Archive for July, 2007

13
Jul

Still Life With Woodpecker

By love-ridden 3 Comments
Categories: Uncategorized

This guy here knows how to set a ‘BOOM’ on every page. "Still Life With Woodpecker" is a pyrotechnical masterpiece that will surely blow anybody’s brains off.  its politically, sexually and romatically charged . Tom Robbins.    T-O-M      R-O-B-B-I-N-S

The blurb reads: is a sort of love story that takes place inside a pack of Camel cigarettes. It reveals the purpose of the moon, explains the difference between criminals and outlaws, examines the conflict between social activism and romantic individualism, and paint a portrait of contemporary society that includes powerful Arabs, exiled royalty and pregnant cheerleaders. It also deals with the problem of redheads.

Thanks to Mira for recommending me this genius. havent done reading this "yet" . . . just a little peek 184243022xon the pages to know the runnings of this man’s head:

“Now, tequila may be the favorite beverage of outlaws. But that doesn’t mean it gives them preferential treatment. In fact, tequila probably had betrayed as many outlaws as has the central nervous system and dissatisfied wives. Tequila, scorpion honey, harsh dew of the doglands, essence of Aztec, crema de cacti, Tequila, oily and thermal like the sun in solution; Tequila, liquid geometry of passion; Tequila, the buzzard god who copulates in midair with the ascending souls of dying virgins; Tequila, firebug in the house of good taste; o Tequila, savage water of sorcery, what confusion and mischief your sly, rebellious drops do generate.”

“I’m an outlaw, not a hero. I never intended to rescue you. We’re our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.”

“There followed an embarrassed silence, tense and awkward, broken finally with a snap by the Woodpecker’s abrupt plunging of his hand into his jeans. Patterning his gesture after the successful Jack Horner, he pulled out a single hair and held it aloft. It glowed like copper filament. “Can you match that?” he challenged.

Okay, buster. Okay okay okay okay okay okay. Beneath the table, beneath a map of Hawaii with extraneous atolls, she submarined a hand into the depths of her skirt and slid it along the flat of her thigh. It winnowed into her panties. She yanked. Ouch! Damn it! She yanked again. And presto, there it was, curly and stiff, and as red as a thread from a socialist banner.

“What do you think of that?” she asked brightly. Then she noticed that from the tip of the hair there hung, like a tadpole’s balloon, a tiny telltale bead of fishy moisture. Oh sweet Jesus, no! she released her grip on the crumpled toilet paper. It fluttered to the deck like a stricken dove. Here face heated as crimson as the hair, and then some. She could have died.

“What do I think of that?” The Woodpecker’s voice was very very gentle. “I think it could make the world a better place”. “

09
Jul

Sidonie Colette

By love-ridden 1 Comment
Categories: Uncategorized

                              

La Vagabonde is, by far, the only book I’ve read from theColette1 French writer Sidonie Gabrielle Claudine Colette. Although I have come across several of her literary outputs I never got the ‘temptation’ to sit and read them just as I think I should considering this book has caught my interest and instantaneous mania for her. It’s short and uncomplicated, verbose yet not to the extent of enervating and intimidating plain readers like myself. It’s intimate and devoid of prolix complications and it does not require a profound philosophical understanding. La Vagabonde, as novelist and critic Remy de Gourmont says, “ is not a work of art, it is a treatise of feminine psychology”. It reveals a conflict between heart and head, domesticity and career, between shared existence and the guarantee of freedom. I have extracted lines that I think have lyrical energy as only Colette might have directed them:

“ "She is dying of grief; she has died of grief,” they say. Do not believe it. A woman does not die of grief. She is too strong, too tough a beast to kill in such a way. Do you believe affliction preys upon her? Not in the least. Delicate and sickly she may be in nature, but grief will ripen her, will give her nerves of cast-iron, pride that is inflexible, the faculty of patient waiting and dissimulation, though it will earn for her also the contempt of the happy.

“" She is made of steel,” they cry; but be sure that grief; jealousy hidden, patiently borne, has matured and sharpened and hardened her. She is a woman—and that is enough.

“I think it is far more likely that I attract and hold the sad, the lonely, all those vowed to seclusion or a roving life—like myself.”

“A vagrant I am, so be it, but resigned like my colleagues and brethren to touring in a circle, to revolving on a pivot. True it is departures that sadden yet elate me. Something of my personality clings passionately to all I pass through – new lands, clear or cloudy skies, rain-clouds of pearly grey falling on the sea! Behind me, I leave thousands upon thousands of tiny ghosts of myself; they are tossed on the waves, cradled on the leaves, scattered in the clouds. But the last small phantom, the one most like me, sits dreamy and wise beside my hearth, and bends over the book it forgets to read”.