Tom Robbins, my favorite-est author ever, on the (in)famous Pacific Northwest Rain*:
On the mainland, a rain was falling. The famous Seattle rain. The thin, gray rain that toadstools love. The persistent rain that knows every hidden entrance into collar and shopping bag. The quiet rain that can rust a tin roof without the tin roof making a sound in protest. The shamanic rain that feeds the imagination. The rain that seems actually a secret language, whispering, like the ecstasy of primitives, of the essence of things.
Yeah, that’s it.
*from his 1980 novel Still Life with Woodpecker
ahhhhhh . . . one of my favorite books! i miss the old tom robbins . . . his last couple of offerings have been strange . . . you think so???
hee hee – hard to tell for me – i read “villa incognito” on my first trip to india, and “wild ducks flying backwards” (his collection of essays and short stories) on my third and most recent trip
hard to separate the strangeness of the book from the wonderful strangeness of the place
though “fierce invalids” and “villa” were definitely a departure from his earlier works, i loved them just the same…
and “wild ducks” was just such a cool look back through his development as a writer