Inspired Writing

[Jack Scribe]

I came across this breathtaking writing last night while reading Jitterbug Perfume, a 1984 novel 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. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing. Honeysuckle, swamp flowers, magnolia, and the mystery smell of the river scented the atmosphere, amplifying the intrusion of organic sleaze. It was aphrodisiac and repressive, soft and violent at the same time. In New Orleans, in the French Quarter, miles from the barking lungs of alligators, the air maintained this quality of breath, although here it acquired a tinge of metallic halitosis, due to fumes expelled by tourist buses, trucks delivering Dixie beer, and, on Decatur Street, a mass-transit motor coach named Desire.

 

Don't know too much about this author other than he's considered a creative wordsmith...and somewhat eccentric. I love this quote from an interviewer who spent time with Robbins when he was promoting Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates:

 

Without benefit of a conversation with Robbins it would be tempting to call the book "tightly plotted," because the intricate twists and turns certainly lend it that feel. But, of course, it isn't. Robbins admits he does almost no plotting in advance but, "that's the adventure of it, for me." The thing that keeps him coming back to writing every day.

 

Jack

[Razor]

Writing about the South is so damn sexy. That was awesome. Thanks for sharing.

[Krista]

This was really good, it was wordy, but in a delicate way that pulled me right into it. So the author is really talented and it is about a City that is unique.

 

 

Krista

[Duncan Ryder]

Tom Robbins! Wow, a writer I cut my teeth on. A novelist I discovered on my parents' bookshelves when I was a teenager (I grew up surrounded by literally thousands of books... you couldn't move in our house for books...)

 

The best one, at least as I recall, was Even Cowgirls get the Blues. And I seem to remember another great one called....um...Still Life with woodpecker, I think. He had great titles.

 

 

People wax poetic about the sixties, but I think the seventies must have been awesome ...

[Jack Scribe]

The best one, at least as I recall, was Even Cowgirls get the Blues.

 

For those who are not familiar with Robbins' (born, 1936) book that Duncan referenced, here is a Wiki synopsis:

 

"Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" tells the story of Sissy Hankshaw, a woman born with a mutation (she would not call it a defect) giving her enormously large thumbs. The novel is a transgressive romp, covering topics from homosexuality and free love to drug use and political rebellion to animal rights and body odor and religions. Sissy makes the most of her thumbs by becoming a hitchhiker. Her travels take her to New York, where she becomes a model for a transvestite feminine hygiene products mogul who introduces her to the man whom she will marry, a staid Mohawk named Julian Gitche. In her later travels she encounters, among many others, a sexually open cowgirl named Bonanza Jellybean and an itinerant escapee from the Japanese internment camps happily mislabeled "the Chink". Robbins finally inserts himself into the novel as a character as well.

 

It was made into a movie in 1993 - directed by Gus Van Sant - with the sound track by k.d. lang. The author is definitely marching to a different beat. I must read Even Cowgirls get the Blues at the earliest opportunity.

 

Jack