juvenile white male privilege, don't waste your time.

A motley collection
Starts off with some really delightful travelogue style articles
Meanders with some shorter pieces / poetry / off-piste writing

Tom Robbins command over the language and his hard work on using the language in the best possible way comes through in all these pieces

Worth a read….

[...]Το φιλί δεν μιμήθηκε την φύση αλλά την αναδόμησε.[...]

[...]Το ροζ είναι η όψη που παίρνει το κόκκινο όταν βγάζει τα παπούτσια του και λύνει τα μαλιά του.[...]

[...]Με τη φαντασία και το παιχνίδι με τις λέξεις μπορείς να βγεις από οποιοδήποτε αδιέξοδο. Αυτό φυσικά προϋποθέτει να έχεις ταλέντο.[...]

“No kiss is ever wasted, not even on the lottery ticket kissed for luck.”

Having read most of Tom Robbins fiction, I was excited to pick up this short nonfiction collection. How does Robbins insanely original use of figurative language work with short nonfiction? Well, after reading “Wild Ducks Flying Backwards’ I can say that it (mostly) works.
The text is broken into a highly original introduction and five sections. The first section, a collection of travel essays is enjoyable. Robbins’ gymnastic figures of speech used to describe nature is a good mix.
I also enjoyed a quirky essay on Ray Kroc (McDonald’s founder) and a thoughtful piece on Joseph Campbell (the monomyth and archetypes).
I loved the section, “Stories, Poems & Lyrics”. Unique and original stuff there. In his poem “Dream of the Language Wheel”, we get quintessential Robbins, as demonstrated by this-“Come slide beside me naked into the world’s steamy honeycomb of words.” The adjective “steamy” makes all the difference there. For a variety of reasons. Also awesome, the lyrics to his country song, “My Heart is not a Poodle”.
Another highlight is the essay In Defiance of Gravity” in which Robbins explores the missing playfulness in modern literature. It is a thought provoking read.
The text contains some misses, most notably 3 pieces that are art critiques and appreciations. I am an art lover and collector, but these pieces bored me silly. There is also an essay on the 1960s with which I simply cannot be in agreement.
However, "Wild Ducks Flying Backwards” ends with a bang with the final section, simply called “Responses”. And it is literally just that, responses that Robbins wrote to questions posed by various entities.
I enjoyed my time with this collection. I have almost read all of Robbins output; this text has not dissuaded me from continuing that course of action.

I really love Tom Robbins... I learn so much.

Worth reading even if it’s just for the 10 pages dedicated to the joy of a tomato sandwich.

Yeah, his later work just doesn’t kick my butt in the same way. I wonder if as readers we continue to expect the same sense of magical discovery as when the storytelling was a completely new experience?

I always read a Tom Robbins with a box of salt, with the full knowledge that I will not be able to read another Tom Robbins book for at least a half dozen years. I can imagine it's the same feeling people have with sky-diving ("It was exhilarating! Such an adrenaline rush! I'm never doing it again") or like my father with a box of chocolate covered cherries. My father did not like chocolate and did not have a sweet tooth, but about once every five years or so he would buy a box of those confectionery treats at the movie theater and down the entire package before the opening credits had stopped rolling. This held him for four, five, six years.
The trouble with Tom Robbins (and no one ever refers to him by his surname alone) is that he is a linguistic pyrotechnician. He dances around a dictionary like Baryshnikov, does somersaults off a thesaurus, tumbles and twirls and flips and flounces in air heavy with the long pauses of people stammering for the right word; he plucks those words off the tips of their tongues and crumbles them in his hands before throwing nothing in the air like a word-crazed magician. His writing is the equivalent of one of the longest innovative fireworks displays. But just like those fireworks, impressive as they are, after the explosions and diaphanous colors igniting the night sky, what are we left with? A loud ringing in our ears and a lot of detritus and exploded paper on the ground that someone has to clean up. There's no substance, or some substance and metaphor and symbolism buried under a slowly dissipating smoke. We feel great while it's happening, but it doesn't usually last.
This collection is even more of a fireworks display than any of his novels. With the novels we are given a continuous story, a plot, a grounding so that when Tom goes off on one of his peyote-induced tangents, we know where we can always return. In this collection of short writings, there is no grounding, only Tom Robbins in all his excess and grandiosity.
It's fun, it's funny, it's intoxicating. But only in doses. Reading Tom Robbins is that moment you have when watching a Jack Black film and you begin to think how much fun it would be to hang out with him in real life; you begin to imagine that night, and you realize that no no no no no that would not be a good idea, and you are so happy there's a cathode-ray barrier between you and the frenetically self-absorbed comedian. Being forced to be feet, inches away from that hyperkinetic of a cosmic force would make you either flee in terror or punch Black in the face. Which is exactly how I feel about Tom Robbins. I love his work, his incontrovertible embrace of the absurd, his ability to weave such incongruous topics and references such as Dostoevesky, Camel cigarettes, obscenely large thumbs, and a canoe ride in Tanzania into one connecting quilt; I also sometimes want to kick him in the crotch.
Writers and readers wax poetic and obsessively about the love/hate relationship with David Foster Wallace, and it's a well-deserved ambivalence the unforunately late writer has engendered. But Robbins should be mentioned just as often in the same context, and for the same reasons.

Tom Robbins is a genius!

Σίγουρα δεν είναι το πρώτο που θα προτείνω σε κάποιον από Τομ Ρομπινς. Και αυτό γιατί παρά το ότι το χιούμορ και ο τρόπος γραφής του συγγραφέα υπάρχουν κ εδώ, έχουμε να κάνουμε με μικρά κείμενα του συγγραφέα, ούτε καν με διηγήματα. Ωραίος τρόπος για να δεις το πως σκέφτεται, τις απόψεις του για κάποια θέματα, όχι όμως για πρώτη γνωριμία. Αν έχετε διαβάσει κάθε μυθιστόρημα του Ρόμπινς και σας λείπει απειρα, πάρτε το

This book sat on my shelf for years before I finally pulled it out and began to read it, a little each morning before I started work. The short nature of the pieces in this collection lended itself well to being able to put it down and return to it the next day. I'm a long-time Tom Robbins fanboy and would love anything he does. Having said that, there is some great content in here and there is some that could have been left out. A more judicious editor might have left out much of the poetry and song lyrics, and I think this collection would be stronger for it and still stand on its own as a compendium of Tom Robbins in short form. Many of these pieces capture the joie de vivre that is unique to Tom Robbins' writing. Some of them expose the reader to new sides of Robbins that are less familiar to us, which is nice to see. For the Tom Robbins completist, this is worth your time. For the casual reader, you will probably find something to like here. Not going to lie, I did cringe at a few of the more salacious passages in the book. Twenty-something me and forty-something me respond to Tom Robbins differently, I'll leave it at that.

Αν και μ'αρέσει ο ανάλαφρος τρόπος με τον οποίο γράφει ο Tom, αυτό το βιβλίο δεν το βρήκα τόσο ενδιαφέρον, μάλλον επειδή είναι μια σειρά από σύντομα κείμενα τα οποία έχει κατά καιρούς δημοσιεύσει και όχι μια ολοκληρωμένη ιστορία.