GIVE ROMANCE A CHANCE

A Belated Appraisal of “Still Life With Woodpecker,” by Tom Robbins

“Unwilling to wait for mankind to improve, the outlaw lives as if that day were here.”

—Bernard Mickey Wrangle

In 1980, Ronald Reagan became POTUS, MTV turned negative one, & Tom Robbins published Still Life With Woodpecker. Peradventure, your mother was a Tom Robbins fan when you were growing up. You remember his books & their quirky titles — Skinny Legs And All, Jitterbug Perfume — & Uma Thurman as a hitchhiker with prosthetically enlarged thumbs in the film adaptation of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. You may have borrowed your mom’s copy of Even Cowgirls the novel, on the pretext of reading it, but being an adolescent at the time, all you really did was flip through the pages looking for sex scenes.

So, you nearly missed the Tom Robbins express train to cult literary Nirvana. Luckily, in your present life as a grownup in a whole new millennium, you chance upon a rack-size paperback of Still Life With Woodpecker, from a free pile or tiny library, & take it home to read. Suddenly, your mother’s enthusiasm all those years ago comes back, & makes perfect sense. You are soon hooked by this winsome yarn about a wayward modern princess named Leigh-Cheri, on the cusp of adulthood, who breaks away from her punctilious parents for a fateful sojourn on Maui.

“Who knows how to make love stay?” That’s the question asked early on & woven through the novel. We are invited to ponder the fleeting & elusive quality of love, why we can’t hold on to the first rush of connection & stay in love, forever. At the core of Still Life With Woodpecker is a love story, irreverently told by the inimitable Tom Robbins, comprising equal parts oldfashioned storybook romance, Greco-Shakespearean tragedy, Lady & the Tramp, & Bonnie & Clyde. This love story begins & ends with a bang, literally, in the form of dynamite. It dispenses with sentiment, skips over courtship, & cuts to the chase. If you’re a reader of warped sensibility who usually spurns romance, given what it signifies as a modern literary genre, here is an alternative romance that may suit your taste.

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6.7

NOT ANOTHER EARTHQUAKE!, he yelled,

standing up

and shaking all over like Elvis

his family gathered around the dinner table

doing their best to ignore him

as he grabbed a broom

from the hall closet

and ran around jiggling all the light fixtures

on the ceiling.

When it was over

he sat back down to

dinner.

Passing the dinner rolls,

a perfect gentleman.

The threat of aftershocks

ever present.

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Try Smile

                     When you labor from dusk to dawn

                     Sleeping only for some hours till morn,

                     When you watch your hands tremble from cramp

                     And cold sweat makes your cloth damp,

                    When a trace of grin darkens your face

                     And in gloom blues you seek solace,

                     When you watch vain results pile:

                     Still from within, try a smile.

                     When for a thousand life pays a buck

                     And you feel nothing seems to work,

                     When you lie on the brink of desperation

                     Seeking your way through strong meditation,

                     With closed eyes, yet seeking, all you can find

                     And thousand thoughts flood your pale mind,

                     As fickle fortune ease you where you lie,

                     Invictus you are, when you smile.

                     Against the fierceness of a million raging storms,

                     And the cataclysm raining down to burn,

                     Against the future that seem very bleak,

                     And the fiascos making your bones creak,

                     As the moon reflects in perfect radiance

                     Against the damp night in sweet defiance,

                     The bitterness that engulf you like bile

                     Can you courageously fight, with a smile.

                     For I know a smile can:

                     With the fury of ten thousand swords

                     Pierce through the marrow of mocking words;

                     With the warm Aura of the sun

                     Draw you positive people for your sun

                     With the attractiveness of a maiden

                     Get you prompt help for a farthing;

                     Cause you to sing while tackling the thing

                     And do what you thought you couldn’t.

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1. Unrequited Love

Lonely teardrops flow through my eyes,

dampening my aching heart

that beats only for you beloved

as we are drifted apart.

A restless thought gnaws at my mind_

When will our restless souls meet?

The trepidation of uncertainty

numbs my senses.

As I feel a kiss of your breath,

a rapturous joy envelops me

drowning me in a tumultuous ocean,

flowing through my being.

My feelings are tearing me apart

like the waves that treacherously depart

from the bed of the sifting sands.

Haunting thoughts of you that lie deep within

linger on unabatedly.

I ponder, I brood, I moan.

A warm silence palpitates and sweeps

through the flickering, aromatic candlelight.

I pause to wonder_

Could you be thinking of me too?

The magical moments of our love enshrined, revisited.

The passion of our love unrequited.

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Welcome to June’s issue of Synchronized Chaos Magazine.

This issue illustrates that to a point we can choose how to interpret the world around us. As with a children’s connect-the-dots picture, the facts of life may to some extent be established, but we have some say over the connections and conclusions we draw from them.

Poet Vijay Nair draws once more upon classical Greek mythology, with a homage to the story of Pygmalion and Galatea, where a man creates and falls in love with a statue of an idealized female figure. In the same way, we all create and embrace our own ideals, as we come up with our own concepts of what is beautiful and important to focus on in life.

Some of this month’s writers are sincere in their appreciation for the world. Joan Beebe’s poetry celebrates birds in flight, stars in the nighttime sky, and the world after sunset, with a wish for humans to act with care towards each other in light of so much natural beauty. Mimi Mathis honors veterans from World War II in a piece inspired by oral history interviews she conducted.

Their genuine words contrast with the cynicism inherent in Michael Marrotti’s short story lampooning an over-the-top writers’ workshop and J.J. Campbell’s more serious poetry that provides small snapshots of people with broken lives.

Mahbub’s poetry selections this month remind us of life’s impermanence. We aren’t going to be here forever, and neither are our loved ones, so we may as well choose to make the most of the time that we do have.

Elizabeth Hughes, in her monthly Book Periscope review column, shows us the writing of a woman who has done that. Darrah Perez, an author and performance artist from the Wind River Native reservation in Wyoming, has given us three collections of poetry and prose that describe her journey through life as she overcame addiction and other obstacles to be able to impart wisdom to others.

Elizabeth Hughes also reviews Joe Klingler’s new suspense novel Tune Up, about the young female San Francisco police detective Kandy and her older Inuit partner Qiqig’s work on a homicide that intersects with the story of Mylin, a talented violinist. Crime solving inevitably involves ‘connecting the dots.’

J.D. DeHart offers up thoughts in the form of little vignettes reminiscent of paintings, slices of life from unusual angles. We see calm strength through a gorilla keeper’s eyes, opened minds as a family comes to full understanding of their mother’s life and stature, self-critique as a person realizes that archetypes of people in distress speak more to his own need to rescue than to those others, pity for those whose human foibles are recorded electronically for posterity – and children, once grown, who take control and begin creating their own stories, shaping their own mythologies independent of the fairy tales of previous generations.

We hope that this issue helps empower you to develop and act upon a worldview that energizes and inspires you.