Román Leão

Category: Reviews

  • 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