I first met Tom Robbins in the editorial department of The Village Voice in the summer of 2006. At the time, I was a newly hired reporting intern working for Wayne Barrett, and I was thrilled when I discovered that Tom was also working at The Voice. When I approached him, Tom was sitting behind a desk on the fifth floor of that old Manhattan office building in Cooper Square, immersed in a dimly lit sea of overstuffed filing boxes and an unfathomable amount of stacked papers and wearing—in addition to the somewhat stoic-cum-sour face I have come to remember him by—an expression that said, “What the hell do you want?”
I was crushed. Not because my favorite author and literary god had not been happy to meet me but because I had the wrong Tom Robbins. This Tom was a hard-nosed veteran news reporter—one of the last remaining old-school rabble-rousers (along with Wayne) still left at The Voice—whose journalistic prowess had made him something of a celebrity himself over the years, and indeed, he had even authored a few books. But all the same, he was not my Tom Robbins, the author of eight “juicy, daring, and sagacious novels” whom I’ve often credited as the very reason I read and write.
It was an easy mistake to make; Tom Robbins (the fiction writer) also began his career as a news reporter, and he is the type of guy that one would not be the least bit surprised to find hanging out at The Voice. At any rate, the ersatz Tom and I got along just fine, and I have nothing but fond (and very few) memories of him.
This is not his paper. This is about the other Tom Robbins—the zany author who now lives in La Conner, Washington, a small fishing village outside Seattle.
Contents
“People of Zee World, Relax!”
What can be said by way of introduction for this writer? I mean, when we’re talking about Tom Robbins, we’re talking about someone who has been accused of writing “the way Dolly Parton looks”, whose predilection for wordplay and profound subject matter has earned him a worldwide following verging on rock-star status, and whose debut novel Another Roadside Attraction (1971) is rumored to have been found lying on the bathroom floor beside the body of Elvis Presley.
“His writing style is simultaneously intellectual and immature, high-brow and low-brow, snobby and perfectly willing to dabble in all our human flaws,” posted one fan as a dictionary entry for “Tom Robbins” on the Urban Dictionary website. It’s little wonder, the response Robbins gets. With phrases like “He had a smile like the first scratch on a new car”, or “His voice could have been shoveled from a gravel pit”, his work is rife with offbeat imagery and quirky wordplay reminiscent of Thomas Pynchon and Richard Brautigan (both among Robbins’ favorite writers). Like those writers, an undercurrent of seriousness prevails in Robbins’ comedic expressions, occasionally bubbling to the surface to convey profundities on the nature of the universe, the human condition, et al.
For example, in Skinny Legs and All (1990), a chapter begins with, “An Arab and a Jew opened a restaurant together across the street from the United Nations…” The restaurant is called Isaac & Ishmael’s, and hearing it described sounds more like the beginning of a bar joke—more frivolous than profound. But then Tom Robbins continues:
It was to be a gesture of unusual cooperation, a symbolic reconciliation, an exemplary statement on behalf of peace—in the Middle East and beyond. If it could be demonstrated on a small scale that traditional, “natural” enemies could join together for a common purpose profitable to both, then might it not inspire adversaries on a global level to look into one another’s eyes, to explore avenues of mutually beneficial friendship? That was the rhetoric, that was the hope.
This juxtaposition of playfulness and seriousness, what Tom Robbins dubs the “comic and cosmic”, exemplifies Robbins’ modus operandi. His work is grounded in the mindset of lightheartedness, but an informed lightheartedness, in which “playfulness and wit rescue the earnest philosopher from depression over humanity’s inhumanity”.
“Cheerfully cynical,” is how Robbins puts it. “My view of the world is not that different from Kafka’s, really. The difference is that Kafka let it make him miserable and I refuse. Life is too short. My personal motto has always been: Joy in spite of everything. Not just [mindless] joy, but joy in spite of everything.”
As a result of his “joyous” mindset, there is a tendency among reviewers of Tom Robbins’ work—detractors and fans alike—to characterize his writing style as “chatty, digressive, and eclectic”. Of Robbins’ second novel, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976), one critic said reading it was like “listening to an older stoner-buddy philosophy-major rapping about the amazing insights he experienced during his last acid trip. His powers of description are so fertile that he wants to describe the same thing several different ways, and this descriptive fecundity, while often delightful, is just as likely to annoy or obfuscate with its cloying cuteness and excessive verbiage.”
Tom Robbins’ Crazy Wisdom
To fully understand the logic behind Tom Robbins’ writing—and even he will tell you this—one must be familiar with an Eastern philosophy known as Crazy Wisdom. Crazy wisdom is a Vajrayana Buddhist concept that took root in Tibet during the Eighth century C.E., when the Indian guru Padmasambhava first came there and introduced Tibetans to the buddhadarma (the Buddhist teachings). It is an aspect of the Buddhist ethos that deals with an individual’s perspective on the world. It essentially urges one to cultivate one’s innate playfulness, to indulge in the primal impulse for goofing off, and to see the world for the mind-boggling enigma that it is, but regard it less like a frown-inducing riddle and more like a grand cosmic joke.
“Crazy wisdom is, of course, the opposite of conventional wisdom,” Robbins says. “It is wisdom that deliberately swims against the current in order to avoid being swept along in the numbing wake of bourgeoisie compromise; wisdom that flouts taboos in order to undermine their power; wisdom that evolves when one, while refusing to avert one’s gaze from the sorrows and injustices of the world, insists on joy in spite of everything.”
Wes Nisker, a well-known scholar on the subject, gives this definition:
Crazy wisdom is the wisdom of the saint, the Zen master, the poet, the mad scientist, and the fool. [It] sees that we live in a world of many illusions, that the emperor has no clothes, and that much of human belief and behavior is ritualized nonsense. Crazy wisdom loves paradox and puns and pie fights… [It] laughs at our ridiculous ways and shows compassion for the suffering that results from them.
In crazy wisdom, there are four archetypal figures: the clown, the jester, the trickster, and the fool. Wherever crazy wisdom emerges, in whatever culture or context, time or place, its presence is always marked by the appearance of one or more beings belonging to this archetypal quartet. From the Laughing Buddha to The Three Stooges, from Jesus Christ to Mark Twain, from Coyote, that epic rascal of Native American folklore, to Albert Einstein (and his hair stylist!); these archetypes appear in a multitude of forms to mock our rigid social conventions and poke fun at our self-seriousness. They challenge us, “each in their own special way—with questions, stories, or laughter, or by offering their own radically different version of reality,” and urge us—often coercively, by means of Chinese tickle torture—to question our role in the universe and the downcast, solemn attitude with which we approach it.
Each of the four archetypes performs a different function—the clown demonstrates our human awkwardness and tries to make us laugh about it; the jester criticizes and exposes our missteps; the trickster embodies our primitive, sneaky side; and the fool reminds us of our childish, idealistic beginnings. One trait the archetypes share is their ability to get into trouble and get right back out of trouble.
The clown gets bopped, the trickster is dismembered and blown apart, the jester may have his head cut off by the king, … and the fool is about to martyred by angry mob. But just when it seems that all is lost, they rise again, recovered and whole … (The dismembered Coyote reassembles, Jesus Christ rises into everlasting life.) Because of their humor, or their innocence; or because their revelations are so important, these crazy wisdom characters are immortal. (Nisker)
Regardless of which crazy wisdom archetype is currently prancing on the local scene, they are all there to send the world the same basic message: Lighten up!
This same message presents itself in Tom Robbins’ fourth novel Jitterbug Perfume (1984). It comes in the form of “Erleichda!” Erleichda is a made-up phrase that Robbins invented specifically for the novel. According to the narration, erleichda belongs to the language of an obscure and long-lost tribe in ancient Bohemia. “It is a transitive verb, an exclamation, a command of which an exact English translation is impossible. The closest equivalent probably would be the phrase: Lighten Up!”
In Jitterbug Perfume, this crazy wisdom message appears twice: first, ploughed by a fingertip on the mantle of a fireplace, “where the dust lay thick as fur” and second, as the last word uttered by Albert Einstein on his deathbed, which, ironically, his nurses mistook for unintelligible German.
We hear this message echoed yet again through the incessant squawking of the talking parrot in Robbins’ Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates (2000), saying—in a Portuguese accent—“People of the zee world, relax!”
When viewing these phrases (and Robbins’ work in general) through the prism of Crazy Wisdom, the degree to which this Eastern philosophy has influenced the author becomes much clearer. Actions, characters, dialogue, et al., that might have seemed whimsical, frivolous, or just plain hokey at the outset suddenly seem to make sense.
There are other ways in which Crazy Wisdom rears its kooky head in Tom Robbins’ writing: language—which is what the author is best known for. “His writing is simultaneously ironic and heartfelt. It has a kind of innocence while never shying away from the vividly erotic. Straining at the limits of metaphor and simile, pumping up plots to within a half-breath of exploding, Robbins hurtles himself over the top and outside the envelope, scandalizing hidebound traditionalists.”
Tom Robbins plays with words in a frequently amusing way that, like Crazy Wisdom itself, forces a kind of revelation on the reader, causing typical images to suddenly become extraordinary, exotic, and thought-provoking in a manner they never were before. “Wit and playfulness aren’t only serious, they’re a form of wisdom and a means of psychic survival,” Robbins says. “A comic sensibility can open secret doors that are closed to the sober and the prudent. I’ll go so far as to say that a seriously playful attitude represents humanity’s most effective transcendence of evil.”
The following descriptions are just a few examples of how Robbins sets a scene with “witty” and “playful” word combinations:
Louisiana in September was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air—moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh—felt as if it were being exhaled into one’s face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing. Honeysuckle, swamp flowers, magnolia, and the mystery smell of the river scented the atmosphere, amplifying the intrusion of organic sleaze. It was aphrodisiac and oppressive, soft and violent at the same time. In New Orleans, in the French Quarter, miles from the barking lungs of alligators, the air maintained this quality of breath, although here it acquired a tinge of metallic halitosis, due to fumes expelled by tourist buses, trucks delivering Dixie beer, and, on Decatur Street, a mass-transit motor coach named Desire. The only way to hang up on the obscene caller was to install air conditioning (Jitterbug).
On the subject of Egypt, Ellen Cherry was so vague she thought Ramses II was a Jazz piano player. From that, we might conclude that she was equally dumb about Jazz (Skinny Legs).
When one is on a pilgrimage to the Canyon of the Vaginas, one has to be careful about asking directions (Wild Ducks ).
Tom Robbins once revealed in an interview the content of a fan letter written by a woman who worked in a “scientific field”, and whom he’d never met. She wrote: “Your books make me think, they make me laugh, they make me horny, and they make me aware of the wonder of everything in life.” Robbins followed that by saying, “And I thought, hey, that’s pretty great. That’s perfect, in fact. You can’t ask any more from a novel than that.”
Given that Crazy Wisdom ideals have developed independently of one another in a multitude of cultures throughout history and the world labeling Tom Robbins’ spiritual influence as a purely Eastern one may be somewhat a matter of debate. Certainly, “clowning appears in many contexts, especially among primal peoples, as an ingredient of sacrality. In many cases the sacred is treated as incomplete, if not inadequate, without due reverence for folly and the clown as the manifestation of folly.”
However, we know that Tibetan Buddhists cultivated the concept to a high degree and even gave it its current name. At any rate, it is safe to say that Crazy Wisdom is a spiritual boxcar not generally hitched to the Western train of thought. Of course, examples of Crazy Wisdom do abound in the modern West. They range from “Joris Karl Huysmans sewing his eyelids shut because he believed that at age thirty, he’d already seen so much it would take him the rest of his life to process it all, to Muhammad Ali dancing in his undershorts at the Houston Induction Center after committing a felony by refusing to be conscripted into the army. Unfortunately, however, Crazy Wisdom in the West is almost always devoid of a spiritual dimension.”
The reason for that, says Tom Boyd, a scholar on the phenomenology of sacred folly, is that the term Western “thought” is basically tantamount to the term Western “Christendom”. Western Christendom does not recognize “the relationship between comedy and the sacred” the way that Eastern cultures do. He says, “Western Christendom has often been quite hostile, and always ambivalent, toward the comic representation of life.” To wit, farting may be funny (even uplifting), but you can’t do it in church; it’s simply inappropriate.
Herein lies the great irony of Western spirituality, adds Nisker, because Jesus Christ was, in every way, an ideal manifestation of the Crazy Wisdom archetype known as the fool. The fool is considered the most powerful of the four archetypes and the one with the most to teach. The Fool is also the first (and only unnumbered) card in the tarot deck:
He is outside the boundaries of number or sequence, outside all categories, beyond good and evil. Innocence is his trademark… Jesus, a Jew, denounced for their corruption and collaboration with the Romans the Jewish establishment of Judea. He chased the money changers out of the synagogue, gave up all his possessions, and preached to the lowest classes. There is little wonder why the authorities called him mad and put him to death. (Nisker)
Jesus was a fool! Today, you could no sooner make that statement in any Western church—and many public arenas, for that matter—than you could pass gas audibly and giggle from it in those very same meeting places. The Jesus-fool concept has largely vanished from Western thought, but, Nisker adds, there is still evidence of this antiquated notion lurking in plain sight.
As a testament to his power, the Fool is one of the few characters from the tarot deck to make it into our modern playing cards. He becomes the joker—always wild, and almost always welcome. Like the Fool, the joker is without number or trump… He has no specific value and so is of the greatest value. The joker is mightier than the kings and higher than the aces. (Nisker)
So the notion of the holy fool, and Crazy Wisdom in general, has been suppressed in Western culture. What does this mean for Tom Robbins, who says his goal as a writer has been “to twine images and ideas into big subversive pretzels of life” and create work that is “a fusion of prankish Asian wisdom, extra-dimensional Latin magic, and two-fisted North American poetic pizzazz?” Well, basically, Robbins says, it means a lot of negative book reviews in America and Europe, and a comparatively scant amount of scholarly attention given to him in relation to other writers. (I can vouch for the latter claim.)
“You see,” Tom Robbins tells one interviewer, “the underpinnings of my literary aesthetic are not anchored in Western tradition, and that’s the only tradition [literary critics] recognize and understand. They’re hemmed in by the narrowness of their experience. There’s nothing in their cultural background to prepare them to recognize, let alone embrace, the universe’s predilection for paradox and novelty. As they say in the Orient, ‘To the unenlightened, the God-laugh will always seem frivolous.’”
In an article published in Harper’s Magazine in 2004, Tom Robbins adds: “It’s good to bear [that] in mind when trying to comprehend the indignation with which the East Coast establishment greets work that dares to be both funny and deadly serious in the same breath. The left-handed path runs along terrain upon which the bowtie-sattvas find it difficult to tread. Their maps are inaccurate and they have the wrong shoes.”
The Pink Elephant
We have been discussing the influence of a Tibetan Buddhist philosophy on a contemporary American author and, bang-up job notwithstanding, I see no way of proceeding in good form that doesn’t involve mentioning the rather sizeable pink elephant that—bejeweled tusk to tail and swathed in temple paint—has been standing in the room with us the entire time, and which heretofore we have neglected to mention. That elephant, of course, is J.D. Salinger.
It is virtually impossible not to think of Salinger when discussing Buddhism and Western literature in the same conversation. Just as Robbins’ work is steeped in the tea of Crazy Wisdom, so is Salinger’s work permeated with Buddhist concepts (particularly Zen Buddhism), and we invariably see symptoms of crazy wisdom within that permeation.
Salinger’s Seymour Glass, for instance, is a classic example of one of the four major crazy wisdom archetypes: the holy fool, which is regarded as the “most potent of the archetypes and also the most capable teacher.” This puts Seymour in the same spiritual league as Jesus Christ. Indeed, Seymour is even referred to by his younger brother Buddy as “the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty.” In that same narration, Buddy continues to describe Seymour: “Surely he was all real things to us: our blue-striped unicorn, double-lensed burning glass, our consultant genius, our portable conscience, our one full poet and, inevitably, I think … our rather notorious mystic and unbalanced type.”
As revealed in the Glass family stories, Seymour is essentially a wise misfit whose “mysterious equanimity, which neither Buddy, nor Muriel, nor [any of those around him], nor apparently the majority of Salinger’s critics can understand, makes sense from a Taoist perspective” and thus, from a crazy wisdom perspective, as well. Despite Seymour’s quirky demeanor, or perhaps because of it, he can maintain intellectual and spiritual sway over the Glass family siblings even after death. In this sense, Seymour is immortal, in keeping with the notion that he is a Crazy Wisdom archetype.
“I can’t even sit down to a goddamn meal, to this day, without first saying the Four Great Vows (of Buddhism) under my breath,” says Zooey, speaking of Seymour’s influence, “and I’ll lay any odds you want that Franny can’t, either.”
Meditation master and scholar Chögyam Trungpa describes the overwhelming energy of a holy fool that is radiated and projected onto those around him so that his influence is unavoidable, just as Seymour’s influence was inevitable and irreversible for the Glass family siblings. He says:
When a crazy wisdom person decides to work with you, when he decides to liberate you, you become his victim. You have no way to run away from him. If you try to run backward, that space has been already covered; if you try to run forward, that space has also been covered. You have a feeling of choicelessness…. So the crazy wisdom teacher is somewhat dictatorial. The space he creates is thronged, filled with a strong charge of heavy enlightenment, heavy primordial sanity.
Of course, as Buddy Glass puts it, “the hallmark most commonly identifying this person is that he very frequently behaves like a fool, even an imbecile.”
In Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, there is a character, “The Chink”, whose behavior and function as a spiritual guide closely parallels that of Salinger’s Seymour Glass and a crazy wisdom fool in general. The Chink lives an isolated life in a cave up on Shiwash Ridge overlooking the Rubber Rose Ranch, a place that, among other things, has “the finest outhouse in the Dakotas”. He can be heard singing from a distance, “Ho-Ho, He-He, Hum-Hum”, and can be seen dancing naked at times and waving his genitals at the cowgirls.
Granted, Seymour Glass never does this in any of Salinger’s stories, not literally, at any rate, but the idiosyncratic nature of the two characters is highly comparable. So, too, is their imparting of wisdom. The Chink subjects Sissy Hankshaw to numerous lengthy discourses on time and the universe, some of which she comprehends and some of which she fails to understand completely. Robbins describes this as “the hit and miss of the cosmic pumpkin”.
So, in terms of Eastern influence, there are parallels between Tom Robbins and J.D. Salinger; however, there are also noteworthy dissimilarities. We find upon closer examination that the thematic link between Robbins and Salinger is very thin, where Buddhism is concerned; so thin, in fact, that one would have trouble walking that line for very long before falling flat on one’s dharma.
To begin with, Salinger’s use of religion (both Buddhism and Christianity, for that matter) is much more overt and technical than Robbins’. Case in point are the Glass family stories, where we get a strong dose of what one scholar dubs as Salinger’s “Orientalism” in the form of Taoist parables (or koans), and repeated mention of various Buddhist concepts, including the aforementioned Four Great Vows, which Zooey recites verbatim in a dialogue with his mother: “However innumerable beings are, I vow to save them; however inexhaustible the passions are, I vow to extinguish them; however immeasurable the Dharmas are, I vow to master them; however incomparable the Buddha-truth is, I vow to attain it.”
This sort of literal transcription of Buddhist spiritual ideals is not likely to be found in any of Tom Robbins’ novels. With Robbins, we get playful allusions to dharmic principles woven into the plot, see them acted out by his characters, and hear the echo of crazy wisdom precepts in phrases like “the Infinite Goof” and “It is what it is. You are what you it. There are no mistakes.”
However, Robbins never explicitly identifies any of them as belonging to a particular philosophy, Eastern or otherwise. The concepts are simply presented, unnamed and without wrappers, like chocolates from a heart-shaped Valentine’s box. It is up to the reader to look at the legend on the underside of the lid (that is if the reader can locate it) and draw conclusions about their philosophical origins. Indeed, is only through interviews and magazine articles that Robbins has ever uttered the words “crazy wisdom” in relation to his novels.
Granted, Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” follows the same path of subtlety upon which Robbin’s treads, but Salinger does not stop there; rather, he begins there with Seymour and proceeds to elucidate Seymour’s nature with the heavy-handed religiosity that we see in later Glass family stories. Thus, “Bananafish” is somewhat anomalous in that respect, and it is not subtlety (at least in matters Buddhistic and Seymour) for which Salinger is generally regarded.
Also, along with Salinger’s religious explicitness, there comes an element of strict adherence to those precepts among the Glass Family siblings—Buddy doing his share of familial indoctrination as a result of his proximity to Seymour, Franny reciting the “Jesus Prayer”, Zooey with his Four Vows—for whom, “instead of being enlightening, the four vows have become obsessive”—and Seymour, himself, committing suicide.
Seymour, in his roundabout way, is essentially on a Buddha-esque journey to eliminate all the pain that comes with being in existence. He is following what is referred to as the Noble Eightfold Path to enlightenment. “Seymour achieves nirvana by living a good life and ending anything that causes suffering. He is able to attain nirvana by committing suicide.” For Seymour, letting go of that final bit of suffering requires letting go of life on this particular plane of existence, hitting what Robbins calls “the corporeal delete key”/
This marks the point of greatest divergence between Tom Robbins and J.D. Salinger. None of Robbins’ characters have, or would, ever go about things quite so drastically, nor would they adhere so stringently to any one belief, even Crazy Wisdom. Whereas Salinger more or less plays by the rules of Buddhism in his stories, Robbins treats the rules of Crazy Wisdom more like a New York City taxi driver regards lane stripes and traffic laws: as loose guidelines that can be veered away from at any moment he feels the need.
“Orthodox Buddhism is really just as rigid as orthodox Christianity,” Robbins says in an interview. “It allows a little more room for growth, but not a great deal more.” In another interview with Shambhala Sun magazine, Robbins offers the following message, which further illustrates the contrast between his and Salinger’s interpretation of Buddhist doctrines:
I’m a word-slinger, not a scholar; I have a monkey mind, not a monk mind… Unlike Zen, crazy wisdom is not a practice, it’s an attitude. I’m attracted to Zen’s focus on absolute freedom and all-embracing oneness, its reverence for nature, and its respect for humor. When Zen or tantric masters visit North America, they’re often astonished by how earnest, how overly serious, Westerners are about their spiritual practice. They’ll go to a zendo in Minnesota, for example, and wonder aloud why nobody there is laughing. To be uptight about one’s Zen practice, to become attached to it, is to miss the whole point of it; one might as well hook up with one of the fear-based, authoritarian, guilt-and-redemption religions.
In Jitterbug Perfume, we see an ancient Bohemian king named Alobar become obsessed with achieving immortality—not death—through a blend of unique mediation and sexual activity. Alobar seeks enlightenment in the opposite way from Seymour; he is on a quest to stave off his demise permanently and even “teach death some manners” in the process.
Were Tom Robbins ever to kill off one of his central characters via self-infliction, I imagine he would do it less in the manner of Seymour Glass and more in the fashion of Charlie Parker, who died laughing at a juggler on TV, which was, after all, a very crazy wisdom-esque way for “Bird” to fly the worldly coop.
To avoid concluding this essay with the death of Charlie Parker, a decidedly blue note to end on, I will leave it with a pair of quotes and, in doing so, furnish yet another example of a Crazy Wisdom archetype. Chögyam Trungpa described Crazy Wisdom as “an innocent state of mind that has the quality of early morning—fresh, sparkling, and completely awake”.
Decades before Trungpa made that statement, Jack Kerouac wrote in a poem named for the late Jazz musician Charlie Parker: “And the expression on his face was as calm, beautiful and profound as the image of the Buddha represented in the East. The lidded eyes. The expression that says ‘all is well.’ This was what Charlie Parker said when he played: ‘All is well.’ He had the feeling of early in the morning, like a hermit’s joy…”
Works Cited
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Geddes, Dan. “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues – Language Over Story”. The Satirist. November, 1999.
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Popular Contemporary Writers. Lorena Laura Stookey. Greenwood Press. 1997
Jammoe, comment on “Tom Robbins”, The Urban Dictionary, comment posted 10 October 2005.
Kerouac, Jack. “Charlie Parker” Poetry for the Beat Generation, Audio recording. Hanover Records. 1959.
Lundquist, James. “A Cloister of Reality: The Glass Family in J. D. Salinger“. Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1979.
Matuz, Roger. Contemporary Literary Criticism. 74, Daniel G. Marowski. Gacl. 1993.
Miller, Andrea. “Wisdom of Rebels.” Shambala Sun. July, 2008.
Nisker, Wes. The Essential Crazy Wisdom. Ten Speed Press. 2001.
O’Connor, Dennis L. “J.D. Salinger’s Religious Pluralism: The Example of Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters.” The Southern Review. April 1984.
O’Connell, Nicholas. At the Field’s End: Interviews With 22 Pacific Northwest Writers. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 1998.
Reising, Russell. “An Interview with Tom Robbins.” Contemporary Literature 42, no. 3. 2001.
Richards, Linda. “Tom Robbins.” January Magazine. June, 2000.
Robbins, Tom. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. Random House, Inc., 1976, page 46.
Robbins, Tom. “In Defiance of Gravity: Writing, Wisdom, and the Fabulous Club Gemini”. Harper’s Magazine. September, 2004.
Robbins, Tom. Jitterbug Perfume. [Printed on inside back-flap.] Random House, Inc. 1984.
Robbins, Tom. Skinny Legs and All.Random House, Inc., 1990, page 126.
Robbins, Tom. Villa Incognito.Random House, Inc., 2003.
Salinger, J.D. Franny and Zooey. Little, Brown and Company. 1961.
Salinger, J.D. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour an Introduction. Little, Brown and Company. 1959.
Trungpa, Chogyam. Crazy Wisdom. Dharma Ocean Series. Sherab Chodzin. Shambhala Publications, Inc. 2001.