When Pacino's Hot, I'm Hot (Book) - 7/14/2008 12:27:35 PM
— Nathan Tyree, Bookmunch
Bitesize: Terrific new short story collection blazes a trail on to the Bookmunch 'must-read' list...
I had not heard of Robert Levin before When Pacino's Hot, I'm Hot arrived in the mail. I'm not really sure how I had missed him. Much of his work has appeared in publications that I sometimes read, and yet he had slipped completely beneath my radar. That fact is something of a shame.
When Pacino's Hot, I'm Hot is a slim volume, split about in half. The first forty or so pages are devoted to Levin's short stories, the second forty or so made up of his commentary. It is the first half of the book that interested me most.
Levin writes rude, bawdy, strange, idiosyncratic tales. His characters are obsessed with sex and with themselves. They tend to be losers and bores (but are never boring). Levin crafts stories often in the first person, with a raw wit and free Id. There is a discomfort (with life, existence, sexuality, the body) that bleeds out of his characters. These are not the strong, sleek, beautiful protagonists that hang about so much of today's fiction. These characters owe something to Bukowski and Burroughs.
All of the tales that make up this book deserve some level of mention, but a few truly stand out. "Dog Days" is disturbing. "Peggy (or sex with a very large woman)" is hilarious. I found myself putting the book aside while reading that story, to compose myself and let the laughter trail off so that I could finish reading it. "Spinning the Wheel of the Quivering Meat Conception" has one of the best titles I have seen in years. Sadly, it is one of the weaker stories in the book.
The title story is most deserving of discussion. "When Pacino's Hot, I'm Hot" is a fascinating and nasty tale. It follows an unattractive man. He describes himself thus: "Just under average height, more skinny than slim, and with long, usually unkempt hair hanging over my ears and forehead and down the scruff of my neck, I also have heavily lidded eyes, sunken cheeks and a pallor that's cadaverous." Reading that self description, one may be surprised that our narrator "Gets his pipes cleaned" all the time by a variety of women.
His secret is that a certain type of woman will mistake him for Al Pacino, or Dustin Hoffman, or Bob Dylan, or some other celebrity that doesn't meet the standard of beauty in the modern world. We are presented with a holy litany of the times he's been laid due to mistaken identity.
Eventually he falls into a relationship of sorts. He begins living with a girl that has no idea who it is she is sleeping with each night. This girl has the improbable name Roger (her father had wanted a boy). She is one of the strangest characters I have ever read about. Something in her reminds one of Anthony Burgess' Enderby. She is flatulent and sort of disgusting in her habits. This girl is a fountain of malapropism, mixed (or twisted) metaphor and strange construction. When excited she is "excruciated". She wonders why strangers don't "notarize" her boyfriend (who she initially believes to be Dustin Hoffman).
The two of them make a strange pair in extremis. It is, in its own way, a sad tale. We know from the start that it can’t end well, and of course it doesn’t. Along the way we are given some of the best characters to appear in a long time.
Any Cop?: I’m tempted to call Levin a sick comedian, but how then to account for the pathos and the genuine sadness that permeates these stories? How to account for the fact that I am about to set aside several other books so that I can read this one again?
Against Mental Health (Short Story) - 4/18/2019 7:52:08 AM
I found this strange tirade against medical health almost nonfiction in its clarity, but applaud the author for knowing too much. It's hard for me to evaluate since I know so little, having never been entitled to a mental health issue except perhaps periods of depression that worked their way through me and time to my happy disposition today.
I do recall that I was once examined by psychiatrists in none other than the esteemed Mayo Clinic in Rochester on a cold January day. Why the head doctors were looking at me that day when I was there for an analysis of a spinal cord injury caused by surgery, I don't know. But they seemed very interested in a drooping of my left eye that amounted to not much except that it certainly was hereditary because some of my dad's family had the same droopy affliction.
But it is hard to believe that one would endure spinal fractures in order to go down on oneself? That's the kind of self-flagellation that would certainly lead to much more serious consequences… Believe me, I know.
All in all, a good show…
Ron
Why Utopia Will Forever Elude Us (Article) - 4/18/2019 8:08:44 AM
I thought you were writing about utopia. But instead I think you were referring to immortality. In a sense, the state of the world gets better every year in spite of the major and minor calamities that we all face along the way some of which you described like World War II. For example, my twin brother, in retirement, lives a kind of utopia, a freedom from responsibility where he wakes up when he wants and does what he wants, relatively free from financial or even health worries until such time as he becomes incapacitated doing the things he likes to do like boating, golf and hanging out with friends almost every night. He and a large portion of the fortunate upper-middle-class of the world, are now living the life of what only kings and queens could live in 1919. So utopia for some, is at hand. But not escaping death.
I have no fear of death. I do fear living with my condition too long. Currently I have lived my life well and will not be doing what I did again. So I don't mind if my prolonged decline is cut short soon. I'm fully in favor of euthanasia to avoid prolonged agony for no other reason than the Hippocratic oath.
I fully agree with your assessment of the Trump administration and why he is succeeding. My twin thinks that anyone with wealth is successful and that we have to have demons to call out in order to feel that we are better, superior, or otherwise smarter than those we want to remove from our view. Wars are nice, but walls are cheaper.
Ron
Three Poems (Poetry) - 1/4/2003 8:53:13 PM
This one is good!!
Peggy
Three Poems (Poetry) - 1/4/2003 5:59:43 PM
Oooh! I like this!!! More please???
Maria
Three Poems (Poetry) - 1/4/2003 5:17:04 PM
Interesting!.....how about some spell checks?
Sandie Angel :o)
Three Poems (Poetry) - 1/4/2003 5:09:15 PM
YES! This is the reason one reads poetry...I'm impressed as all hell!
