What the bloggers are saying about Tom this week

Bulungula Lodge, continuedBy Rebecca Crootof They’ve a high-quality library (Myths and Tom Robbins, what more could I want?) and you sleep in rondevals, which are tiny circular cement buildings with thatched roofs and tiny windows. There are NO MOSQUITOS, a huge bonus, …Crootof Thoughts – http://crootof.blogspot.com
The dream that pushed me into such vanity (or stup…By abby(abby) It lies slumbering somewhere in my psyche, a dream soaked in lethargy, driven there by self-doubt, preoccupations, lack of aesthetic juices and literary knowledge, and a sudden growth of what Tom Robbins calls “an allergy to solitude”. …from behind these curtains – http://wengwangishness.blogspot.com/index.html
Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins [added by morphidae]Bantam (1984), Hardcover tags: {Box 42}Recent books added to group “Romance… – http://www.librarything.com/groupzeitgeist.php?group=romancefromhistorica
old boker knives Links: Folding knives, boker knives, japanese knives,By Administrator In Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins, Pan plays a prominent role throughout the whole plot. … Stainless Steel Covered Cake Pan @ Vermont Country Store Looking to buy Stainless Steel Covered Cake Pan? The Vermont Country Store has it for …Cooking pans – http://cookingpan.be/news
i really dont know whats happening.By ___strokify_me(___strokify_me) … my e-rewards money at borders in the mall. ill be buying fierce invalids and wild ducks, both by tom robbins. im hoping he will do good things to me this time, since his last book still life worked wonders on my mental health. …asdfg@#&%! – http://users.livejournal.com/___strokify_me/
i was drunk and no one could tell me otherwise and i played catch …By junius worth and that tom robbins novel sitting on the nightstand smoking procedures there are 73 of us that work in the bookstore 31 of us smoke 24 of us don’t and 18 of us smoke on occasion generally after we’ve been drinking …dive bar napkin chronicles – http://divebarnapkin.blogspot.com
ChoiceThanks Tom Robbins…. “The word that allows yes, the word that makes no possible.The word that puts the free in freedom and takes the obligation out of love.The word that throws a window open after t…I feel like I’m taking CRAZY… – http://blog.myspace.com/the_uber_wop
Oh yesBy sexy mama Finally, I was motivated by a recommendation by a mutual Tom Robbins fan to make a purchase of a new book, and well I can’t buy just a book, so I finally picked up one of the cds on my wish list. here’s what came in the mail today: …All Things Good – http://allgoo.blogspot.com
If the world got any smaller,….By KiTT If the world got any smaller, we’d all have to go on a diet.– Tom Robbins (source http://quote.kitt.net)- http://quote.kitt.net
news readers. Click your choice: Half Asleep… news readers …By robbinshalf_173819 This is, after. all, a Tom Robbins novel and the author has never been in finer form. …Source: www.randomhouse.comVilla Incognito byTom Robbins On one level, Tom Robbins’ Villa Incognito is a book about identity, masquerade . …robbins half – http://robbins-half.goodpost.org
Books Books Books (and the Senate) (and Ted Haggart)One Book I read more than once: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. One book I would want on a deserted island: The Complete Works of Tom Robbins. I don’t think this book exists but if it did I would want this. …Their Eyes are Watching God – http://ctanews.com/blogs/Their-Eyes-are-Watching-God/
Britney and Cletus Breakup. Oh My!By More Serotonin Please In fact, I think from now on any time I say hollywood I will have to spit afterward – thank you Tom Robbins. So pay attention boys and girls, Britney is planning to make a new album and record, what some consider, music again. …More Serotonin Please – http://more-serotonin-please.blogspot.com
Books Books Books (and the Senate) (and Ted Haggart)By Arwen One book I would want on a deserted island: The Complete Works of Tom Robbins. I don’t think this book exists but if it did I would want this. We asked my mom if she would want to named Maestra after reading the first page of Fierce …Anthropologist for Corporate America – http://spicyelf.blogspot.com
“We waste time looking for the perfect lover, …..……..instead of creating the perfect love.” – Tom Robbins.Upon the Catherine Wheel….. – http://the-wheel.spaces.live.com/

Night School Teacher Pushes Robbins…

…to little avail.

Literature: Learn it, Live it, Love it? Fuck it.
by Joelle Renstrom

When we’re discussing what makes a good opening paragraph, I bring in the prologue to Tom Robbins’ Still Life With Woodpecker, which begins: “If this typewriter can’t do it, then fuck it, it can’t be done.” It’s perfect. If this doesn’t grab them, what will?

I pass out the copies. “I think you’ll like this,” I say. “Tom Robbins is a lot of fun.” Someone reads the page out loud. Silence follows. I look out at them, awaiting evidence of their literary conversions. “’If this typewriter can’t do it,” I pause and look up, “then fuck it, it can’t be done.’” It’s twice as clever.

“I hate it,” says a woman in the front row. She’s never uttered a single word in class.

“Why?” I ask.

“The F-word in the first sentence?! I would never keep this book in my house!”

“Neither would I,” the father of ten adds.

“Okay,” I say. Well. “Anyone else?”

A couple of people think it’s funny. Some even say they’d like to read the book sometime. I offer to loan my copy, but they all quickly back down, as though selflessly passing up the last hot appetizer on a plate.

Tom Pitching Story Ideas

Welcome to the time machine. These posts will skip around like Billy Pilgrim unstuck in time and with all the regularity of the Clockworks. But at least we’ll mostly eliminate the future. We won’t go there. You’ll see pictures of Tom at all ages like some good-natured Dorian Grey.

Back in September of 2005 Tom Robbins was on book tour for Wild Ducks. In San Francisco, Edward Champion aka Bat Segundo of radio fame, was at Tom’s reading. He wrote about that night.

One startling revelation was that Tom had some interesting ideas for TV shows and Movies. Here they are:

And Robbins said that he had experienced a sudden burst of artistic activity. He had started writing a script entitled Pyrex of the Caribbean, which involved maintaining an oven-ready backing condition on the high seas. His offering for reality television was Fungi for the Straight Guy, whereby the producers would take a conservative Republican and give him a syphillitic mushroom with a camera crew following him around. And he had devised a pitch for a dramatic television show, Helen Keller: Private Eye with the tagline: “She’s blind, she’s deaf, she’s mute, but she can smell a rat a mile away.”

Another item was one I think I knew but forgot. It’s the fact that Switters from Fierce Invalids also appeared in Villa Incognito, not in person but in the conversations of others. He’s the freelance spy that Thomas is trying to contact. In that bit you get the outcome of Fierce Invalids explained a little bit.

SPOILER!!!!
On page 204 the agent is described as having two wives, one European and one American. Sound like any two ladies you know?

The whole article is in The Return of the Reluctant

What are bloggers saying about Tom today?

this is what it’s about.By smft.(smft.) go to post office come back, put load in dryer do all dishes in bedroom play lots of sub debs get rid of beer bottles make skirt wear skirt pay cell bill read tom robbins write in my journal call somebody banana bread and apple sauce …i like the innocent type, dear… – http://users.livejournal.com/____aa_xxx/

QUOTES that I feel passionate about++++++We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love. Tom Robbins Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired. Robert Frost To love abun…Tiffany – MySpace Blog – http://blog.myspace.com/50944645

quotesTom Robbins • “Love is much nicer to be in than an automobile accident, a tight girdle, a higher tax bracket or a holding pattern over Philadelphia.” – Judith Viorst • “A kiss makes the heart young again and wipes out the years.” …trishy69’s IMVU Blog – http://www.imvu.com/blogs/index.php?blog=160358

Tom Robbins“Stay committed to your decisions, but stay flexible in your approach.”ThinkExist.com Quotations – http://www.thinkexist.com

I’d Agree With This One………By comment4U We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love. ~Tom Robbins.Weighing In, Without The Cookies – http://weighing-in-without-the-cookies.blogspot.com

New Review of a not-so-new Book

BOOK REVIEWS
By William S. Allen
Special to THE DAILY

WILD DUCKS FLYING BACKWARD. By Tom Robbins. Bantam, 272 pages, $12, paperback.

‘Wild Ducks’ is mixed bag

Book is compilation of works from 1960s to present day

Author Tom Robbins is very like the lit tle girl who had a little curl.
When he is good, he is very good indeed, and when he is bad, well, you’d have to define bad, something that I’m sure Robbins would be happy to do for you, in the process listing all the varied connotations of the word and commenting on each.

Robbins loves words. He twists them and turns them and combines them in ways that no one has ever thought of before. It’s his forte.

“Wild Ducks Flying Backward” is a sampling of Robbins’ shorter writings from the 1960s to the present. Included are travel pieces, poems, essays, critiques and a treatment for a movie. There are 68 selections crammed between the book’s covers.

After reading some of these, the reader may feel that Robbins has actually said very little, but has said it beautifully.

They are like posters from the Haight-Ashbury in its heyday. We can regard the posters as art, but they are only announcing concerts after all.

Fortunately, not all of the pieces are this type of meringue. “The Day the Earth Spit Warthogs” is a travelogue about an expedition across Tanzania. The unrestrained imagery is here, of course, but there is also a lot of information about Africa. Rhinoceroses avoid conflict with humans whenever possible, but hippopotamuses seek it out. I would have missed that question on a test.

In another selection, “The Genius Waitress,” Robbins writes with empathy about young women who are overeducated in unmarketable fields and are forced to take blue collar jobs to make ends meet. “Erudite emissary of eggs over easy…articulate angel of apple pie,” he says.

Robbins can be insightful and compassionate. He can be self-deprecating, unlike, say, Norman Mailer or Tom Wolfe, two writers whose works cover the same eras and roughly the same topics. He can also include much that is gratuitously erotic in his portrayals of people and places. Parents take heed. As for his poems, Robbins should have avoided attempting them. Not everyone can be a Renaissance man.

Would I recommend “Wild Ducks Flying Backward”? It is a very mixed bag, some parts are good and some are not, as noted above. If the reader has previously been initiated to Robbins’ work and likes it, then give this book a shot. Otherwise, try one of his novels, “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” (good book, bad movie) or “Another Roadside Attraction,” perhaps.

Two suggestions: First, don’t try to read “Wild Ducks Flying Backward” straight through. You could possibly experience sensory overload — a condition that Robbins favors for himself, by the way — and second, keep in mind that what Robbins writes is just one man’s opinion, as is this review. Copyright 2005 THE DECATUR DAILY

Tom Talks Sports

A letter to the editor about the Sonics:

Being too harsh toward Walker

In all of my decades of reading sports pages, I’ve never encountered such a mean-spirited rant as Steve Kelley’s vicious verbal mugging of Wally Walker (“Walker’s departure is too little, too late,” Seattle Times, Oct. 27).

Certainly Wally made mistakes (Jim McIlvaine and Paul Westphal being the most egregious) but running a professional sports franchise is hardly an exact science, and can anybody name a general manager who hasn’t goofed up more than once? Isiah Thomas can make more bad decisions in a single afternoon than Wally made in his entire career.

Moreover, his trade of Gary Payton for Ray Allen was brilliant; the moves that brought Earl Watson and Chris Wilcox here were shrewd; Rashard Lewis was a draft-day steal; and during Wally’s tenure a number of unheralded talents (Damien Wilkins, for example) were plucked out of obscurity by the Sonics.

There’s plenty of blame to go around for the probable loss of our franchise, but ultimately the dead horse must be left at the well-shod feet of (NBA commissioner) David Stern. Had Stern and his cohorts acted years ago to prevent players’ salaries from getting so insanely out of hand, there would be no arena issue in Seattle or any other NBA town.

— Tom Robbins, La Conner

Cunning Linguistic Deformations

I was writing the line “pleasant summer sounds like the screeching of harradans and the roaring of neanderthals”.  Then I looked up the spelling for “harradan” and found it was actually “harridan”. But I saw an unfamiliar word listed in the synonym section. ‘Virago’. Clicking on that (Dictionary.com is convenient that way.) it brought up that word’s meaning. There were two. The au currant definition was “a loud-voiced, ill-tempered, scolding woman; shrew”.  But the Archaic definition, the original one, was “a woman of strength or spirit.” 

 So before there was a movement to remove gender-disparaging words from our language there was a much longer-term devolution of our language from positive images of women to negative ones.

Not that anybody gets called a virago any more, but it sure is an example of what Tom writes about–the suppression of the Goddess by male-centered religion. A good reminder to us guys that the shrew or nag might be just a strong woman with a message. Not always but we should keep the possibility in mind.

Bumbershoot Award Speech

Here in Geoduck Junction

Finding a home among the migrants, mavericks, and mutants of the Pacific Northwest.

By Tom Robbins

Rick Dahms

In 1997, Tom Robbins was given Bumbershoot’s Golden Umbrella Award for “lifetime achievement in the arts.” The following, never before published, is his acceptance speech, which Robbins wants you to know is a piece of rhetoric, not an essay. “Had I intended it to be read rather than listened to, the writing would have been tighter of syntax and less bombastic of cadence,” Robbins says. Nevertheless, it’s an eloquent, full-throated tribute to the writer’s sources of inspiration.

[Read the rest of the article under Pages to the right or click here

Ten Books Tom Wants You to Read

In a 2000 article Tom listed….

Ten books everybody should read because they’re not remotely enlightened until they do

Understanding Media by Marshall MacLuhan
The Archaic Revival by Terence McKenna
The Tao of Physics by Frijdof Capra
The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan Watts
The Masks of God by Joseph Campbell
On Glory Roads by Eleanor Munro
The Banquet Years by Roger Shattuck
The Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets compiled by Barbara G. Walker
News of the Universe by Robert Bly
The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James

 How many have you read? What would be the 10 most enlightening books in your experience? I guess I’m 60% of the way to being remotely enlightened.