The Love Parade, the Blues Festival, Webzine 2005, antiwar protests, and that remarkably sunny weather that creeps into San Francisco during this time of the year didn’t stop about 250 people from gathering at the All Saints Church to listen to Tom Robbins read from his newest book, Wild Ducks Flying Backwards — an event sponsored by the Booksmith. The crowd consisted mostly of people in their twenties and early thirties, with a few hoary-haired holdouts that had somehow kept their humor and idiosynchratic faith while flaunting sartorial garb from the L.L. Bean catalog: no mean feat by anyone’s standards.

I had hoped to get Tom Robbins booked on the Bat Segundo Show, but while the people at Bantam were more than accommodating, it wasn’t in the cards. As Robbins himself explained to the crowd, he had recently had surgery in his right eye and had recently been the victim of “a Category 5 dental emergency.” This resulted in Robbins, at times, speaking out of the corner of his mouth. Robbins warned the audience that he “sounded like a cross between Gomer Pyle and Boy George.” Nevertheless, he still maintained the traces of his North Carolina drawl with a deadpan timbre, speaking at a measured pace and pausing to shout specific words into the mike for emphasis.

A few words on the new book: While the title shares the exuberance of Robbins’ previous tomes, this book collects short pieces that Robbins had racked up over the years. There are travel articles, “tributes” (more like over-the-top paeans, a few of them from 1967) to the likes of Ray Kroc, Nadja Salemo-Sonnenberg and redheads, an extremely mixed bag of “stories, poems and lyrics” (the less said about the poems, the better), “musings & critiques” and finally various responses to questions. In form, the book reminded me of Douglas Adams’ The Salmon of Doubt; the difference, of course, being that Robbins isn’t dead. While it’s a bit odd to experience Robbins in short form, causing one to reconfigure one’s head for unexpected ends (often after a mere paragraph), like The Salmon of Doubt, it’s still an interesting portal into Robbins’ thought processes. Just don’t pencil in the entire afternoon. You’re likely to knock this puppy off in a few hours.

Robbins was dressed in a grey suit that was slightly rumpled, although just crisp enough for a public appearance, and a black tee with the portrait of a cherubic green boy with crimson devil’s horns (the cultural connection momentarily eludes me). On his right hand, there was an extremely large and extremely round watch. He only took off his shades during the reading to reveal hounddog eyes surrounded by the deep circular recesses of age. But he kept the shades on during the Q&A session and, of course, during the mad rush of Robbinites stampeding towards the book signing line. He had dark tousled hair that appeared to have been cut by a barber in a rush. Near the back of his head, several sharp spikes emerged like blades of jet grass hankering for a head-shaped lawnmower.

Since we were in a church, Robbins started off by observing that his two grandfathers were Southern Baptists and that, because of this, he felt that it was his disposition to be in the pulpit. He said that he had spent some time in the Haight dring 1967 and remarked upon the many things to do in San Francisco. By comparison, Robbins noted that in his Northwestern town, there was little to do but throw a stick of margarine in the microwave and watch the oysters and clams come in from the fields.

He noted that despite San Francisco having “the highest cost of living in the solar system,” he was shocked that a bohemian culture still existed. This was, he thought, very conducive to art. And Robbins said that he had experienced a sudden burst of artistic activity. He had started writing a script entitled Pyrex of the Caribbean, which involved maintaining an oven-ready backing condition on the high seas. His offering for reality television was Fungi for the Straight Guy, whereby the producers would take a conservative Republican and give him a syphillitic mushroom with a camera crew following him around. And he had devised a pitch for a dramatic television show, Helen Keller: Private Eye with the tagline: “She’s blind, she’s deaf, she’s mute, but she can smell a rat a mile away.”

He read a piece first written in 1967, in which he had just seen the Doors. He read another piece from 1967 about the Seattle arts community. He read the Sonnenberg piece, as well as a travel piece called “Canyon of the Vaginas,” a story called “Moonlight Whoopie Cushion Sonata” and his response to the question “How do you feel about America?” in which the original response had been written in 1997 and updated with a footnote for the book. During the course of these readings, he would frequently stop midway, saying “And this goes on and on….”

Then there were questions. Robbins was asked what his favorite novel was. He said that Still-Life with Woodpecker was his favorite to write because it was so short. Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, he found, “the structually most impressive.” Skinny Legs and All and Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates were “the ones I most admire,” although he said this with some uncertainty. Robbins doesn’t read his books after he’s written them. And this proved problematic when he had done several interviews in Italy. Unknowingly, Another Roadside Attraction had been republished. Unlike American journalists, Italian journalists actually read the book. So he was forced to respond to questions for a book he had not read in 25 years. He couldn’t obtain a copy of his own book, as the only ones available were in Italian.

An extremely obsessive Tom Robbins fan asked Robbins if Fierce Invalids from Hot Climates‘ Switters, seeing as how Switters appeared at the end of Villa Incognito, would be appearing in a future book. Robbins was clearly mystified by this and answered, “I haven’t been thinking about another book.” But he did mention that he was thinking of outsoucing the next book.

Robbins was asked which book he most admired this year. He said that he hadn’t been able to do much reading this year because of the eye. But he did say that the best books from the past 3-4 years were Louise Erdrich’s The Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse and Manil Suri’s The Death of Vichnu.

Questioned about his thoughts on the film version of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, he said, “It was a big hit in Hungary.” He noted that Gus Van Sant was such a fan of the language that he had decided, against Robbins’ suggestions, to present the book’s dialogue as is. Robbins felt the film spiraled downward after the “first ten to twelve exhilirating minutes” and that, given the stylized nature of the language and that people don’t talk like this in real life, he felt it was a mistake that Van Sant had made that decision. Particularly since the first words were said by an actress who had never acted before. “Not a lot of authors will tell you that,” he said, mentioning that most novelists want to retain the original feel of a book.

Robbins doesn’t base any of his characters on real people, save Jitterbug Perfume‘s Dannyboy, who was “50% Timothy Leary.” However, the aforementioned Switters was based in part on a CIA agent Robbins had met in Singapore. Despite being a member of one of the most evil agencies in the world and despite desiring to be posted in Southeast Asia so that he could have sex with underage girls, Robbins remarked that this agent was articulate, well-educated, charming, funny, and the kind of guy who would risk his life for you. It demonstrated to Robbins that human beings were more complex than we give them credit for. Thus, Switters was born.

There was another minor character who Robbins had based on a real person — a yuppie he knew in “one of those books.” Apparently, a note from the editor came back, indicating that this one character didn’t seem real and was “too artificial.” But in this instance, Robbins had essentially taken the details from ordinary life.

Asked about Finnegans Wake, Robbins again insisted that he was stuck on page 49 and that he understands it all. He said that it was “the most realistic novel ever written” and said that it was almost impossible to be real in fiction.

Once, Robbins was on a panel with John Irving. And Irving had remarked that he could never write a book until he knew the end. Robbins couldn’t believe this and said, “Isn’t that like working in a factory?”

Since this is San Francisco, there was one question asked about what Robbins’ stance was on polyamory. Robbins genuinely did not know what this was. He confused it with polygamy. After an explanation, Robbins said, “I had some experience with that. I tell ya, it only can lead to disaster.”

Last night, at Modern Times Bookstore, Norman Solomon spoke on his new book, War Made Easy. War Made Easy is organized by chapters headlined by statements that Solomon believes the media perpetuates (sample chapters include “If This War Is Wrong, the Media Will Tell Us” and “Opposing the War Means Siding with the Enemy”) . The book delves into the last forty years of media reaction to government policy, beginning with LBJ’s 1965 oft-overlooked invasion of the Dominican Republic and extending into the present Iraq conflict, using specific statements parsed directly from politicians and framed within the context of media theorists such as Susan Sontag and I.F. Stone.

Solomon had a chiseled face, a recurrent and well-timed smile that might easily disarm small animals, and an adorable mop of curly dark hair well-streaked with flecks of gray. He was dressed in a light blue oxford shirt and dark pants, attire indicative of a suave journalist, and wore a calculator watch on his left wrist, presumably to balance his checkbook when catching a flight to Tehran.

There were roughly 35 people in the crowd, predominantly activists and, to my dismay, predominantly men, leaving me to wonder why women weren’t showing up to this. Was it because the book had the word “war” in the title? About half of them were quite gray-haired, with the remaining half inhabiting a wide swath of temporal increments under the age thirty-five.

Solomon began by evoking the anonymous graffiti spray-painted in Bogota, “LET’S LEAVE PESSIMISM FOR BETTER TIMES,” which he suggested was applicable to living under the Bush Administration. He noted that only one newspaper (the Los Angeles Times) had reviewed his book so far, but that it had been selling comparatively well for a political hardcover.

Solomon honed in on 1965 because he says that before this, the United States was not invading countries at this time.

Solomon talked about the 1965 Dominican Republic invasion, pointing out how it was comparatively obscure to other conflicts of the day (such as Vietnam). But he noted that for some people, such an invasion is not obscure at all. There remains the legacy of U.S. involvement. He noted too that when visiting Iran, he could feel the effects of what happened in 1953 — not just with the coup, but of the spirit of Mossadegh, whose ousting he viewed as a particular tragedy because he was an educated and secular leader. And that this spirit led in part to the 1979 revolution. Solomon had recently visited Iran and, in a question later asked of him, he remarked that despite the repression, he encountered more of a civil society in Iran than in Iraq.

He bemoaned the inability for Americans to see world events from someone else’s vantage point, pointing out that government is unwilling to do this. The excuses behind the Dominican invasion were largely bogus. And as Solomon began looking into other conflicts, he remarked, “I couldn’t find any war not based on deception.”

He declared Tony Blair “the smart man’s George Bush” and dwelled upon how Blair’s recent statement that “the ability to use common sense” would be used to seek detractors. Solomon remarked that he thought it was the law’s duty to protect against what some people’s notions of what common sense entails.

Solomon pointed to a Department of Defense press conference, in which “Welcome back” had been lodged inexplicably in the middle of a transcript, without any indication that a segue had occurred. He saw in this transcript all sorts of references to “a modern-day Hitler” and said that if he ever released another edition of War Made Easy, that he would likely include a chapter describing this common association.

Specifically, Solomon zeroed in on three symbols of unreality that current media engages in: (1) denial of information (and here, Solomon quoted Aldous Huxley), (2) things that are not true that are taken as truisms, and (3) the numbing anaesthetic quality of media that forces media consumers to shut down.

Questions were then asked. Strangely, Solomon was asked to weigh in on the television show, Over There, to which he didn’t offer an opinion. When pressed for a prediction about U.S. involvement in Iran, he said that he believes there will be a very good chance of an air attack on Iran in the next year. He believes the troops should get out sooner rather than later. He said he didn’t buy the rationale that dicates, “Well, I didn’t support the war, but now we have to stay.”

Solomon remarked that he viewed NPR as the biggest tool of the Bush Administration because so many people trust it. He expressed distaste for a recent interview with Laurence Korb on All Things Considered, where the idea that we should have enlisted more people in the military is now being passed off as a liberal notion.

How did War Made Easy get published? Solomon likened the ability to get his book (and other related books) published to cracks in the wall. He remarked that the corporate dominance of book publishing is understated, but didn’t really elaborate too much on this. He suggested that word of mouth and grassroots support had done more for this book than anything else.

Tonight, at Modern Times, two University of Iowa grads read from two books issued from University of Iowa Press. Both books were remarkably compact (both around 135 pages) and both authors had won several awards. It is here that the similarities end between Marilyn Abildskov and Merrill Feitell. (Although, you see? They also have similar first names!)

Both read for about twenty minutes: Abildskov from The Men in My Country and Feitell from Here Beneath Low Flying Planes. Abildskov’s book is a highly personal memoir set in Japan about her days as an English teacher, while Feitell’s book is a collection of short stories (and winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award).

After their readings were up, the two answered a handful of questions, before Marilyn took the mike and began interviewing Merill and expressed how astonished she was at Merill’s output, before Merill confessed that writing her California-based novel was an uphill battle.

Even so, the two ladies demonstrated that there’s one heck of a demand for Iowa writers here in San Francisco. It was SRO by the time I got there, but I somehow managed to find a strange seat watching the two authors in profile. I felt a bit like Tom Landry, which is a strange sensation to feel at a reading.

Incidentally, I’ve read The Men in My Country and I’ve been trying to talk Marilyn (a friend of mine) into a Segundo interview. I made an impassioned pitch to her that she did indeed have things to say, but we’ll see.