Read Online Wild Ducks Flying Backward by Tom Robbins - Free Book Online
Authors: Tom Robbins
Tags: Fiction
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grandeur is not of the intellect but of warm red blood. Their stained talons, wet fangs, and leathery wings are seldom out of view, yet if they leave us crotch-raw and exhausted, at least they leave us aware of our aliveness. And of our destiny. The Doors scream into the darkened auditorium what all of us in the counterculture are whispering more softly in our hearts: We want the world and we want it………………………. NOW!
The Helix,
1967
Nurse Duffy of MTV
H er name sounds like one of those blue-collar taverns frequented by sports goons and off-duty cops, her job title sounds like the end of World War II. But Karen Duffy—the reigning “VJ”—looks more like an erotic bakery specializing in anatomically correct cream puffs, and her workplace looks more like the end of the world. As we know it. And she feels… fairly mischievous.
Coming at us in short bursts—Stella by strobelight—Duff manages nevertheless to be funny, bright, vulnerable, and genuine; the girl next door as video vamp, the perfect counterpoint to the laser-and-leather looney bin of MTV, over which she so jauntily presides.
Whether she is spinning Aerosmith’s propeller or tossing MC Hammer his tacks, she introduces the optic sizzle, the hip-hop histrionics, as if she were Little Red Riding Hood showing off her pet wolves. She has bravado to spare, but her whip is licorice, her nerves just a bit on edge. (Van Halen, what sharp teeth you have!)
If MTV is simultaneously decadent and fresh, technologically sophisticated and emotionally primitive, both an accomplice to the apocalypse and its antidote, then who better than a former recreational therapist at a nursing home to reign over its sphere of paradoxical power? With alley-cat eyes,
pâtisserie
figure, Cubistic haircut, and a grin wide enough to put Julia Roberts’s cat out through, Karen Duffy is capable of playing succubus to a generation of alienated young men. She is equally suited to be every patient’s favorite candy striper in the rehab wards of a poisoned land.
So let’s doff to Duff, let’s quaff to Duff: a juicy burr under the stiff saddle of American puritanism; a witty companion in many a lonely, cathode-lit room; the reassuring wink at the center of a billion-dollar ’round-the-clock hallucination spawned by the uneasy marriage of commerce and art.
Esquire,
1992
Joseph Campbell
O ne humid, hammer-heavy morning seven years ago, on the ceremonial grounds of Chichen Itza, I watched a small coral snake slither from a pile of Mayan rubble and shoot through the grass like a rubber arrow in the direction of a group of my traveling companions. The snake singled out one man from the group, crawled deliberately up to the toe of his conservative, urban shoe, paused there for a long moment, then veered sharply to the right and disappeared into another heap of ancient stones.
That tiny incident would have been mildly interesting at best had not the man whom the snake “visited” been Joseph Campbell.
Professor Campbell had been regaling our party with some story or other, and gave no indication of having even noticed the little serpent. Yet I was convinced that something had passed between them.
Did the snake lick the tip of Joseph Campbell’s shoelace, changing it into jade?
Was the snake carrying a tarot card under its tongue? Was it carrying a pomegranate seed?
Had the snake wept? Had it sung? Were those purple feathers sprouting from its spine?
Would the serpent and Professor Campbell meet again late that evening—and would they sip mistletoe gin from a virgin’s skull while discussing details for the coronation of the Ant King?
Speculations such as those were hardly surprising. Joseph Campbell was so conversant with the world of wonders that he awakened the potential for wonder in everyone he touched. He unbuttoned the secret earth for us and let the inexhaustible inspiration of Being stream through.
Now, like heroes before him, he has vanished into
The Helix,
1967
Nurse Duffy of MTV
H er name sounds like one of those blue-collar taverns frequented by sports goons and off-duty cops, her job title sounds like the end of World War II. But Karen Duffy—the reigning “VJ”—looks more like an erotic bakery specializing in anatomically correct cream puffs, and her workplace looks more like the end of the world. As we know it. And she feels… fairly mischievous.
Coming at us in short bursts—Stella by strobelight—Duff manages nevertheless to be funny, bright, vulnerable, and genuine; the girl next door as video vamp, the perfect counterpoint to the laser-and-leather looney bin of MTV, over which she so jauntily presides.
Whether she is spinning Aerosmith’s propeller or tossing MC Hammer his tacks, she introduces the optic sizzle, the hip-hop histrionics, as if she were Little Red Riding Hood showing off her pet wolves. She has bravado to spare, but her whip is licorice, her nerves just a bit on edge. (Van Halen, what sharp teeth you have!)
If MTV is simultaneously decadent and fresh, technologically sophisticated and emotionally primitive, both an accomplice to the apocalypse and its antidote, then who better than a former recreational therapist at a nursing home to reign over its sphere of paradoxical power? With alley-cat eyes,
pâtisserie
figure, Cubistic haircut, and a grin wide enough to put Julia Roberts’s cat out through, Karen Duffy is capable of playing succubus to a generation of alienated young men. She is equally suited to be every patient’s favorite candy striper in the rehab wards of a poisoned land.
So let’s doff to Duff, let’s quaff to Duff: a juicy burr under the stiff saddle of American puritanism; a witty companion in many a lonely, cathode-lit room; the reassuring wink at the center of a billion-dollar ’round-the-clock hallucination spawned by the uneasy marriage of commerce and art.
Esquire,
1992
Joseph Campbell
O ne humid, hammer-heavy morning seven years ago, on the ceremonial grounds of Chichen Itza, I watched a small coral snake slither from a pile of Mayan rubble and shoot through the grass like a rubber arrow in the direction of a group of my traveling companions. The snake singled out one man from the group, crawled deliberately up to the toe of his conservative, urban shoe, paused there for a long moment, then veered sharply to the right and disappeared into another heap of ancient stones.
That tiny incident would have been mildly interesting at best had not the man whom the snake “visited” been Joseph Campbell.
Professor Campbell had been regaling our party with some story or other, and gave no indication of having even noticed the little serpent. Yet I was convinced that something had passed between them.
Did the snake lick the tip of Joseph Campbell’s shoelace, changing it into jade?
Was the snake carrying a tarot card under its tongue? Was it carrying a pomegranate seed?
Had the snake wept? Had it sung? Were those purple feathers sprouting from its spine?
Would the serpent and Professor Campbell meet again late that evening—and would they sip mistletoe gin from a virgin’s skull while discussing details for the coronation of the Ant King?
Speculations such as those were hardly surprising. Joseph Campbell was so conversant with the world of wonders that he awakened the potential for wonder in everyone he touched. He unbuttoned the secret earth for us and let the inexhaustible inspiration of Being stream through.
Now, like heroes before him, he has vanished into
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