Title

Off The Shelf - Still Life With Woodpecker

by Marcus Pan

"You have to read this," he said as he stuffed a larger-than-pocket
sized soft-cover volume into my hands. On the cover was an old-style
pencil drawing of a woodpecker, its red tuft of head feathers sloped
back in an aviary pompadour and an unstruck match held in its beak. In
its feet is a stick of dynamite and it flies low over a desert view
bespeckled with palm trees and pyramids. "You'll enjoy this, trust me."
he said urgently. "His writing reminds me of yours." Now, at the
point, I was coaxed into opening "Still Life With Woodpecker" regardless
of the fact that I have never heard of Tom Robbins or any of his books
before…it's not every day I'm compared favorably with a successful
writer. So that I did.

The biggest wondering I was fraught with was whether or not I could
handle another zany book. I had just finished four of Douglas Adams'
Hitchhiker's series one after the other and was quite loop-minded
following the ludicrosity and at-many-times hilarity that abounded in
those. I was ready to get serious with "Carrion Comfort," a horror
novel that I hoped would kick my mind back into a more serious mode. I
admit I did read "The Night Church" in between, but if you read my Off
the Shelf review of that one you'd know that didn't count. Sometimes
when you've read nothing but zany books you start to see things in a
weird way…especially if you've been reading nothing but this type of
writing for months. And I have that problem enough on most days without
having to compound it with continuous reading exercises to push it
further ahead. Suddenly the world seems more like a wobbling bubble
about to pop rather than a firmament you can count on and you reach in
your pocket for that stick of dynamite or that metallic thumb in hopes
to help it along before realizing it was just fiction. Or was it? I'll
let that idea lie as this is supposed to be about a book and not my own
musings. So on with it.

Grudgingly, I accepted the demand that I read "Still Life With
Woodpecker" before I go any further with whatever else I was perusing at
the time. It took me a bit longer than most because, as I said, I was
already steeped in farcical worlds. But I trudged along nonetheless and
eventually made it to the end where Robbins' typewriter pissed him off
for the last time and he resorted to completing the last few pages of
his book in longhand. The best way I can describe the upper strata of
Still Life is to say it is a "surrealistic comedy." True 'nuff, but to
delve a bit deeper into the strata we find it is a romantic book, which
is strange for me because the last thing I need is empty romance
novels. Fortunately there were no pirate ships or fights to the death,
though there was an Argonian transport vessel. But that's irrelevant at
this point.

Poor Leigh-Cheri, a princess in exile from her home country by order of
the CIA to live in a blackberry brambled house tucked away in Puget
Sound, "a box with a peaked roof" as it is typically described, waiting
for Prince Charming as is usual with princess types these days. Her
father, Max, was king at one point in his time but following a small
revolution found himself stuffed into the peaked box with his
over-abundant wife and a ticker that tonked like a truck. After
kingship he tried gambling for a while, but found that his metallic
heart valve caused a bit of problem with poker, his favorite game; "When
I draw a good hand, I sound like a Tupperware party." Tilli, the
over-abundance I speak of, learned most of her English speaking from
American television and likewise peppered her attempt at conversation
with commercial slogans that have an absurd accuracy that most would be
far-fetched to achieve. She also had a grandiose appreciation for
opera, and still to this day searches for the musical score to
"Fellatio." Leigh-Cheri is usually tended to by old Gulietta, who has
been with the family for years and still had an appealing cocaine habit
to discover yet. Her current habit was frogs…big green ones.

Leigh-Cheri's questioning of Prince Charming was the only thing that
adhered her to the stereotypical twentieth century princess…or any
princess for that matter. She was far from pure, far from royal
excepting her physical lineage and otherwise skipped about from jock to
jock (the football type) with merriment. Even when the jock's jocks
weren't available she found solace in such mundane items as
candlesticks…but I digress.

Following her sudden loss of cheerleading status due to a rather
graphically performed miscarriage at a homecoming game, Leigh-Cheri
cloistered herself in the attic of the Puget Sound peak-box and teetered
away her princess hours with candlesticks and conversations with the
moon. Until one day she read of the Care Festival…and do-gooderness
took hold of her mind and sent her off; Gulietta, frog and all; to
Hawaii to deal with rude UFO drivers and a level of caring rudeness that
usually require homicidal tendencies to enjoy otherwise. And that's
when the bomb went off, leveling the hotel and sending Argonian UFO
persons running amok and wondering if this was a totalitarian plot to
silence their eccentricities. And the bomber? The book's namesake,
"The Woodpecker" himself, who regardless of his rather unbecoming habit
of blowing up buildings with explosives made out of such everyday fare
as playing cards or Fruit Loops, turns out to be Prince Charming. Go
figure.

Now before we go any further with the plot, I have to make a few things
clear. Some of my representations of Still Life might seem rather
graphic. Let's take the candlestick use. Sure, Leigh-Cheri is anything
BUT virginal…but this is portrayed in anything BUT erotic ways. There
is always a touch of comedic style, a bit of hilarious tendencies and it
is rather quickly done and not dwelled upon. You can always tell just
where the succulent snake staff is slithering…but assuming you have some
sense of humor it's done with comedic flair and style and most
definitely not something I consider pornographic. Not G-rated, no, but
most definitely not erotica. Although I have found myself laughing at
the cheezy plots in porno movies these days, but again I digress. You
still should get the point.

Another thing worth discussing is the Argonians from, you guessed it,
the planet Argon. Robbins uses these bright characters well. They are
not an intrinsic part of the plot, nor are they completely unimportant
either. They are there to represent to us in clear detail that everyone
has different beliefs. A lot of those beliefs seem to be, at least to
you and I, completely ludicrous. But a few well-placed unexplainable
events in the vision of Leigh-Cheri and The Woodpecker make you wonder
just enough…wonder about who's right. Are we right to think they're
crazy? Or do they have the correct idea, the TRUTH of the matter, after
all? It's enough to make you think …maybe we're the ones with the
fucked up beliefs. But what I mean to stress is that you won't see
anyone whipping out automatic hitching thumbs in this story, everyone
stays comfortably Earthbound, but there are a few interesting events to
make you wonder long after you've finished the novel.

Tom Robbins is a surrealist in every sense of the word. From beginning
to end of Still Life you are cordially pummeled by analogies that will
strain your mind and others that will send it wandering to the
proverbial heavens. I enjoyed Robbins' analogous writing style because
I tend to use them fairly often myself, working to explain away things
that I see utilizing methods and means that most just wouldn't be able
to think of, yet makes good enough sense if you give it enough of your
hard-earned electro-chemical neuro-activity. In fact, this is what Kim
referred to when he suggested the similarity of my writing style to that
of Robbins' when he first pressed the volume into my hands.

At the same time, buzzing analogies about like epileptic bees in a
garden, he winds throughout them a philosophy and a number of points
that he's been trying to get across since he first fired up his
Remington SL3 typewriter and loaded in the first sheet. In the novel
you'll ponder the importance of pyramids, the lifestyle of a pack of
Camels and the ramblings of the outlaw. How things that you recognize
immediately suddenly show up in places where you knew they were, but
just didn't recognize the connection until you were smacked in the head
with a mallet and pointed to. You'll learn the intimacy of lunar
landscape from afar as well as study and, if you're lucky, you'll learn
how to make love stay. None of this is going to make sense to you. It's
the surrealism, stupid! And surrealism is something that isn't going to
just fall into place. It kind of oozes into place like slime, bubbling
together until it, like the rest of the world, is about to pop. Robbins
has a unique way of blending all this philosophic bantering and slimy
analogies into a novel that, by the end, makes a lot more sense than
you'd think. Even if it doesn't make sense.

Somewhere in Seattle there's a guy named Tom. He's still sitting there
and, according to reports, is still trying to figure out what a British
critic meant when he said, "Tom Robbins writes like Dolly Parton
looks." Most people would excuse this and move on. But Tom
realizes…everything is part of it.

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