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.

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

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.

A Robbins vs Rumi Smackdown!

Speaking of Rumi/Robbins comparisons… I always think of Robbins as a poet without the line breaks. So perhaps it would be fun to compare some Rumi poetry that I love with some Robbins ‘poetry’. Of course there are no winners or losers. As the taoist says, it’s all good. I should clarify when I say Rumi I mean Rumi-as-interpreted-by-Coleman Barks. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a really good Rumi poem done by anyone else. Plus Rumi’s Islamic religiosity is wisely understated in Barks work. Jonathin Curiel wrote, ‘For example, Barks says he rewrote a Rumi line that originally read in English, “out beyond what is holy in Islam and what is not permitted in Islam” to “out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing.” ‘ That’s much more universal to me. We don’t have to remove any unseemly religious dogma from Tom’s work.

Some Rumi:

In your light I learn how to love.
In your beauty, how to make poems.
You dance inside my chest,
where no one sees you,
but sometimes I do,
and that sight becomes this art.

Some Robbins:

Ziller tiptoed into the gloom.
He scooped Amanda’s face up in his vision
weeding out the paleness, the thinness,
the plastic vines runing out of her veins and nose,
the arms that lay askew like broken wings.
He was afraid to burden her with a kiss.
The magic words he had to say for her he barely whispered.

Anybody else want to take some good poetry and let it snuggle up to some Robbins prose. Line breaks are optional. Either leave a comment or email me and I’ll host a post under your name or nom de net.

Another Writer being compared to Tom

At the Morgan Library in New York City on Wednesday night, three Bay Area writers — Yiyun Li, Micheline Aharonian Marcom and Nina Marie Martinez — were among 10 authors to receive this year’s Whiting Writers’ Award, which comes with a $40,000 cash prize.

Nina Marie Martinez, who grew up in San Jose, is a high school dropout, former punk rocker and Marx-quoting single mom whose writing has been compared to Tom Robbins’.

San Francisco Chronicle

Has anyone read her yet?

Dharma and Weezer

Tricycle Magazine Editor’s Pick

Tricycle is a great Buddhist magazine, and they provide some content for free on their Editor’s Pick page.

I’m excerpting from ,

Rivers in the Stream (August 4, 2006)
By Amy Karafin
Weezer front man Rivers Cuomo cultivates lovingkindness, mindfulness, and a vow of celibacy amid the madness of superstardom.

The celibacy didn’t impress me much, but his approach to mindfulness and creativity were pretty cool.

Following the initial letdown of low sales and poor reviews, Cuomo, dejected, left Harvard and in 1998–99 devoted himself to a rigorous study of creative methods. Secluded in his Los Angeles apartment, he set out to understand what defined great music and to devise techniques for making it. This drive to analyze and break down the creative process would eventually lead him to the dharma, but at the time it brought him to Nietzsche, Goethe, and Stravinsky, among others. He charted songs, studied artists’ methods, painted his room black, unplugged his phone, and reveled in discipline. Looking back on this period, in 2004 he wrote in his second Harvard application essay that “My goal was to purge myself of all weakness so that I could write ‘perfect’ songs as reliably as a machine.”

And then he discovered Rumi whom I call the Persian Tom Robbins-in-love and Hafiz the Persian Tom Robbins in-a-belly-laugh.

Cuomo set out once again to demystify the artistic process.

This time, his determination to harness and master his creativity brought him somewhere unexpected: love poetry. In 2003, the band’s producer Rick Rubin gave him a copy of The Gift, a collection of poems by Hafiz, and Cuomo was taken with the fourteenth-century Sufi poet’s odes to love. He started reading the Tao Te Ching and contemporary writers such as Dzogchen teacher Ken McLeod. He delved into the work of the mystic poets Rumi and Kabir, whose verses he used as a guide to spiritual communion—not with God, but with music. Cuomo’s previous songwriting aids had ranged from Tequila and Ritalin to physical pain and induced emotional states, all of which had complicated his life and eventually lost their potency. Now he began thinking about improving his concentration and eliminating ego as a means of making better songs. He gave away many of his possessions, made a vow of celibacy, sold his car, fasted, and started volunteering six days a week to prepare meals for people living with HIV. He had also just discovered Vipassana.

Rivers had a childhood right out of a Tom Robbins novel. His first word was Buddha.

The ease with which Cuomo slid into meditation practice may have had a lot to do with his background. His parents had first met at the Rochester Zen center in New York, where Cuomo and his younger brother, Leaves, spent their first years. “From the time he was born, he was in the culture,” Shoenberger explains, remembering baby Rivers pointing to a picture in the communal home’s meditation room and saying one of his first words: “Buddha.” When Cuomo was six, Shoenberger, by then divorced, moved with the kids to the Yogaville ashram in northeastern Connecticut. They lived in the ashram itself for only a year but were part of the community for eight. Rivers and his brother attended the Yogaville school for three of those years, where they practiced mantra meditation as part of the curriculum. Shoenberger meditated with her kids at home, too. When Cuomo would miss his father, they would go into the meditation room, light a candle, and send his dad some love.

And it’s all about creativity which I would say next to LSD is Tom’s “Way”. And I guess reading Robbins is part of my “Way.” What’s your “Way”?

As serious as Cuomo is about his spiritual path, though, he is quick to point out that he originally sought out meditation as a tool for songwriting. What he discovered was that his attachment to the creative process was part of the problem. “My compulsive creativity is very harmful and definitely doesn’t produce the best results. It’s a painful paradox, but the more you can let go of those compulsive urges to create, the better a creator you’ll become.” He credits his Vipassana practice with bringing a new sensitivity and better lyrics to his songs, qualities he felt he had lost after Pinkerton. But he has an ambivalent relationship with the creative urges that come up during retreats. “It’s getting more intense, actually. The last two courses I had so many creative impulses and was so tempted to indulge them and start developing my ideas. It’s just constant.” During his last course, song topics and hook lyrics kept popping up. “They’re just so juicy and enticing, and I want to dive into it and start working on it, but I have to wait.” At the end of courses, he busily scribbles down everything he can remember.

The song “Pardon Me,” one of the tracks on Make Believe, came to Cuomo during metta meditation. “Sometimes I hurt you so,” the lyrics go, “I know that I can be the meanest person in the world/ So I apologize to you/ And to anyone that I hurt too. . . . Pardon me.” Other lyrics, like those of “We Are All on Drugs,” seem to be about craving as a root of suffering: “We are all on drugs/Never getting enough. . . . I want to reach a higher plane.” In the end, though, the lyrical inspiration is just a fringe benefit. Cuomo’s in it for all the right reasons: “The material is better because you’re down in a deep place. But if you don’t cling to those ideas, then you’ll go to an even deeper place, and so on, and so on, and so on.”

As he put it in a recent blog post: “The purpose of the precepts is to make my mind calmer so that I can meditate better. The purpose of the meditation is to help my singing, songwriting, performing, and just about everything else in my life. See? It all makes sense. ”

Yeah it does make sense…sensual, sensory, sense.

Rivers’ blog

Alan Furst, spy novelist used to hang with Robbins

From the Austin Statesmen

Though many of his fans probably don’t know it, “Night Soldiers” was not Alan Furst’s first book. He wrote four novels between 1976 and 1983 that he has all but disowned. The first three tell the story of a 1960s pot dealer named Roger Levin. “Sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll — nobody wanted to read about it; they just wanted to do it,” Furst says of his early commercial failures. “Duh.”

At the time, Furst was living in the Seattle area, partying hard and doing readings at a hip bookstore called Montana Books. He often shared a bill with his fellow Washingtonian Tom Robbins, author of “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.” Their evenings together were called “The Winterlude Water Reading” (“I think we were both water signs”) and the far better-known Robbins was kind enough to offer cover blurbs to his struggling colleague.

So what is Robbins sign? He was born on July 22.