I almost DNFed but stuck it out for Ellen Cherry Charles and the dance

this book's jacket description : this book :: funny movie trailer : movie that shot its wad in the trailer

The premise sounds wild and funny and makes you wonder, briefly, how he could pull it off. And then he doesn't.

I read this in high school, and I'm not sure if I would like it better now, or hate it now.

Inanimate Objects... make me laugh out of my skin! My 11th grade English teacher recommended this to me because she believed I could appreciate it with her. It became my favorite instantly and held that title for years. I enjoy stories that stem from someone's wildly fascinating imagination-- they're always funnier and more entertaining to me. This was an easy, fun read that inspired my continuation in quirkiness in general, and in my own writing.

Perhaps, in this particularly cynical day and age, it is hardly surprising that the most philosophically bent of Tom Robbins' characters in Skinny Legs and All is a can of beans. A redneck welder-turned-artist is a close second, expressing his own brand of somewhat confused philosophies regarding art, love, and the state of the world.

Robbins uses his pontificating Can O'Beans and the can's animated inanimate friends to take the plot of Skinny Legs and All to a higher level of academic thought than it might otherwise achieve; our main link to the tangled history of the Middle East and the legendary city of Jerusalem is a Painted Stick, a Conch Shell, and Can o'Beans him/herself.

We start the story sitting with Boomer and Ellen Cherry in their honeymoon getaway vehicle: a gigantic welded roast turkey on wheels. This is the physical expression of Boomer's love for his brand-new wife. The story only gets stranger from there.

The book follows the structure of the legendary Dance of Seven Veils, a dance so enchanting that John the Baptist was murdered because of it--so the story says. It creates a spiritual and philosophical journey for the reader as well as each character, and flawlessly mixes modern motivations with ancient traditions. In New York City, a Jew and an Arab start a restaurant together, the welder becomes an artist and travels to Jerusalem, an Evangelical preacher believes he can create the Apocalypse, Ellen Cherry just wants to get laid, and Can O'Beans fulfills his/her greatest dreams despite enormous odds.

One of the first comments Robbins makes in the novel is that art is the rearrangement of reality. He's talking about mockingbirds, but the same can be applied the the entirety of Skinny Legs and All. Robbins recklessly pushes his characters into a strange version of our world, one where a bellydancer named Salome out-performs the SuperBowl, one where the ancient god of Palestine is rediscovered by a guy named 'Boomer.' And the characters themselves: they not only go along for the ride, they're aware that they're on a sort of pilgramage, particularly Boomer, who, grasped by the unforgiving Muse, delves deeply into art. His erstwhile bride, however, digs her heels into New York and stays put, stubbornly trying to stop the inexorable enlightening movement...in her defense, however, it's through Ellen Cherry's eyes that we watch the veils drop, and she is by far the most entertaining of the various narrators. Unlike Can o'Beans, who, seeming to regard him/herself as self-nominated historian, translates at length Painted Stick and Conch Shell's history of Jerusalem, Ellen Cherry does her best to keep out of the whole mess. Her stubborn belief that she is neither interested nor involved in the Middle East is jarring next to the other characters' obsession with the place: Abu and Spike wax lyrical about Jerusalem, Can o'Beans and the other inanimates do their best to make it to that famed city, and even Boomer finds himself totally fascinated by the combination of violence and religion that is that citadel, Jerusalem.

One of my favorite aspects of Robbins' writing is his love of women, and that comes to the forefront in Skinny Legs and All with his portrayal of Ellen Cherry Charles. With her obsession with Jezebel, her love of girlish shoes, and the way she clings to a feminine ideal, Ellen Cherry is voluptuously feminine. Even her temperment--quick to anger, quick to compassion, quick to leaps of logic--is practically a stereotypically female one. Robbins needs Ellen Cherry's strength of character to discuss the book's main motive: the feminine pagan religion of Astarte vs. the patriarchal organized religion of Yahweh. Let me put it this way: if you are a fan of Robbins' soliloques on feminist religions vs. masculine ones; if you enjoy his unabashed Whitman-esque worship of bodies, nature, love and sex; if you prefer unexpected metaphors to straightforward prose, you will enjoy this book.

it is impossible to describe Robbins as a purely feminist writer, or Skinny Legs and All as a purely feminist book. In fact, I'm not sure I would call it "feminist" at all. Skinny Legs and All is simply, in my opinion, the finest example of Robbins' ecletic ideas and ideals, his bizarre and alliterative imagery, and his love of people and the world at large. Not even in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, a novel whose main character is famous for her hitch-hiking, is the breadth and width of the U.S. so lovingly described, or its place in the world studied. It's a strange mix of modernism and romanticism, of mythology and street performers. Robbins spins us through the story with breath-taking ease and familiarity. No one who is familiar with Robbins' past work will be surprised to find that Skinny Legs and All evolves into a treatise on religions: ancient, organized and defunct, Robbins considers them all. His main beef is with Christianity, so if you're a bit edgy on that subject, I'd suggest keeping an open mind or avoiding the book altogether. The good news? He's already used the Corpse of Christ in one novel, so it doesn't pop up again. The bad news: two of the Bibles most famous tramps are, welll--unveiled. But that's not so bad.

I blame the fact that it took me two months to read this book on me being sick for over a month and not the boring middle part of this book. But the middle of this story is quite dragged out. Other than that, I enjoyed Tom Robbins take on conflict in the Middle East and religion in general. His dark satirical approach in his writing is always comedic and admirable.

You know that ''the fuck did I just read'' feeling you get after you finish a Tom Robbins book? Well, this was the real deal.
Religion (lots), sex(uality), art, that powerful middle-class American depression, and plenty of symbolism as always. Starring, among others: a dirty sock, a can of beans, and a spoon-occasionally a vibrator too-and the endless metaphors exploring history, appeal, and tragedy in the Middle East, all intertwined in the witty, vulgar language that makes Robbins so special.

One of my favorite quotes of all time is from Keith Moon, the drummer for The Who. He once declared: "I'm the greatest Keith Moon-style drummer in the world". This is a centering artistic sentiment that has guided me through a lot of self-doubt and changed the way I see the outlaws and idiosyncratics of the art world.

Tom Robbins is the best Tom Robbins-style writer in the world. Nobody is really even attempting to write like he does. Sure, there will be people who scoop simile and metaphor precariously high, but nobody could weave armchair philosophy and eye-crossing imagery into their stories the way Tom can.

This is perhaps the strangest book for an author who secretes strange books if left out in the sun for a few minutes. Here Tom uses a cast that includes a sentient can o'beans, sock, spoon, conch shell, and painted stick who ponder the mystical city of Jerusalem and the endless war waged over its control. Like all Robbins books, it takes many wild left turns and blindsides readers with shocking insights into the art world, the Jezebel myth, and (like all Robbins books) a rage against organized religion.

I think this is probably Tom's most strangely paced book and it culminates in what will either be his best ending or his worst depending on what you showed up for a Robbins novel for. If you're like me and you're willing to sift through his obscure mind portraits and increasingly unfathomable sex scenes, he'll bestow on you the answers to life's questions so whimsically and full of reassurance that you swear they're delivered from on high. The entire last 20 pages or so are basically a dressed-up essay on what makes modern life so damn hard to understand. Strangely, this means if I posted the last 20 pages I think you probably wouldn't need a majority of the book and would get almost the same pleasure as I did having read the 400 pages before it. Not usually a great sign. I would say that it's not a very well-crafted plot with almost no sense of momentum at all, but it's a great Tom Robbins book.

I already want two Tom Robbins tattoos. I should be thankful that gifs are not yet possible on human skin, or else I'd get my new literary hero splayed across my forehead: Turn Around Norman.

Clever For the Sake of Cleverness (2012)

Robbins, Tom (1990). Skinny Legs and All. New York: Bantam.

This novel is about Tom Robbins, who wants to show you how clever, funny, and sophisticated he is. With respect to that goal, the book succeeds.

However, does he create and motivate interesting characters? No. Does he develop an interesting story? No. Does he elucidate some significant point? No. Does he create a haunting sense of place or time? No. Does he skewer social or political practices with satire or parody? Maybe a little.

After reading this book, I felt like I had watched a TV sitcom. I had a few chuckles and guffaws, then I was angry to have just wasted precious hours of my life. Is there anything to learn from this novel? Perhaps only that some people are good at remote associations, and if you think those are funny, this book is for you. I do happen to enjoy nonsequiturs, sequences of unexpected thoughts or images that have absolutely no relation to each other, so there were giggles here for me.

For example, how would you complete this simile: “It was empty as …”? I might have said, “…a church at noon,” or “…an ice cream parlor at the North Pole,” or some such. I don’t think, even if I were smoking dope, I could have come up with, “a paraplegic’s dance card.”

Funny? Yes, but only because of its extremely low frequency, not because the idea itself is funny. It is clever for the sake of cleverness. Often, Robbins’ comparisons are funny even when they make no sense at all. Consider this description of a sunrise that was “…like a neon fox tongue lapping up the powdered bones of space chickens…” What? Or how about, It was “…a pledge she would stick to like Scotch tape to a Chihuahua.” I chuckled, but this is pointless, goofball humor. The ideas themselves are not funny, only their remoteness and juxtaposition are funny.

Once in a while, Robbins hits gold with an apt comparison, like calling the waning daylight of late afternoon “lame duck daylight,” or describing a woman as being “on the dry side of thirty.” My favorite might have been a description of a man’s gaudy, mismatched clothing making a character feel as though she was being “pistol-whipped with a kaleidoscope.” There were enough of these truly creative – not just clever, but artistically creative – sentences to keep me turning the pages.

There are two and a half parallel stories in the novel. In one, a young redneck couple makes a pilgrimage to New York city in an airstream trailer that the guy, Boomer, a skilled welder, has converted into a roast turkey. His wife, Ellen Cherry, will strive to make it as an artist in the Big Apple. She doesn’t make it, but ironically, Boomer does, as his trailer/turkey becomes the toast of the avant-garde.

In the second story, five inanimate objects are on a pilgrimage from the U.S. to Jerusalem. They are, a can of beans, a dirty sock, a silver dessert spoon, a conch shell and a painted stick. They meditate until they are able to ‘locomote,’ always careful to stay out of the way of curious humans. Some have distinguishable personalities. Can o’ Beans, for example, tends to “fart with curiosity,” whereas Spoon thinks of herself as a Southern lady of taste and breeding. The objects have endless adventures of no consequence. For example, dirty sock gets washed away in a river, but somehow reunited with his colleagues. Conch Shell and Painted Stick get locked in a church basement and have to set a fire to attract humans to open the door. Funny? No. Clever for the sake of cleverness, is what I say.

These characters were not developed enough or motivated enough to be interesting. It would be an achievement to portray convincing characters without human bodies, but Robbins falls short. I confess though, I did like Ellen Cherry’s Japanese-made vibrator that spoke in Zen Koans.

The final half-story is about a cartoony, television preacher who wants to blow up Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock, to cause World War Three and hasten the Rapture. It’s a thin character with a thin story, but Robbins uses it in the last quarter of the book to create a theme of apocalypse and the End Times, satirically symbolized by a Super Bowl game.

Throughout, Robbins attempts to comment on middle-east politics. Ellen Cherry works at an Israeli-Arab restaurant across from the U.N., giving the author ample scope for commentary on middle-east politics and for lame Yiddish and Arabic accents and comments that are supposed to be funny. More deadly however, are Robbins’ heavy-handed lectures about the history and politics of religion and on Israel in particular, all of which, in the ultimate scene, morphs into a half-baked philosophical commentary about human self-delusion in general. Never has a novel ended with a more resounding thud.

There are some creative structural elements in the writing that are interesting, such as surprising changes in voice and point of view. But sometimes, even these veer off into weird, reckless, and seemingly arbitrary changes of tense, voice, and mood. Again, I put those surprises down, not to thoughtful innovation, but to cleverness for the sake of cleverness.

There’s no denying Tom Robbins has his fans. His books are widely praised and wildly popular, so somebody likes them. I found this one mildly amusing, but ultimately disappointing for lack of substance and sustained entertainment value.

This read a lot like an unfocused, ADD-addled Kurt Vonnegut novel. But the fact that it reminded me of Vonnegut in any way means it's worth a read, if nothing else. The wacky, over-strung cast of characters includes a talking stick, a talking can of beans, and a talking sock. Oh, there are people there too. Kind of.
Robbins' prose is evocative, full of similes and ripe description that sometimes means something. Everything kept happening and little of it meant much to me. The revelations come out in high-school philosophy stylings.
All that said, it's not a bad book. I enjoyed parts of it. It just doesn't read as composed as it feels like it should be/thinks it is. I guess both the prose and the jokes came off as too "look how clever I am". And while sometimes the prose was, I wasn't really floored by any of it.

Sıska Bacaklar benim ilk Tom Robbins okumam. @defnesuman’la iki kez okumak üzere yola çıktığımız Sıska Bacaklar’ın ilk okumasını tamamladım. Haliyle tam anlamıyla büyülendim diyebilirim. Müthiş bir tanışma kitabı oldu. İroni yüklü dili sayesinde metaforlar resmen metnin doğal akışına nakşolmuş. Ben uzun bir sürece yayarak okudum, çok yoğun bir kitap olduğu için size de bunu öneririm. Zaten tek solukta okumak için fazla dolu dolu bir metin, heba olmasını istemezsiniz

Μου άρεσε, αλλά δεν με ξετρέλανε. Κάποια στιγμή με κούρασε κάπως. Θα μπορούσε να είναι λίγο πιο περιεκτικό. Για να το διαβάσεις πρέπει σίγουρα να είσαι ανοιχτόμυαλος και να σου αρέσουν βιβλία κοινωνικού, πολιτικού και θρησκευτικού περιεχομένου. Φιλοσοφεί με όμορφο τρόπο και δεν χαρίζει μία σε θρησκείες. Σου δείχνει πως επηρεάζουν την μάζα για να την ελέγξουν και πόσο ανάλαφρος μπορείς να νιώσεις πετώντας από πάνω σου τα "εφτά πέπλα" που θολώνουν την όρασή σου για τον κόσμο και την ίδια σου την ύπαρξη.

3,5/5