Román Leão

Tag: writing

  • 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

  • Asylum (Padrão dos Descobrimentos) [poema]

    Even as children, we suspected our world
    was broken—as if our hometown had been lifted
    and dropped from a much higher place.
    Everyday during the long summers we explored
    the edges of the pieces—the spots
    where the pattern no longer matched up.

    Thirty years later, it’s harder to get up
    the motivation to get out and map the world,
    to find the forgotten corners and secret spots.
    The veil of mystery has been lifted,
    and the edge of the continent explored.
    The great unknown now muffled by a sense of place.

    From Yerba Buena to Eureka, I thought I had found the place
    to put down roots—and as many times—I pulled them up.
    A privateer, up and down the coast I wandered,
    only to miss the hidden parts of the world.
    No longer lost, my spirits are still lifted
    when I think about those magic spots.

    Days spent in rapture until our eyes saw spots,
    we rode from place to place.
    As we grew, our dreams were lifted,
    until too soon—we just grew up.
    It’s every man’s destiny to make his way in the world,
    and every boy’s to forget the land he conquered.

    Down in the creeks and ravines we explored,
    searching for those perfect spots
    away from the bustle of the world.
    We were driven to find a mystic place,
    somewhere where the rules were not put up,
    and our pirate banner could be lifted.

    With found bits of lumber are battlements yet lifted
    into treetops no longer noticed or surveyed?
    The old men below don’t bother to look up,
    knowing that gazing into the sun pays nothing but blindness.
    With everything marked and in its proper place,
    wonder fades into the background of the world.

    If only the veil of maturity could be lifted up,
    and we could again see the world as an enchanted place.
    The places we knew as youth could provide asylum
    even for the grown.

    Published in The Hot Air Quarterly, Number Sixteen

    Photo/Ray Larsen

  • The River [poema]

    The shattered granite banks of the Klamath
    have been rounded by time—more time
    than I can imagine, though I try—and water.
    If the steelhead would show and were
    in a talkative mood, they would tell me
    something about patience, although perhaps
    through their absence, they are still trying to teach.

    This, I have down. I could stand in this cold
    current all day, all year, forever; what
    else could be this perfect? As an eagle
    flies overhead and a pair of black bears
    roam the far shore; all I am missing are things
    that don’t matter, and you. Where are you?
    How could days be so sublime and disconsolate?

    I still have a lot to learn from this river.
    The sharp edges of where whole escarpments
    have sheared off from my heart have yet to be
    smoothed over. Landslides neither foreseen
    or witnessed, but devastating in their force, await
    the healing touch of water. Meanwhile, distant stars
    are my cold companions.

    Photo/Ray Larsen

  • Tears Are Saltwater [poema]

    The bridge is at a standstill

    Protestors cast their keys before them
       Over the steel railing
          Into the bystander Bay
             To be swallowed by sturgeon
                And checked over by crabs

    Imagine that chirping in the background
       The unexpected result
          Of deep-water exoskeletal investigations

    Halfway across the world atrocities continue unabated

    As Dungeness poke at newfound fobs
       As headlights flash on and off unconsidered
          And batteries slowly die
             Their future corroding away
                By the minute

    We wait, hoping for the slack tide to return

  • 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

  • Shit From an Old Notebook: One Man’s Manifesto, #1–36

    About 10 years ago I endeavored to jot what, if anything, I had learned in almost a half-century of not dying. Looking back, I think these “life squeezin’s” have not only held up, but are now cask-conditioned for your edification and/or pleasure.

    Contents may have settled. Objects are much, much closer than they appear. Personal application may cause serious rash and/or burning. If swelling, discoloration, or bleeding occurs, put down the list and notify your physician.

    #1 There is a line of energy from the center of the earth that travels through you and out to the stars. Stand up straight.

    #2 Do not eat anything out of a vending machine. Ever.

    #3 Original sin is a racket. Don’t take blame (or credit) for anything you are not responsible for. This makes you a dupe (or an asshole).

    #4 Everything in moderation. Except meth—that’s just a bad idea all around.

    #5 Sugar is poison. Use sparingly.

    #6 Whisky, despite the name—water of life—is also bad for you. Slightly less moderation, however, is called for.

    #7 Breathe.

    #8 Only travel with folks who think it’s funny when you fart yourself awake.

    #9 You aren’t drinking enough water, or Scotch, for that matter (see #6).

    #10 Know how to drive stick.

    #11 Do not blurt; think before you open your mouth. No one is called an idiot for carefully considering a well-measured response.

    #12 Declarations of love (or friendship, or solidarity), however, should not be postponed. Life is short.

    #13 Things that should never be lent out: guns, knives, and guitars… actually, anything that can kill or maim if used correctly.

    #14 Don’t curse so much, God damn it! What the fuck is wrong with you?

    #15 Be kind to others—even if they’re rude pricks. This will either show the error of their thinking or get them to drop their guard so you can punch them in the neck.

    #16 Admit when you are wrong. Eat crow, it will not kill you (although it could use some hot sauce).

    #17 Always carry a bottle of hot sauce.

    #18 Don’t subscribe to negativity. Bear witness to others’ pain but don’t make it your own, and—for fuck’s sake—don’t spread it around.

    #19 If you need to be somewhere out of your range at a particular time, bring a map. Don’t rely on technology or the kindness of others; they’re both fine but flawed.

    #20 If you have time to kill—get lost.

    #21 Stairs are nature’s Stairmaster. Use them whenever possible.

    #22 Always carry some cash, hidden even from yourself. Something between $20 and $50. Although nothing bigger than a $20, you won’t be able to break it when you need to.

    #23 Choose a day—Sunday’s a good one—and every week get rid of 10 things. Give them away, recycle them, set them on fire; it doesn’t matter. Live like the plane is going down. It’s time to jettison cargo.

    #24 A grown man needs a muffin like he needs a heart attack. Have some fruit you fat fuck.

    #25 Don’t be so hard on yourself, have the muffin once in a while.

    #26 Sweatpants are for sweating. Wearing them away from home for any other reason sends the signal that you’ve completely given up or are ill. Go change.

    #27 Coffee is magic.

    #28 Never trust a man who wears shoes with no socks, unless in the tropics, then avoid sock-wearers at all cost.

    #29 If asked to leave a job, do not burn it down on the way out; all parties may become desperate enough to revisit this relationship.

    #30 Do not, under any circumstances, return. This rule applies to women and bands* as well, only more so.

    #31 Pretend that you belong somewhere, and people will usually assume you do.

    #32 Never. Call. The. Cops. There is no bad situation that cannot be made worse by the addition of the authorities.

    #33 Stay limber. You will be glad you did when the cops show up and/or people finally realize that you do not belong.

    #34 For fuck’s sake, keep your hands off of your fucking face! Stroking your chin in a pantomime of deep consideration is, in reality, anything but. This is how you get sick all the time. (Wow, this one really played out.)

    #35 I was a smart kid but not very wise. Now, I’m wise as hell but still do things that aren’t very smart. Endeavor to be both and see where you end up.

    #36 There is a reflection of the divine in even the biggest ass hat you’ll ever meet. It is up to you to recognize it.

    *Unless you’re Ozzy, but you’re not.

  • 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

  • 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