Tom Robbins - Wild Ducks Flying Backward

Its six oclock in the afternoon, approximately, give or take a tick or two, and the suns attention span is rapidly shrinking. The sun, we might say, should we choose to venture further down the path of anthropomorphic hyperbole, has seen quite enough of you for one day and is entertaining other options. Weary of the old ice-cream castle Judy Collins routine, clouds, too, are shifting priorities, gathering forces, adopting attitudes. By nightfall, you could be in for some rain. Perhaps freezing rain. Even snow. Obviously, were privy neither to your whereabouts nor your season. Youre in freaking North Dakota for all we know. November.

What we do know is that you have availed yourself of the most recent book by novelist Tom Robbins, and what we can assume, though it may be only a conceit, is that you have every intention of beginning it this evening (you couldnt very well have begun it at work today), so if external weather conditions prove foul, so much the better. Should it pelt, should it blow, the cozy factor (almost always a boon to literary experience) will increase severalfold, thereby fertilizing the narcotic poppy of reading pleasure.

The climate indoors is another matter. Serious reading is hardly a social activity and every halfway serious reader is perpetually subject to a form of coitus interruptus. Family members or friends who lack the desire, the courage, or the opportunity to burst in on you when theres some indication that you could be sexually entwined will seldom hesitate to interject themselves between you and a page, even though the act of reading is often as intimate and intense as a full-fledged carnal embrace. You must take steps to ensure your privacy.

Its a Monday, so more than likely your male companion and his buddy, eager for three solid hours of beer commercials and televised football, have already commandeered the sofa. Good. That frees up the bedroom.

Or, switching genders (though not necessarily), your girlfriends in bed with monthly cramps, a heating pad on that sweet little tummy you so love to nuzzle, medication making her sleepy, soft rock on the radio. You suppress a smile of relief. The sofa is all yours.

Of course, if you live alone, both bed and sofa are available you have only to choose your spot, change into something comfortable, adjust the lighting, and disconnect the phone.

No, theres one other thing: this is a Tom Robbins tome youre about to sit down with, and while special fortification is certainly not mandatory, it wouldnt hurt to adjust your mental thermostat a bit. Nothing drastic. No overhaul. You know. Just rotate your tires. Yet, while a weak gin-and-tonic might go well with, say, E. M. Forster or Virginia Woolf, while a tumbler of bourbon might help you wash Faulkner down, Robbins requires a more shall we say, exotic? accompaniment.

Stealthily, nonchalantly, you make your way to your dresser, open your underwear drawer, dig out that bottle of anas nin (green label) youve been hoarding there. Careful! Dont pour too much. Remember what happened that time on your birthday. Besides, ever since the revolution in Punto del Visionario the stuff has been almost impossible to find. And by the way, in case you havent heard, its been placed on the governments list of controlled substances.

Okay. At last youre set. You prop up your feet (we should always read with our feet up, even on the subway or a bus), and retrieve the book, feeling in your hands the weight, the newness, the bookness of it. For a brief second you close your eyes, sip your libation (Jesus! Wow! No wonder therere two dots over the !), and allow yourself to wonder what Robbins is up to this time around. What strange lights on what distant mountainside have attracted his focus? Over whose campfire gypsy? guerrilla? Girl Scout? shaman? has he been toasting his ideas, his images, his figures of speech?

Curiosity suitably aroused, anticipation at a delicious pitch, you take in a small breath and open the book and Whoa! Wait a damn minute. Hold on. This isnt the new Tom Robbins novel. Oh, its by Robbins all right, but You look again at the cover. The Short Writings of Its printed right there on the jacket. Maybe it could have been in bigger type but it isnt as if youve been tricked. Its your own fault, you should have paid closer attention. This will teach you to dash into a bookshop on your lunch hour. Wild Ducks Flying Backward is not a novel at all.

Somewhat disgruntled, you riffle the pages. Hmm? Travel articles. Riffs on various exceptional people. A short story or two. Poems. (Robbins, at any rate, calls them poems: your old English professor would probably shake his head and call them something else entirely.) Essays. Responses. Musings. A treatment for a movie youd wager will never be made.

There are even a couple of examples of the authors art criticism, included, you suppose, to demonstrate to those who might suspect otherwise that a mans expressed preference for right-brain activity need not necessarily constitute an admission of weakness on the left. In fact, so sober and coolly cerebral is Robbinss analysis of the painter Morris Louis that you find it difficult to believe it could have been written in the same year (1967) and by the same person (Robbins) as the overheated, rocked-out, purple-lipped paean to The Doors also contained herein. The contrast both intrigues and confounds you.

About the same time that young Tom was deconstructing modern art and eulogizing psychedelic rockers, he was deciding once and for all to move his professional residence to the land of make-believe, the land of effects as opposed to facts, the country where Style is king and Paradox and Enigma (which must hide between the lines in reportage) are granted diplomatic immunity. He began writing his first novel in 1968 and hes made it clear that if hes remembered, he wants it to be for his fiction. Still, for whatever reason to meet an editors challenge, maybe, or to charm the groceries the novelist has over the years made occasional forays across the inky divide into journalism. Considering the source, arent you at least tempted to test the results? And what about that short story, the one he calls Moonlight Whoopee Cushion Sonata?

Youre warm, snug, alone, loosely clothed, and the anas nin (green label) is working your blood like a Vegas entertainer working a room. If you dont burrow further into this modest if unusual collection, what else can you possibly do with yourself tonight?

You dont have to answer that.

When one is on a pilgrimage to the Canyon of the Vaginas, one has to be careful about asking directions.

I mean, therere some pretty rough ol dudes in west-central Nevada. One knows the ol dudes are rough when one observes that they eat with their hats on.

Nine days I was in the high desert between Winnemucca and Las Vegas, during which time I never witnessed a male Homo sapiens take his noontide nor his evening repast with an exposed bean. In every instance, a grimy bill or brim shaded the fellows victuals from the vulgar eye of light. I assumed that they breakfasted en chapeau as well, but by the hour that your pilgrim sat down to his flapjacks, the rough ol dudes had already gone off to try to strike it rich.