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Chicago Tribune
22-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Biblioracle: Tom Robbins has died at 92. He was one of the writers who shaped me.
It feels like just about every month I'm coming here to remember a recently deceased writer who had some profound effect on my life as a reader. This month it's Tom Robbins, author of numerous classic novels, including 'Another Roadside Attraction,' 'Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,' 'Still Life with Woodpecker' and 'Skinny Legs and All,' among others. Robbins died in his home of La Conner, Washington, on Feb. 9, at the age of 92. I suppose confronting these occasions is the inevitable byproduct of aging. I will turn 55 in less than two months, and the established writers who were full-fledged adults when I was still a fledging are now quite elderly. But also, this is triggered by an increasing wonder about how I've become the person I am. In a lot of ways, my reading has made me, and Tom Robbins is one of the writers you can find in the DNA of my sensibilities. The specific Robbins book that shook me up was 'Still Life with Woodpecker,' published in 1980 with a distinctive cover modeled after a pack of Camel cigarettes, a woodpecker clutching a match in its beak standing in for Joe Camel. Like all of Robbins' novels, 'Still Life with Woodpecker' defies easy description. It involves an exiled princess, Leigh-Cheri, living near Seattle with her royal parents, who wants to save the planet but runs afoul of fellow progressives who fight for influence. Then some aliens show up who think Leigh-Cheri is descended from a different race of aliens that are their enemies. This is in maybe the first 30 pages of the book. To summarize the rest would take a couple more columns-worth of length. Robbins reportedly wrote sentence by sentence, which may seem to describe how everything is written, but he did it literally, refining a single sentence over many hours before moving on to the next. The shambolic nature of his plots has a Scheherazade flavor, a storyteller unfurling a tale bit by bit with no aim other than keeping the reader invested moment-to-moment, failure being the penalty of death. I would've been maybe 15 years old when I read 'Still Life with Woodpecker,' old enough to be curious about everything adult, too young to understand much of it, but the right age to find it all quite seductive. Robbins' work was rooted in the hippie counter-culture ethos of the '60s that I was too young to experience, and which the Reagan revolution was in the business of actively erasing by the time I was reading him. The books were silly, designed to entertain, but also filled with aphorisms that forced you to pause for a moment or two. For example: 'There are two kinds of people in this world: Those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who are smart enough to know better.' Or this one: 'We are our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.' Or this: 'It's never too late to have a happy childhood.' At the time, I took these lines as examples of adult wisdom being handed down to a new initiate. The untethered, anarchic, comic brio of Robbins' novels feels incompatible with today's world, as though the intervening years have been explicitly designed to stamp out this spirit and replace it with something that can be bought and sold, something governable. Sissy Hankshaw, the protagonist of 'Even Cowgirls Get the Blues' is born with oversized thumbs, which make her the world's best hitchhiker. This is Robbins in a nutshell, a reminder that what makes us unique is our greatest power. John Warner is the author of 'Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities.' Twitter @biblioracle Book recommendations from the Biblioracle John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you've read. 1. 'Without Precedent: Chief Justice John Marshall and His Times' by Joel Richard Paul 2. 'Dracula' by Bram Stoker 3. 'Beat to Quarters (Hornblower Saga)' by C.S. Forester 4. 'A Calamity of Souls' by David Baldacci 5. 'The Pelican Brief' by John Grisham — Derek S., Eugene, Oregon I'm going with something of a suspense thriller, though in a different milieu than what Derek has here. My hope is that going a bit off the previous path opens up an exciting new experience, 'Last Resort' by Andrew Lipstein. 1. 'The Noble Rot Book: Wine from another Galaxy' by Dan Keeling and Mark Andrew 2. 'Three Years with Grant' by Sylvanus Cadwallader 3. 'Defusing Armageddon: Inside NEST, America's Secret Nuclear Bomb Squad' by Jeffrey T. Richelson 4. 'Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures' by Katherine Rundell 5. 'Mr. Churchill in The White House: The Untold Story of a Prime Minister and Two Presidents' By Robert Schmuhl — Andy A., Crystal Lake This book is better than 10 years old, but my guess is that things have not gotten demonstrably better: 'Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety' by Eric Schlosser. 1. 'Lincoln in the Bardo' by George Saunders 2. 'The Midnight Library' by Matt Haig 3. 'The Island Child' by Molly Aitken 4. 'Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss' by Margaret Renkl 5. 'The Wedding People' by Alison Espach — Sheryl L., Northbrook This calls for some Lydia Millet. The choice is 'Dinosaurs.'
Yahoo
12-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
America's most misunderstood region has lost its bard
The Pacific Northwest is the youngest child of America's geographic regions, perpetually overlooked and misunderstood. So it's perhaps fitting that obituaries for the novelist Tom Robbins have tended to portray him as a minor figure in the countercultural literary movement that began in the late 1960s. From the perspective of American literature, it's true that Robbins, who died Sunday at 92, is an adjunct to better-known figures such as Kurt Vonnegut or Robbins' friend and fellow Northwesterner Ken Kesey, though all three were in the rare subset of authors who wrote both cult classics and bestsellers. But if you lived in the Pacific Northwest in the latter half of the 20th century, you know that Robbins was, at his peak, the region's pre-eminent author in a way that mattered more than it might for another part of the country. We didn't just read Robbins, we needed him. In a comical scene straight from one of his books, a desperate fan once broke a window in a Seattle bookstore late at night to get one of his hardcover releases, leaving behind an apologetic note and a fistful of cash. Robbins wasn't just a novelist living in the Pacific Northwest, he was a novelist of the Pacific Northwest. In books such as "Jitterbug Perfume" and "Still Life with Woodpecker," he took major cultural influences of the area — Scandinavian stoicism, Asian philosophy and Coast Salish pragmatism — and blended them into irreverent, shaggy-dog novels full of poetic lyricism, pop-philosophy and goofy wordplay. He once said he didn't know the plot of his books before he started writing; you'd be forgiven if you weren't sure of them when you were done reading either. But then you'd come across a description of the Skagit Valley, where he made his home, and plot seemed secondary. "It is a landscape in a minor key," he writes in "Another Roadside Attraction." "A sketchy panorama where objects, both organic and inorganic, lack well-defined edges and tend to melt together in a silver-green blur. Great islands of craggy rock arch abruptly out of the flats, and at sunrise and moonrise, these outcroppings are frequently tangled in mist. Eagles nest on the island crowns and blue herons flap through the veils from slough to slough. It is a poetic setting, one which suggests inner meanings and invisible connections." It is a benediction to read words that reflect your life back to you. When your American history class centers on far-away Civil War battlefields, your American literature class discusses Melville and Twain and your favorite TV shows are set in the various boroughs of New York City, to read about where you live is inspiring. It helps you understand your place in the scheme of things. It inspires you to stand up for yourself, to tell a visitor, as my grandfather would, "That's not a river, that's a slough." Robbins' heyday came before Seattle hit it big. His peak output from the 1970s to the late 1980s was a time when the city still wondered if we'd ever have a local band as big as Heart, when people were excited that we were getting a Planet Hollywood, when you'd still get a cup of coffee from an espresso cart on a damp street corner. His last great novel, "Skinny Legs and All," came in 1990, just as that all changed. The rest of the country came to know the Northwest better in the decade after that, grunge music and riot grrrls, "Twin Peaks" and "Sleepless in Seattle," Starbucks and Amazon. The old, weird Northwest that Robbins represented, of utopian communes and wandering dreamers, is still there, but sanded down. In his later years, he occasionally placed ads in the local paper in La Conner, the onetime artist colony he made his home, to complain in his typically outlandish prose about the commercialization of the main street. But there were Microsoft bros in fleece vests who wanted a microbrew while visiting the tulip fields, so it was a losing fight. Still, some things don't change. The rain, for one. Robbins, who grew up in the South, often said that the Northwest's much-maligned climate was the reason he moved there. He loved the rain and wrote about it regularly, saying that the drizzly climate was "perfect for a writer," turning you inward as the raindrops beat out a cadence against the window. "Yes, I'm here for the weather," he wrote in 1994. "And when I'm lowered at last into a pit of marvelous mud, a pillow of fern and skunk cabbage beneath my skull, I want my epitaph to read, IT RAINED ON HIS PARADE. AND HE WAS GLAD!" Farewell, Tom Robbins. Wherever you are now, I hope it's raining. This article was originally published on
The Guardian
10-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
A life in quotes: Tom Robbins
Tom Robbins, the bestselling chronicler of the weird, whimsical and off-the-wall, has died at the age of 92, his family confirmed on Sunday. A prolific writer and editor, Robbins aligned with the hippie sensibilities of the 1960s, writing books under his guiding philosophy of 'serious playfulness' – outlandish characters, absurd metaphors and fantastical prose, like a hit of literary LSD. His novels, including Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Another Roadside Attraction and Still Life With Woodpecker, garnered a cult-following, even as they were dismissed by mainstream critics as overwrought. Here are some of his most memorable quotes: What I try to do, among other things, is to mix fantasy and spirituality, sexuality, humor and poetry in combinations that have never quite been seen before in literature. And I guess when a reader finishes one of my books … I would like for him or her to be in the state that they would be in after a Fellini film or a Grateful Dead concert. – to January Magazine, 2000 Minds were made for blowing. – Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, 1994 Love easily confuses us because it is always in flux between illusion and substance, between memory and wish, between contentment and need. – Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, 1976 When we're incomplete, we're always searching for somebody to complete us. When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we're still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go on and on – series polygamy – until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimensions to our lives, we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment. Nobody else can provide it for us, and to believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to program for eventual failure every relationship we enter. – Still Life with Woodpecker, 1980 The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being. – Jitterbug Perfume, 1984 Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet. That would mean that security is out of the question. The words 'make' and 'stay' become inappropriate. My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free. – Still Life with Woodpecker Our lives are not as limited as we think they are; the world is a wonderfully weird place; consensual reality is significantly flawed; no institution can be trusted, but love does work; all things are possible; and we all could be happy and fulfilled if we only had the guts to be truly free and the wisdom to shrink our egos and quit taking ourselves so damn seriously. – to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 2007 We are our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves. – Still Life with Woodpecker A sense of humor … is superior to any religion so far devised. – Jitterbug Perfume Our individuality is all, all, that we have. There are those who barter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the twinkle of the morning star is the one who nurtures it and rides it in, in grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life's bittersweet route. – Jitterbug Perfume Establishment critics, to this day, write me off as a counter-culture writer, even though of my nine novels, the last six have had nothing to do with counter-culture things. And I wouldn't have missed the '60s for a billion dollars – but neither I nor my life's work can be defined by counter-culture sensibilities. – to NPR, 2014 So you think that you're a failure, do you? Well, you probably are. What's wrong with that? In the first place, if you've any sense at all you must have learned by now that we pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit, fail with grace, fail with style. A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success. Embrace failure! Seek it out. Learn to love it. That may be the only way any of us will ever be free. – Even Cowgirls Get the Blues To say that you can't take life seriously and that life shouldn't be taken seriously is not to say that life is trivial or frivolous. Quite the contrary. There's nothing the least bit frivolous about the playful nature of the universe. Playfulness at a fully conscious level is extremely profound. In fact there is nothing more profound. Wit and playfulness are dreadfully serious transcendence of evil. – to January Magazine, 2000
