Tom Robbins - Undisputed Master of the Metaphor!!

A quote to whet your appetite: "Spoon surveys the room. Moonrays are driving through the window like a fleet of white Cadillacs." ~Tom Robbins, "Skinny Legs and All", page 250


This is a long post. Probably the longest post I've had so far. I'm finally getting to the prolix part of my brain. I have a serious case of prolixity today, but I've been working on this post for weeks trying to get everything I want to say in---not possible considering the subject matter. This is one of my rare stream of consciousness rants about an author I worship and adore. But to try to minimize what I have to say about Tom Robbins, the KING OF METAPHORS, is unconscionable, totally not do-able, etc. So please, bear with me because you won't be disappointed if you're just discovering this man's writing. If you already read Tom Robbins, please feel free to share your favorite quotes or books. I'd love to know so I can secretly judge you by what's in that grocery cart of a brain of yours......LOL! I don't judge, but I am quite the curious girl, pun intended.


Many days I wake up and wish I'd never read a single word he'd written so I could re-experience the ecstasy of finding him. Oh, to be a Tom Robbins virgin just one more time---it gives me shivers, just the thought of it!!! I love this man's words more than chocolate or mocha frappuccinos and that's really, really saying something. I'm posting covers of my favorites of his books. I love every one he's written (although I haven't read his new one, "B is for Beer" yet. I'm saving it for a dreary day so I'll have something to look forward to.......) and highly recommend them all for great, never-your-average reading.

CREOLE DEBUTANTE

By Tom Robbins

She went to the School of

Miss Crocodile,

learned to walk backwards,

skin a black cat with her teeth.

Soon, she could dance with

dead pirates,

cook perfect gumbo,

telephone the moon collect.

But it took 23 doctors to

fix her

after she kissed that snake.

From: "Wild Ducks Flying Backward", page 150

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TRIPLETS

By Tom Robbins

I went to Satan's house.

His mailbox was painted black

A fleet of bonecrushers

was parked in his driveway.

The thorns on his rosebushes

were longer than shivs.

And sixty-six roosters scratched

in his front yard, their spurs

smoldering like cheap cigars.

I went to Satan's house.

It was supposed to be an Amway party.

I wanted one of those

hard as hell steak knives.

The ones that can't tell the difference

between mama's sponge cake

and a chunk of rock cocaine.

I went to Satan's house.

I felt a little out of place.

But Satan's twin daughters soon put me at ease.

They tried on funny hats for me,

showed me jewels,

danced around my chair.

They read my fortune

in a bowl of ashes,

let me pet their Dobermans,

and watch while they rinsed out their pink underthings.

I stopped by Satan's house,

I just happened to be in the neighborhood.

Satan came downstairs in a Raiders jacket.

His aura was like burnt rubber,

but his grin could paint a sunrise

on a coal shed wall.

"I see you've met Desire

and Fulfillment," he said,

polishing his monocle with a blood-flecked rag.

"Regret is in the kitchen making coffee."

From: "Wild Ducks Flying Backward", pages 125, 126

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In the world of writing/reading, there is Tom Robbins, then there is everyone else and I am seriously not exaggerating or pulling your leg. As Mama says, “I shit you not!” Go ahead, ask anyone who reads Tom Robbins and you’ll find a passionate, ardent, fanatic; a fiery-fierce, ferocious free spirit; a person with whom you’d trust your life and your children’s lives and even your groceries. I am being as serious as a dead grasshopper here!

I have been going to library sales and used book stores for 35 years and I have yet to find a single, battered Tom Robbins book ever. Why is this? BECAUSE NOBODY EVER GETS RID OF HIS BOOKS! I can’t say that about any other author on earth! Nobody!! Nowhere! I used to have a habit of highlighting favorite passages in books. I gave up on his books because I have entire books highlighted! Entire books, people---every magical, crazy, hypnotic word! (Have you peeked at Amazon.com and hit "Add to Shopping Cart" yet???)

Everything I read before Tom Robbins was piss poor, stale white bread. He is the juiciest, most mouth-watering steak, the finest, aromatic wine, the most luscious, pristine, fresh vegetable---to put it gastronomically. He's the red, ripe Chipmunk AND Grasshoppper untouched tomato fresh off the intoxicating vine. . . It was like this: I thought I had been drinking coffee all my life until I had that first cuppa Starbuck’s Espresso Roast, freshly ground, then I realized I’d been drinking colored water up until then---that's TOM ROBBINS! He’s so far beyond what I can even describe that it’s pathetic to even try. Excuse the abundance of exclamation marks, okay? I’ve been saving them up for this post and they’re all jumping around in my pockets in anticipation of their appearances! I promised to use them all in this post......!!!

I spent over half my life eating said white bread then a friend (who cannot remember the person who introduced them to the master?) sent me an old copy of “Jitterbug Perfume”. My life has never been the same.

I am on my knees bowing, head to the ground, arms waving up and down in the air to Angie C. the best friend on earth, who sent me her very own copy of “Jitterbug Perfume” back on October 14, 1999---I told you one never forgets---From there I escalated to “Skinny Legs and All”, then to “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” and all the rest of them. (If you're a real Tom Robbins nut, you own the movie version of "Cowgirls" with a young Uma Thurman....Of course, I have it!) Hell, I even found some poems he wrote in "Wild Ducks Flying Backward" to keep with my blog theme of poetry.

I met Angie online in a “Discussion Group” about Anais Nin, my favorite female author, way back in the virginal days of cyberspace in 1998. It was fate---we're still good friends, too! You might forget your own Mama’s birthday but you’ll never forget the person who introduced you to Tom Robbins---EVER! Thank you, Angie, I’ll owe you till the day I become ashes spread in bookstores around the world……(That's my last request, that my husband put on his favorite jeans, rip a little hole in the pocket, put my ashes in and take a road trip to the biggest, best bookstores around the USA and dribble my ashes in the poetry sections of as many as he can...if he dies before I do, my daughters have this information and swear to do it themselves...no boxes in the ground for this girl!)

I found an interview with Tom Robbins online and share my favorite line here where he attempts to describe, quite aptly I might add, his own books. You can read the entire interview if you want to at the website following the quote:

TOM ROBBINS: "If unrestrained, I might describe my books as hallucinogens, aphrodisiacs, mood elevators, intellectual garage door openers, and metaphysical trash compactors. They'll do everything except rotate your tires. As a novelist, my goal has been to twine images and ideas into big subversive pretzels of life, death, and goofiness with the hope that they might help keep the world lively and give it the flexibility to endure. Now, having said all that, I should confess that I probably have no idea what I'm talking about. I rarely indulge in self-analysis and I'm as surprised as anyone else by what seeps out of the end of my pen."

From interview with Peter Wild at Bookmunch:

http://www.bookmunch.co.uk/view.php?id=1628

And now for a few of my favorite quotes from his books:

Jesus: Hey, Dad.
God: Yes, son?
Jesus: Western civilization followed me home this morning. Can I keep it?
God: Certainly not, boy. And put it down this minute. You don’t know where it’s been.
From: “Another Roadside Attraction” by Tom Robbins


"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." ~Tom Robbins, "Jitterbug Perfume", page 66

"The Chinese fingers of dawn, slender and opium-stained, were massaging the bruised bottom of the sky, and owl hoots were beginning to be supplanted by benevolent birdsong and what might have been the sound of the night shift punching off duty at the buggworks." ~Tom Robbins, "Skinny Legs and All", page 72

"The last thing she hears as she dives deep down among the keys and change, Kleenex and Boomer letters, post-Jezebelian cosmetics and tattered old magazine photos of Georgia O'Keefe, is the joyful laughter of the heathen dildo.......The average woman's purse weighs approximately one kilo. The average woman's heart weighs nine ounces.....Can a woman who does not know the contents of her handbag know the contents of her heart?" ~Tom Robbins, "Skinny Legs and All", page 279

"The minute you land in New Orleans, something wet and dark leaps on you and starts humping you like a swamp dog in heat, and the only way to get that aspect of New Orleans off you is to eat it off. That means beignets and crayfish bisque and jambalaya, it means shrimp remoulade, pecan pie and red beans with rice, it means elegant pompano au papillote, funky file z'herbes, and raw oysters by the dozen, it means grillades for breakfast, a po' boy with chowchow at bedtime, and tubs of gumbo in between. It is not unusual for a visitor to the city to gain fifteen pounds in a week---yet the alternative is a whole lot worse. If you don't eat night and day, if you don't constantly funnel the indigenous flavors into your bloodstream, then the mystery beast will go right on humping you, and you will feel its sordid presence rubbing against you long after you have left town." ~Tom Robbins, "Jitterbug Perfume", page 240

"....I always wear flats to work, you've hardly ever seen my prime-time heels. I mean, hey, I'm no Imelda, but I've got three or four pair that could loot the treasury of a Third World country and make the natives say thank you. My hot pink Kenneth Cole pumps could fleece Manila in an hour......Let me show you a pair that takes no prisoners. Ellen Cherry knocked back a slug of Rum and vanished into her bedroom closet. When she reappeared, she was holding out in front of her, as if they were twin holy grails, a pair of pumps that seemed to have been fashioned from passion fruit and monkey entrails knotted together in posh bows; with cut-out insteps, ribbon ties, and spool heels, wider at the ends than in the middle. 'Ta-da,' she said softly and without emphasis. "Now, aren't these the shoes estrogen would wear if estrogen had feet? I call the color neon fox tongue, but that's another story." ~Tom Robbins, "Skinny Legs and All", pages 293, 294.

"With it's marvelous pinkness, Conch shell's long, smooth, folded aperture saturated the cave. It was a bonbon pink, a tropical pink; above all, a feminine pink. The tint it cast was that of a vagina blowing bubble gum." ~Tom Robbins, "Skinny Legs and All", page 54

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Happy weekend, and happy reading. Hugs, Love and Blessings, ~Marion~