Tom Robbins without pie

I live a couple blocks from Union Square and have had the chance to see a few authors—Augusten Burroughs, Anne LaMott and Paul Auster give readings at the (now I feel sorry for them because of meany Amazon) Barnes & Noble, and it feels a little old-fashioned but the crowd is always eclectic and you can always return the book they force you to purchase as requirement to be seated.

I was out for a walk feeling restless and was doing a little soul searching and saw that Robbins was reading at 7pm. I had tried to read Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and Jitterbug Perfume, and I knew his reputation as a colorful iconoclast but could never get through his novels. So I bought the book just as he was walking in—in a hippy-striped black and gold blazer—lots of rings, big shades, tall, and what had to be dyed hair—since I figured he must be at least in his late 70's. Turns out he is 81.

He chose several readings from his new book he is not calling an autobiography but a sort of memoir—the stories he says the women in his life kept asking him to write down. He started with how as a precocious toddler he began writing as a child—before he could actually write—by having his mother taking dictation. He went on with a funny story about how another writer compared his work to the Unabombers and that resulted in a visit from the FBI, another where he’d identified himself as a CIA agent to a high school marching band majorette on a trip to Moscow, and finally a story about an afternoon with birds and music and a crazy rainstorm at Washington Square Park but he reflected how if he’d been “hip to the skip” he would have moved to San Francisco instead. All wryly but charmingly read and beautifully written.

He took some questions after—the usual—how do you make yourself write? He sits in his writing room every day at ten and the muse shows up sometimes. Still Life With Woodpecker is his best seller, LSD did in fact change his life. A couple questions had to be repeated—it was a big room and hard to hear, he also said he’d sign to Jack or Jill- or Jack and Jill—but no long explanations as he tired from extensive signing. Otherwise he seemed in fine fettle. I highlight my hair so gave him a pass on the color.

I went home and read on to find a gossipy story Dennis Hopper had told him about Natalie Wood, a bitchy anecdote about running into Tom Wolfe— who’d attended the same southern college —at an Esquire party where William F. Buckley “…sneering at me with the horror and revulsion he would have displayed had he come upon a bedbug lounging in his satin sheets, reserving particular odium for my ruffled pink shirt and my bow tie with colored sequins. I guess you can’t please everyone.” He finds fault with the New Journalism lacking imagination—seeming flat as compared to full-on fiction.

He’s had an interesting life—growing up anti-racist in the south, leaving when it wasn’t permitted to use photos of black people in the paper he edited. He spent time in the service in Korea and Japan, doesn’t reflect on his time as a sportswriter at newspapers but finds great interest later as an arts reviewer—largely self taught on art and music but getting by because he was good with words. I’m almost finished with the book—which I am getting thru faster oddly than Christopher Buckley’s new collection of essays. And speaking of things I may never get through—I wish I would have asked him what he thought of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle.