Latest news with #TomRobbins
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.'
The Guardian
12-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Tom Robbins obituary
Tom Robbins, who has died aged 92, was one of the last cult novelists to emerge from the 1960s. Often compared for their humour to Kurt Vonnegut or Richard Brautigan, his books took their place on the shelves alongside novels by Richard Farina, Peter S Beagle, Philip K Dick, Ken Kesey and Thomas Pynchon. Rolling Stone magazine called his first novel, Another Roadside Attraction (1971), 'the quintessential novel of the 60s', but it did poorly until the paperback edition became a word-of-mouth bestseller. The next, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976), was his biggest hit. Its heroine was Sissy Hankshaw, a world-class hitchhiker whose oversized thumbs lead her to the all-female Rubber Rose Ranch run by Bonanza Jellybean. Pynchon wrote a blurb for it, saying, 'I hope this book … winds up changing the brainscape of America, which sure could use it'. Instead, it wound up as a 1993 film by Gus Van Sant, one of the most-panned movies ever, in which Uma Thurman played Sissy. Part of Robbins's cult status reflected the slow gestation of his books. Over the course of 34 years he wrote only eight novels and though he would do reading tours after each one, he eschewed most interviews. I was lucky enough to sit down with him in 2001, as he promoted Fierce Invalids from Hot Climates, and he explained his unusual writing habits. 'I never leave a sentence until it's as good as I can make it, so it meets the soundness of whatever philosophical bullshit I might be propagating, and relates to the sentences which preceded it,' he said. 'It's slow, but the advantage is I don't rewrite, or rather, I rewrite as I'm going along.' As time went by, the critics tried to hang the 60s label as a millstone around Robbins's neck, with Karen Karbo, reviewing Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas in 1994, claiming that 'unless his work was imprinted on you when you were 19 and stoned, you'll find him forever unreadable'. However, it was an epitaph that a growing readership failed to recognise. Robbins claimed his brand of storytelling was inherited from his forebears, who were preachers and sheriffs. Born in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, he grew up in Warsaw, Virginia. His father, George, was a power company executive; his mother, Katharine (nee Robinson), was a nurse, and both his grandfathers were Baptist preachers. Facing disciplinary problems at Warsaw high school, he spent his final year at Hargrave military academy, playing basketball and winning the senior essay prize. Already intent on becoming a novelist, he studied journalism at Washington and Lee University but left after two years, again because of disciplinary problems. He then joined the US air force, serving as a meteorologist in Korea and for the Strategic Air Command in Kansas. Discharged in 1957, he returned to Virginia, enrolling at the Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University) while working on the night sports desk at the Richmond Times-Dispatch newspaper, joining there full-time as a copy editor after graduating. He left in 1962, after the paper objected to his using a photo of Sammy Davis Jr in the paper; their Jim Crow policies did not allow photos of black people. He then moved to Seattle, 'as far away from Richmond as possible', and worked at the Seattle Times as an art critic. A month later the arts editor suffered an ulcer and Robbins was editing the section; knowing nothing about classical music, he reviewed a performance of Rossini by riffing on the composer's likeness to the actor Robert Mitchum. In 1963 Robbins took acid for the first time. He quit the paper, made a pilgrimage to Greenwich Village, and returned to write for Seattle Magazine and host a weekly music show, Notes From the Underground, on KRAB radio. He also wrote for Art Forum and Art in America, and in 1965 had a monograph published on the Pacific Northwest artist Guy Anderson. In 1967, after reviewing the Doors in Seattle's local underground paper The Helix, Robbins felt he had finally found his voice, and began to write Another Roadside Attraction, a novel about a circus couple who turn an abandoned diner into Captain Kendrick's Memorial Hot Dog Wildlife Preserve, housing an offbeat menagerie and the mummified corpse of Jesus, stolen from the Vatican. Perhaps his best novels were Still Life With Woodpecker (1980), 'a sort of love story' set inside a Camel cigarette pack, and Jitterbug Perfume (1984), in which a pair of duelling perfumers cross paths with a deposed eighth-century king and his consort, who seek immortality. Most Robbins novels are classic journeys, drawing on the mythic archetypes of Joseph Campbell's work, which he admired. Featuring oddly matched couples drawn to each other, they usually have female leads, with Fierce Invalids (2000) the first to feature a male protagonist, something Robbins had avoided lest the characters became too autobiographical. A number of his books were optioned for films, but none since Cowgirls have been made. Thereafter his involvement in the cinematic world consisted of playing bit parts in various films, including Made in Heaven (1987), Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994) and Breakfast of Champions (1999), all directed by his friend Alan Rudolph. Robbins's last novel was Villa Incognito in 2003. In 2005 there was a collection of essays, Wild Ducks Flying Backwards, and in 2009 a novella, B for Beer. His final book was an autobiography, Tibetan Peach Pie (2014). Robbins is survived by his fourth wife, the psychic and actor Alexa D'Avalon, and by three sons, Rip, Kirk and Fleetwood, from previous marriages. Thomas Eugene Robbins, novelist, born 22 July 1932; died 9 February 2025
Yahoo
10-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Tom Robbins, Counterculture Scribe of ‘Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,' Dead at 92
Tom Robbins, the celebrated author whose novels included Skinny Legs and All, Jitterbug Perfume, and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, died Sunday, Feb. 9, The New York Times reports. He was 92. Robbins died at his home in La Conner, Washington. His son Fleetwood confirmed the news but did not provide a cause of death. More from Rolling Stone Tony Roberts, Stage and Screen Actor Known for Woody Allen Films, Dead at 85 Mike Ratledge, Soft Machine Keyboardist and Co-Founder, Dead at 81 Irv Gotti, Music Producer and Murder Inc. Records Co-Founder, Dead at 54 At once an underground favorite and a best-seller, Robbins' comic novels — with their fantastical stories and far-out musings — were distinctly of the counterculture and soon became part of its fabric. He rarely plotted out his books, choosing instead to see where his imagination and characters led him. 'I've always wanted to lead a life of enchantment and writing is part of that,' Robbins told Rolling Stone in 1977. 'Magic is practical and pragmatic — it's making connections between objects, or events, in the most unusual ways. When you do that, the universe becomes a very exciting place. I'm a romantic, and I don't apologize for that. I think it's as valid a way of looking at life as any. And a hell of a lot more fun.' Robbins published his first novel, Another Roadside Attraction (the 'quintessential counterculture novel,' RS declared), in 1971. He would publish seven more, each arriving about four or five years after the last. His final novel, Villa Incognito, arrived in 2003, though he subsequently published a short story collection, Wild Ducks Flying Backwards, in 2005; a novella, B Is for Beer, in 2009; and a memoir (or 'un-memoir,' as he called it) Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life, in 2014. 'Heartbroken to hear about the passing of Tom Robbins,' actress Marisa Tomei wrote on Instagram. 'His books weren't just stories — they were wild, mind-expanding adventures that made you see the world differently. His words were playful, rebellious, and full of magic, reminding us to embrace the strange, chase beauty, and never take life too seriously.' Born July 22, 1932 in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, but raised largely outside Richmond, Virginia, Robbins showed a penchant for writing from a young age and expressed his desire to become a novelist as a teenager. His parents, however, pushed him more towards journalism, a career he pursued first in college and then picked up again after a stint in the Air Force. But two distinctly Sixties experiences re-routed Robbins back to his ultimate calling. An LSD trip in 1963 convinced him to quit his day job at a Seattle newspaper and start writing for underground publications. Then, in 1967, while reviewing an awe-inspiring Doors concert, Robbins said he 'finally found [his] voice' and set about writing his first novel a few weeks later. While Another Roadside Attraction failed to garner much attention when it was first published in hardback, the paperback edition steadily became a word-of-mouth hit, especially on college campuses. By the time his next novel, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, arrived in 1976, Robbins was a well-known quantity garnering both backlash and raves (including from the likes of Thomas Pynchon, who called Cowgirls 'a piece of working magic, warm, funny and sane'). Throughout the rest of his career, Robbins rarely deviated from his distinct style, retaining his devoted fans though sometimes exasperating critics. Despite their myriad out-there elements, his books were often optioned for films, but only one was ever made — Gus Van Sant's 1993 adaptation of Cowgirls, which was a critical and commercial flop. As a parting word in his 1977 Rolling Stone interview, Robbins succinctly captured his singular style and creative approach. 'You can tell people that my goal is to write novels that are like a basket of cherry tomatoes,' he said, 'when you bite into a paragraph, you don't know which way the juice is going to squirt.' Best of Rolling Stone Every Super Bowl Halftime Show, Ranked From Worst to Best The United States of Weed Gaming Levels Up
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
CBC
10-02-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Literary prankster-philosopher Tom Robbins dead at 92
Social Sharing Tom Robbins, the novelist and prankster-philosopher who charmed and addled millions of readers with such screwball adventures as Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and Jitterbug Perfume, has died. He was 92. Robbins's death was confirmed by his friend, the publishing executive Craig Popelars, who said the author died Sunday morning. Pronouncing himself blessed with "crazy wisdom," Robbins published eight novels and the memoir Tibetan Peach Pie and looked fondly upon his world of deadpan absurdity, authorial commentary and zig-zag story lines. No one had a wilder imagination, whether giving us a wayward heroine with elongated thumbs in Cowgirls or landing the corpse of Jesus in a makeshift zoo in Another Roadside Attraction. And no one told odder jokes on himself: Robbins once described his light, scratchy drawl as sounding "as if it's been strained through Davy Crockett's underwear." He could fathom almost anything except growing up. People magazine would label Robbins "the perennial flower child and wild blooming Peter Pan of American letters," who "dips history's pigtails in weird ink and splatters his graffiti over the face of modern fiction." 'Most mischievous boy' A native of Blowing Rock, N.C., who moved to Virginia and was named "Most Mischievous Boy" by his high school, Robbins could match any narrative in his books with one about his life. There was the time he had to see a proctologist and showed up wearing a duck mask. (The doctor and Robbins became friends). He liked to recall the food server in Texas who unbuttoned her top and revealed a faded autograph, his autograph. Or that odd moment in the 1990s when the FBI sought clues to the Unabomber's identity by reading Robbins's novel Still Life with Woodpecker. Robbins would allege that two federal agents, both attractive women, were sent to interview him. "The FBI is not stupid!" he liked to say. "They knew my weakness!" Meet the Canada Reads 2025 contenders and the 5 books they will champion! 18 days ago Duration 0:19 He also managed to meet a few celebrities, thanks in part to the film adaptation of Even Cowgirls, which starred Uma Thurman and Keanu Reeves, and to appearances in such movies as Breakfast of Champions and Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle. He wrote of being Debra Winger's date to the 1991 Academy Awards ceremony and nearly killing himself at an Oscars after-party when — hoping to impress Al Pacino — he swallowed a glass of cologne. He had happier memories of checking into a hotel and being recognized by a young, pretty clerk, who raved about his work and ignored the man standing next to him, Neil Young. In Robbins's novels, the quest was all and he helped capture the wide open spirit of the 1960s in part because he knew the life so well. He dropped acid, hitchhiked coast to coast, travelled from Tanzania to the Himalayas and carried on with friends and strangers in ways he had no right to survive. He didn't rely on topical references to mark time, but on understanding the era from the inside. "Faulkner had his inbred Southern gothic freak show, Hemingway his European battlefields and cafés, Melville his New England with its tall ships," he wrote in his memoir, published in 2014. "I had, it finally dawned on me, a cultural phenomenon such as the world had not quite seen before, has not seen since; a psychic upheaval, a paradigm shift, a widespread if ultimately unsustainable egalitarian leap in consciousness. And it was all very up close and personal." His path to fiction writing had its own rambling, hallucinatory quality. He was a dropout from Washington and Lee University (Tom Wolfe was a classmate) who joined the Air Force because he didn't know what else to do. He moved to the Pacific Northwest in the early '60s and somehow was assigned to review an opera for the Seattle Times, becoming the first classical music critic to liken Rossini to Robert Mitchum. Robbins would soon find himself in a farcical meeting with conductor Milton Katims, making conversation by pretending he was working on his own libretto, The Gypsy of Issaquah, named for a Seattle suburb. "You must admit it had an operatic ring," Robbins insisted. 'Best practitioner of high foolishness' By the late 1960s, publishers were hearing about his antics and thought he might have a book in him. A Doubleday editor met with Robbins and agreed to pay $2,500 US for what became Another Roadside Attraction. Published in 1971, Robbins's debut novel sold little in hardcover despite praise from Graham Greene and Lawrence Ferlinghetti among others, but became a hit in paperback. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues came out in 1976 and eventually sold more than 1 million copies. "Read solemnly, with expectations of conventional coherence, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues will disappoint," Thomas LeClair wrote in the New York Times. "Entered like a garage sale, poked through and picked over, Cowgirls is entertaining and, like the rippled mirror over there by the lawn mower, often instructive. Tom Robbins is one of our best practitioners of high foolishness." Domestic stability was another prolonged adventure; one ex-girlfriend complained, "The trouble with you, Tom, is that you have too much fun." He was married and divorced twice, and had three children, before settling down with his third wife, Alexa d'Avalon, who appeared in the film version of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. Robbins's other books included Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates and Villa Incognito. His honours included the Bumbershoot Golden Umbrella Award for Lifetime Achievement and being named by Writer's Digest as among the 100 best authors of the 20th century. But he cherished no praise more than a letter received from an unnamed woman.
