Román Leão

Tag: writing

  • Shit From an Old Notebook: Dancing with Mr. D

    So, I’m sitting on the patio of a coffee shop in Arcata… and I know what you’re saying, “Of course weird shit is going to happen, it’s Arcata,” and that’s fair, but hold on.

    I’m outside with my wife and the pup, just kicking it after a stunner of a day, and who comes out, does an over-theatrical stretch, and stands there looking out at G Street? Death.

    It’s the most beautiful day I’ve ever seen in Humboldt County, I’m enjoying my coffee in the waning sunlight, and fucking Death shows up. Now, I’m well aware that it there’s a chance it was some person dressed like Death—the flowing robes, the big white skull for a noggin, gloves (which is surprising since I always had Death pegged for a hands-on kind of guy)—but I have to ask, yet again, would that any less weird?

    Being the curious—and occasionally not very bright—type, I ask, as many would, “What up, Death?” Big mistake. Big D was just waiting to tell someone that we were on the cusp of something called Walpurgis Night. Death read the blank look on my face and offered, “It’s like another Halloween.” Fair enough. Is there candy? “’Erm… no.”

    Death went on to explain that it’s more for witches than the more inclusive “All Spirits” kind of affair. Traditionally there are wild dances, bonfires, and orgies… and that’s when Death acknowledged the awkward conversational turn. “We probably won’t go that far tonight,” Death back-peddled.

    OK, Death, if you’re reading this, sorry we slipped out, but you know, shit to do and all that. As busy as you must be, I’m sure you understand. Catch you later (way later, I hope). I’m sure you’ll end up with the opportunity to screw me before it’s all said and done, just not right now.

    But, I’m sure that’s what they all say.

    Art/Praetorius Blocksberg Verrichtung, Johannes Praetorius, 1668

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • Out on the Serpentine [poema]

    I walk the serpentine
    Path where dust settles
    Late and yellowjackets prey
    On bones left standing in
    The middle of the road

    I walk the ages
    Past where Gypsies camp
    Back in the pale shadows
    Of summer slowly turning to
    The harvest downwind

    I walk beside you
    Now and do not profess
    To know the mystery of days
    Caught in amber or what happens
    Next; I wonder myself

    Sometimes

    Photo/Ray Larsen

  • 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

  • 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