!http://photos8.flickr.com/12356072_6a5779af0a_t.jpg! ‘Tom Robbins’:http://www.google.com/search?q=%22tom+robbins%22&sourceid=opera&num=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 sure can write. There is still hope for modern (or is it postmodern, or perhaps post-postmodern…) literature. He swings a vicious hockey stick at all the big issues, yet remains unputdownably readable and brilliantly funny. As one of the many blurbs on the jacket put it: *Mystical, biazarre and just plain funny*.
A few notable passages are quoted below, courtesy of Amazon’s ‘Seach within the book’:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/10197021/002-8510098-7224819.
bq.. “Tell me, amigo,” said Switters in a voice just loud enough to penetrate the fellow’s earphones, “do you know why boom-boom movies are so popular? Do you know why young males, especially, love, simply love, to see things blown apart?”
The man stared blankly at Switters. He lifted his headset, but on one side only. “It’s freedom”, said Switters brightly. “Freedom from the material world. Subconsciously, people feel trapped by our culture’s confining buildings and its relentless avalanche of consumer goods. So, when they watch all this shit being demolished in a totally irreverent and devil-may-care fashion, they experience the kind of release the Greeks used to get from their tragedies. The ecstasy of psychic liberation.”
…”Things. _Cosas_. Things attach themselves like leeches to the human soul, then they bleed out the sweetness and the music and the primordial joy of being unencumbered upon the land. _Comprehene?_ People feel tremendous pressure to settle down in some sort of permenant space and fill it up with stuff, but deep inside they resent those structures, and they’re scared to death of that stuff because they know it controls them and restricts their movements. That’s why they relish the boom-boom cinema. On a symbolic level, it annihilates their inanimate wardens and blows away the walls of their various traps”.
>> Page 22 in the Bantam paperback edition
p. The by now mandatory ‘Amazon Link’:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/055337933X/qid=1084974991/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/102-9749415-0835359?v=glance&s=books&n=507846.