Still Life with Woodpecker
• List item Still Life with Woodpecker is a sort of a love story that takes place inside a pack of Camel cigarettes. It reveals the purpose of the moon, explains the difference between criminals and outlaws, examines the conflict between social activism and romantic individualism, and paints a portrait of contemporary society that includes powerful Arabs, exiled royalty, and pregnant cheerleaders. It also deals with the problem of redheads.From the Trade Paperback edition.
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3recommend
5mentions
5people
2010–2021years
60% recommend40% neutral
Mentions per year
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- "Still Life With Woodpecker" by: Tom (fuckin) Robbins!
Defined "Outlaw", a philosophy for dope folk.
- "The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared" by Jonas Jonasson (Love it -- hilarious, witty, a pleasure to read)
"Kafka on the Shore" by Haruki Murakami (Strange good -- but I'm not sure if I liked it as much as liked "The Wild Sheep Chase")
"One hundred years of solitude" by Gabriel García Márquez (Very slow, had a hard time honestly)
"Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn (A fast, exciting read but found the ending unsatisfying. But would recommend)
"Still Life with Woodpecker" by Tom Robbins (Fantastic prose, fantastical characters and situations. Will read more from him)
And for technical books, I read "The Art of Agile Development". Was alright.
- Oh jeez, this'll be tough. I'll start by saying that Tom Robbins "Still Life with Woodpecker" inspired me in the post-undergraduate world greatly.
http://www.amazon.com/Still-Life-Woodpecker-Tom-Robbins/dp/0...
Leaving college with such powerful to convictions of social evolution, scientific pragmatism, and the power of Art as a mental practice left me with some hard facets of reality to contend with. This is the struggle of one of the the main characters, Leigh-Cheri. She is a wide eyed idealist who is thoroughly disenfranchised with the way the systems in the world abuse and exploit people.
She meets a mad-bomber outlaw named Woodpecker, a revolutionary with bordering mythical aspirations. Their affair is a wild journey of growth as characters and citizens, not of a royal bloodline or America, but of Earth and the ideas, and actions, which make this world a vibrantly beautiful place. Most important book of the year for me, with close runners up:
"The Nature of Code" by Daniel Shiffman. Excellent book on simulation of the natural, chaotic world in the Processing programming language. http://natureofcode.com/book/
"Nine Kinds of Naked" by Tony Vigorito, which deals with the primacy of synchronicity and numeric harmony in the lives of twirling, interrelated characters. http://www.amazon.com/Nine-Kinds-Naked-Tony-Vigorito/dp/0156...
Good reads everyone!
- words often do not retain their original meaning. No modern state practices declaring people outlaws therefore if the word outlaw retained its original meaning the only reason we would have to use it would be in history books as an antiquated term, but it is used quite often.
Thus outlaw has new meanings, the most common one is criminal, but some people seem to go with a meaning very like that of Tom Robbins, from Still Life with Woodpecker:
"The difference between a criminal and an outlaw is that while criminals frequently are victims, outlaws never are. Indeed, the first step toward becoming a true outlaw is the refusal to be victimized. All people who live subject to other people's laws are victims. People who break laws out of greed, frustration, or vengeance are victims. People who overturn laws in order to replace them with their own laws are victims. ( I am speaking here of revolutionaries.) We outlaws, however, live beyond the law. We don't merely live beyond the letter of the law-many businessmen, most politicians, and all cops do that-we live beyond the spirit of the law. In a sense, then, we live beyond society. Have we a common goal, that goal is to turn the tables on the 'nature' of society. When we succeed, we raise the exhilaration content of the universe. We even raise it a little bit when we fail."
I personally hate that usage, because I knew a guy who would go around with a self satisfied smirk declaring that he was an outlaw because he sold a bit of weed and believed in freedom whereas other people who were doing drugs were just criminals. I expect he probably got busted and ratted out all his friends, because I have a low opinion of outlaws I guess.
- Who knows how to make love stay?
“When we're incomplete, we're always searching for somebody to complete us. When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we're still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go on and on--series polygamy--until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimensions to our lives, we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment. Nobody else can provide it for us, and to believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to program for eventual failure every relationship we enter.” -- Tom Robbins, "Still Life With Woodpecker"
