Of Tom Robbins first four novels, Jitterbug Perfume was my favorite. This is a positively far out wild man in his writing. I recommend them to those whose minds are open and who love the surreal and a viewpoint that makes you laugh at man's strange habits and condition.
Friends and Kin
I read Robbins' books avidly, loving every one of the first four. The final two or three he published were too weird. The books I recommend are Still Life With Woodpecker, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, and Another Roadside Attraction.
In Jitterbug Perfume, a man named Alobar was the chief of a tribe of European semi-cave men. By some strange bit of luck, which he attributes to consuming quantities of beets, he lived more than a 1000 years, even until the 20th century, and this book details his life. He meets Pan, and they become travel companions. As time passes, people stop believing in Pan and he begins to disappear, and finally does entirely, becoming invisible and you could only hear him distantly and even smell his rutting reek at times though he was almost gone.
Other characters include a Seattle girl who makes perfume, and a voodoo perfumer in New Orleans. This book is a winner, as are the others mentioned above. For a treat that is totally different, read it. Here are some quotes from it.
I looked him up on the net and found a story written by a less than successful screenwriter whom Robbins asked to come to Seattle to help him write a screenplay. It seems that Robbins never closes the blinds, and goes about with his whole life on display. When asked what the book was about, Robbins shushed him and told him to wait, that he didn't know quite yet. The guy over time became exasperated for Robbins would labor over a sentence, changing the words here and there, and when he finally was happy, he noisely put a satisfactory period at the end and wrote another. He never went back to correct or edit anything after that. When he reached the end of the book, it was done, never edited or changed. He didn't know what he was going to write next.
I did something like this when I wrote Dawn's Revenge, my thriller set in the New Orleans French Quarter, as I didn't have any idea what was coming next. But I did edit it a bunch and had it professionally edited later, as most writers do. I was never that competent or confident.
Quotes:
- Above the building, the sky recalled passages from Les Miserables, threadbare and gray.
- Birth and death were easy. It was life that was hard.
- Modern Romans insisted that there was only one god, a notion that struck Alobar as comically simplistic.
- If you didn't serve the nasty fellow (God), the Romans would burn your house down. If you did serve him, you were called a Christian and got to burn other people's houses down.
- The shaman lives outside the social system, refusing to have any part of it. Yet he seems to connect the populace to the heavens and the earth far more directly than the priest.
- In the quiet ache of the evening, Alobar listened to his calluses grow.
- I journey to the east, where I have been told, there are men who have taught death some manners.
- You don't have to be a genius to recognize one. If you did, Einstein would never have gotten invited to the White House.
- Louisiana in September was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air - moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh - felt as if it were being exhaled into one's face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing.
- Let me see if I can put it in words that even the inebriated might understand.
- She needed help, but God was in a meeting whenever she rang.
- ... overdramatizing the word of God, turning the Scriptures into a cross between a German opera and a hockey game.
- Some of the professors and physicians were rather shabby; they were men too clothed in ideas to pay much attention to grooming.
- The Middle Ages hangs over history's belt like a beer belly. It is too late now for aerobic dancing or cottage cheese lunches to reduce the Middle Ages. History will have to wear size 48 shorts forever.
- ...the natural process of aging, which according to Dr. Wiggs Dannyboy, is so unnaturally cruel that only man could have ordained it - neither nature nor God would stoop so low.
- As to the quality of the beer we cannot testify - perhaps a taste of it today would leave us sadder Budweiser.
- My lunar sign is in Virgo. Every month when the moon is full, I'm driven to balance my checkbook and straighten up my apartment. I can't help myself. Instead of a werewolf I turn into an accountant.
- Well, there's one thing to be said for money. It can make you rich.
- There's probably no subject with quite so many conflictin' opinions about it as there are about food, and 'tis better to swap bubble gum with a rabid bulldog than challenge a single one o' the varyin' beliefs your average human holds about nutrition.
- I deserve to be chained by night in a church basement without company o' cassette player if I'm not man enough to ask you for the teeniest, slightest brush of oral-muscular affaction.
- Water! Of all liquids on Earth, the only one chosen for scrubbin' and flushin'. The liquid they rinse baby's nappies in, the fluid that floods the gutters o' this cloud-squeezer town; a single drop o' water discolors a glass of Irish, and you, false friend, are wantin' me to pour this abrasive substance into me defenseless body!
- Zippers are primal and modern at the very same time. On the one hand, your zipper is primitive and reptilian, on the other, mechanical and slick. A zipper is where the Industrial Revolution meets the Cobra Cult.
- A sense of humor, properly developed, is superior to any religion so far devised.
- A lot of progress was being made there at MIT. Those guys had molecules jumping through hoops like poodles in a circus.
- Most snoring is composed by Beethoven or Wagner, although a few times Wiggs had heard heavy metal rock performed on the somnambulate bassoon.
- They were old enough to know better. Some of them were old enough to remember when old Macdonald had a farm.
- To achieve the impossible, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.
- It couldn't have been Pan's output alone because Alobar's testicles were as flat and juiceless as trampled grapes.
- Meet me in Cognito, baby. In Cognito, we'll have nothing to hide.
So there's my first Blog in a long time. September 10, 2007. Tomorrow's the big day. We will see just what the insanity of this planet has to offer on the fifth anniversary. I predict nothing. I predict it will be like when we rounded the corner on 2000 and everyone thought the world was going to come to an end.
LDSledge
rantor
9-10-07
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