How is it that I never heard of quintessential Los Angeles author John Fante until now?

    St. Fante, the doomed Catholic romantic who presaged Kerouac as the steady-eyed chronicler among the invisible underclass of his generation.

    El Fante, the true spirit of LA, sitting up nights that refuse to cool down and typing madly in a white undershirt while his ashtray blooms and the smell of flowers on the hot wind makes the whole city smell like a funeral.

    Fante the Bulldog, Bukowski before Bukowski had thought of it, or had given in to it—his spirit resilient against cops, and beautiful/crazy Mexican girls, and poverty.

    I mean, what the hell were they teaching us in school? If I had my way, I’d have kids read this book over and over. This is life: mad, frantic, desperate, and ecstatic.

    Ecco

  • Radio Free Albemuth—Philip K. Dick

    In 1974, science fiction writer Philip K. Dick had what he would come to understand as a religious experience, or more specifically, a Platonic anamnesis—a loss of forgetfulness.

    Triggered by exposure to an ichthys, what is commonly known as a “Jesus fish,” he had a flash of the continued existence of Rome circa 70 AD and felt the certainty of the early Christians that their messiah had just left and would be right back. This experience was followed by several nighttime visions where a beam of pink light beamed information into his head from an alien satellite.

    Dick struggled to understand what had happened to him and wrestled with these themes, most comprehensively in the writing of his exegesis, the VALIS trilogy, and, in 1976, the creation of Radio Free Albemuth. Those that have read VALIS, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer will recognize this novel as a tentative first crack at the material that would define and consume Dick until his death in 1982.

    This is not to say that this book doesn’t stand on its own, in many ways it is the more down-to-earth take on a very complex and singular cosmology, however, the VALIS mythos did become richer as a result of the extra effort. A lot of the underlying schema in this early draft is pitched in the form of manic exposition.

    Dick would later recast himself as Horselover Fat/Phil and kept the gist of Radio Free Albemuth intact as the experimental film that forms the centerpiece of VALIS. Some characters, however, lose something in the translation. Cancer survivor Sadassa Silvia Aramchek comes across as a better-realized and motivated person than her later incarnation, Sherri Solvig.

    The thinly disguised Richard M. Nixon stand-in, Ferris F. Fremont, is a delightfully evil antagonist, doubly chilling as the portrait rings true in hindsight. All in all, Albemuth is not the place to start exploring later-period PKD, but it is a worthwhile read as well as a fascinating example of what a rewrite/re-imagining can do.

    Mariner Books Classics

  • Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void—Mary Roach

    With Elon Musk trying to gin up interest in “occupying” a planet that looks a lot like Nevada without the atmosphere, I figured it was time to see what the experts had to say on the subject.

    It wasn’t until nearing the end of Oakland journalist Mary Roach’s fun fact-finding foray that the five-year-old boy deep inside of me finally shut the hell up about going to outer space. The litany of the astro-indignities Roach gleefully, yet respectfully, outlines with her usual irreverent wit killed that dream as decisively as, well, trying to occupy Mars.

    Worse than horrible food? Check. Little opportunity for humane sanitation? Check. A decent likelihood of having one’s brain disengage from its stem in a g-force tilt-a-whirl clusterfuck? Ch-ch-check. And yet lil’ Román held on to his Apollo-era dreams of the uncharted void until the horrible truth was finally revealed: there will be no beer in space.

    Apparently, without gravity, the bubbles that provide beer’s carbonation don’t rise to the top of your pint or to the top of your stomach. Retired NASA food scientist Charles Bourland calls the results, “a foamy froth… often a burp is accompanied by a liquid spray.”

    The best the greatest minds in the country could offer as a substitute was to decant Paul Masson cream sherry into little plastic pouches. Hard pass. Of course, once the neo-prohibitionists got wind of it, even that exiguous libation was permanently grounded.

    And so it went. It seems the excitement of space exploration had died down before the Apollo program had even run its course. Roach quotes Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan as deadpanning, “Funny thing happened on the way to the Moon: not much.”

    From this remove, it’s hard to believe that even going to the Moon could have ever seemed routine. Cernan summed up the feeling many Americans had toward the space race by 1972 with, “Should have brought some crossword puzzles.” Roach explains the sea change by stating; “The close of the Apollo program marked a shift from exploration to experimentation.”

    Even the luster associated with, in the words of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, “Boldly go[ing] where no man has gone before,” tarnishes when you hear Shoichi Tachibana, the Chief Medical Officer of Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), reveal, “To tell you the truth, astronaut is a kind of college student.” Roach embellishes, “He is given assignments. Decisions are made for him. Going into space is like attending a very small, very elite military boarding school.” Hard, hard pass.

    Indeed, many of the tests that astronauts have to endure seem more like ritual hazing than science, but lest one forgets, they are not being prepped to survive in the great big world, but beyond it, where the very nature of the void wants to kill you.

    Astronaut Chris Hadfield explains the necessity of what often seems like sadistic torture. “That’s what we do for a living. We don’t fly in space for a living. We have meetings, plan, prepare, train. I’ve been an astronaut for six years, and I’ve been in space for eight days.”

    Roach ultimately considers whether all of the trouble is worth it. She quotes Benjamin Franklin who—upon the occasion of the first manned hot air balloon flight—was asked what use he saw in it. “What use,” Franklin replied, “is a newborn baby?” She dismisses the argument that the substantial amount of treasure spent on such an unlikely venture as traveling to Mars could better spent here on Earth by pointing out the truth that it probably wouldn’t.

    “I see a backhanded nobility,” she writes, “in excessive, impractical outlays of cash prompted by nothing loftier than a species joining hands and saying, ‘I bet we can do this.’”

    You kids have fun.

    W. W. Norton & Company

  • Poetry as Insurgent Art—Lawrence Ferlinghetti

    If any man alive can be still held responsible for the Beat movement and/or the poetry renaissance of the ’50s and ’60s, it is San Francisco poet and City Lights Booksellers & Publishers co-founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He was there from the very beginning, helping to create a scene in the Italian North Beach neighborhood that reverberated to this day.

    It was the publishing arm of City Lights that propelled East Coast writers such as Allen Ginsburg and Gregory Corso, as well as San Franciscans like Kenneth Rexroth and Ferlinghetti himself, into the national spotlight. The landmark Howl obscenity trial, sparked after San Francisco police seized the City Lights paperback, won more notoriety for what Ginsburg and friends were up to than any lame spot-the-beatnik tours could have ever brought to bear.

    The bibliographical note to this slim volume, Ferlinghetti’s own Ars Poetica, marks it as an on-going work in progress starting as a KPFA broadcast in the late ’50s. The main body of Poetry as Insurgent Art reads almost like a collection of daily affirmations, ranging from practical advice to writers, “If you call yourself a poet, don’t just sit there. Poetry is not a sedentary occupation, not a ‘take your seat’ practice. Stand up and let them have it,” to more philosophical and sensual musings such as, “Be a dark barker before the tents of existence,” and “Instead of trying to escape reality, plunge into the flesh of the world.”

    Some of Ferlinghetti’s aphorisms seem antithetical to a movement that worshiped the idea of Jack Kerouac spontaneously writing On the Road on a continuous roll of Teletype paper. Advice like, “Cultivate dissidence and critical thinking. First thought may be worst thought,” places him outside of the spur-of-the-moment crowd.

    Of course, Ferlinghetti always argued that he was never a “Beat,” but was rather a bohemian, sort of a proto-Beat, if you will. In her 2004 book, Bohemian Manifesto: A Field Guide to Living on the Edge, Laren Stover breaks down the evolution of bohemianism into five branches: Nouveau, Gypsy, Beat, Zen, and Dandy, any number and combination of which can still be found slouching around the City wherever hipsters congregate, leading to possibly my favorite of his bits of wisdom, “Stash your sell-phone and be here now.”

    The book veers into more abstract attempts to answer the burning question of What is Poetry? some of which bear the brand of the modern world, such as, “Poems are e-mails from the unknown beyond cyberspace.” ’Erm… why do I get the feeling that one may not make the cut in a future edition? Others are timeless, “It is private solitude made public,” psychedelic, “Poetry is Van Gogh’s ear echoing with all the blood of the world,” religious, “It is the street talk of angels and devils—It is made by dissolving halos in oceans of sound,” and, last-but-not-least, political, “The idea of poetry as an arm of class war disturbs the sleep of those who do not wish to be disturbed in the pursuit of happiness.”

    It takes him a while to get around to it, but toward the end of the book lies possibly the best definition of poetry I have ever read. “Poetry is making something out of nothing, and it can be about nothing and still mean something.”

    Ferlinghetti certainly knows what he’s talking about, and although the man is gone now, we’re truly lucky to still have his words around.

    New Directions