Interview with Tom Robbins, Tape 3

yes they are for thirteen months i taught me earlier this afternoon air force no i had absolutely no interest in cajun urology and my students and really no interest in learning because the pilots in the south korean air force approached whether very differently in american politics but their pre storm system out there is shown on the charts an american pilot would circumnavigate the korean pilots fly right through it has a certain to do that in a way was no reason for them to know about the weather they need to know that the existence of a storm system so since another was particular interested in the subject how we operate on black market rent together not enough indians peanuts that were primarily toilet articles and

cosmetics and cigarettes but a little later being that most of the stuff was going into china what was then known as red china saw a figure that for thirteen months i was supply and mao tse tung one is called a toothpaste in it i was working for a zone for days off and i had access to the weather station of course in every pilot who flew out of that airport to japan had to be cleared through the weather stations i was very easy the hitch arrives early for days pitcher in japan have a girlfriend in tokyo there's a stigma once a wasabi university where somehow i don't think that was the main follow i win my attending classes are wasabi interested here it is

you mean the girlfriend says a lot i guess for me where you really go up an rv you know that was fascinating and i took some classes there from i'm a mandarin japanese aesthetics in unspent while time of sermon try and absorb some of the culture in japan announced over attracted to japanese culture japanese and friends and i mean my life is a french living with japanese subtitles well i don't really remember was five years all of the time i literally own decided to become a writer at age five the loan limit also taught myself to

about myself to read at age five was i couldn't wait to get into books and i tell myself or i saw been at this a long time and on my own time sixty years old mill i've been at this for fifty five years so i don't know what on one level at least i know when i'm going on another level and not have a clue how like it that what you i didn't say it started i couldn't course right very well at age five i mean by american mike you mention it ms aaron it five stars for my mother and my mother was very good about stop and whatever's test she might be performing and take dictation when the news struck me she was

always ready to take it down but been a frustrated writer herself she would sometimes make little changes and now what i had dictated to make it in her opinion there and she would read it back to me and i always knew she had changed so much as a single word and i would for temperamental issue traced it back the way i had it and i told the story to my editor the new yorker some years ago and i said my god romans yemen change in forty years they're very curious i did not want to

evict him to write them all until i had my own voice so i waited i had a friend who was always a tony owens it's just to start running and all but you know you could be another foreigner and wildly enough water and would be another a body and wanted to come in that have a singular voice and i am course of a few young people do and i think world what finally gave me my voice after many years of writing and reading in was the phenomenon of the cultural phenomenon of the sixties because

i was reading things about that well known writers norman mailer's center were writing about the sixties and i could say that that they were really miss in the essence up they were passionate from the old reportorial perspective of the euro or a family of appointed new word in the style of social realist but what was going on a million in the sixties didn't lend itself to socialism i was much more subjective than that much more internal and had to do and a much more direct way with things that were highly unfamiliar in american or western culture so i thought you know i could write a

cassette and all in the sixties that attacks it from the inside out that instead of writing about the sixties tries to recreate the sixties on page and that's what i set out to do and i think to a certain extent i succeeded maybe succeed too well because every sense you know that book was published twenty six years ago twenty six years ago and so well there are some lazy non thinking people who try to pigeonhole may as a sixties writer i'm quite annoyed and koren owens well you know i didn't die in nineteen seventy and still online in and dealing with those issues are permanent today hamish is which i think are universal

and eventually nothing about my style or my content today there hasn't anything to do with the sixties and that has not been true for years to many people in the media are just lazy a pigeon hole for humans they stick you in there not a window becomes increasingly obsolete there too lazy intellectually to take you out and re examine human sewage are really about it has no i don't know how mccain won and to see what i am what i am and what i'm going around that's a little too complicated to explain you know the worst thing that can happen the second worst thing that can happen for his analysis the worst thing that can happen is self analysis you met your

soul which lies at boise airport saturday and said it happened another roadside attraction another roadside attraction he'd walk this year but zoe do is move away from me and show the cover the bottom and then come back here lot of tricks is visiting your eyes are you're welcome ari with conor is in another is a direction you know it's a list as a

ballet i will think what color is referred to reemerge this mythical roadsides it was actually several i when i know i'm closer to conway and the color they are so it really is i was into to actively attracted to the northwest all still a minimal cell phone perhaps it was because i i could hear and feel the reigning from there and my internal climate is a rainy one of which is not to say sen lemieux of

wonder and said why me but i think it's always been raining in my head and i can i came out here moved out here and found that it really was a frequent bone now precipitation frequent foreign rain i was so delighted and i realize that i had no matched my internal environment my external environment the trees to work you into mayor i love trees and all things considered i'd prefer trees the people but i don't think of myself as a northwest writer anointed necessarily think of myself of the american writer my books are become the distant past few years quite popular abroad in greece for example

men who would have greece is environment that was more foreign to this one in greece that their own and then tell them and they only live in american authors entire body of work is available in theory on their pop and there's also in italy and even more so in australia is a long but that isn't in english so it's to be expected but so i don't consider myself an interplanetary alike these labels let's hear it

we're at to what connor for the first time to visit a couple words to ruin your job and was then married to their doors thomas i've been looking for an excuse to come out because at the time i was a cricket trying our criticism for the seattle times and i knew that and a connor had played the role that our history of this region so i came up one day with ray collins the cartoonist from the pri who i met

at the blue moon we went to visit the artist in young man came in said my parents our own party the night you're all invited and so we went in mr biddle for masses just outside town there was a table long long table laden the food including films and i had never eaten before like artichoke and avocados among an avocado once enrichment to nome peel it and tried to eat it almost broke my keys off answer the guards never tried another month and realize that it wasn't right people in the south in those days didn't know anything about avocado the merger they will roast wild ducks line up on the table a while pigeons wild mushrooms all these exotic footed

sense of very interesting people with a lot of the artists and the man approaches on him is what he was a fisherman and his wife was a nurse that they own for patrons of the arts in that word the arts made by the eyes because they were interesting people well most of the night and it was quite a while quite wonderful and i bonded with those people except that came up my surrogate parents and again mcconnell a car every weekend in spin two weeks in the summer and when i finally own and found my voice as i said and it was time to go off and start work my first book i wanted to come to lower them into a car but i couldn't find any place here

that was bacon or chicken of summer down the self been instead which physical is very much like a carnival intellectually and spiritually almost diametrically opposite but i've read a storefront down there and lived in the back of it for eight dollars a month not at that eight dollars a month to my girlfriend no work that bridges restaurant in raymond and which is a seafood restaurant and she brought home a leftover slammed by monsters in limbo for slots de mare and butler says the festival wrote that book himself been here which is probably better because i like some distance between him i said that i associate to literally a finite so i can get to the essence better through the conduit of my imagination than just an idea so the very week that i

finished the book and drove so what kanner found a place for miles that was april fools' day nineteen seventy always make my major moves on april first and seven or gardens a lonely canyon fire here is there's it is says it because they were just that when i move to le carre it was a hard working little tugboat town and fishing village in which b a number of quite competent artist lived because it

was beautiful it was peaceful it was private and it was cheap and mrs grace had come here first and this period at a phalanx of understanding he had done he broke the ice here in terms of acceptance so it was a small town in which you could be yourself to the limit of yourself you could dress every would be board chairman paul ryan addressed the center address an eccentric behavior and he would have to vote or works at the fine that kind of acceptance and the components so it elop offer it's changed enormously since those days nowadays it's a it has a bad case of boutique freer

and the areas quite frankly just another roadside attraction i live i have friends here but i live here and of course i still love the beauty of this in the valley but i live your parlor the car as of my house if i couldn't move my hells with trees in tech are probably wouldn't learn leave in an instant but they are as medea it's very many of the euro and the problems and the liabilities the larger city and that none of the amenities i know that at a noun here in our

sense of where you're going to say i am an american socialize much with him and weissman those early days when i was first coming up here's song of all parties i've admired his work on my or the fact that he has a mild effect the guy anderson is it is skewed fame has not pursued fame and fortune has though kepler distance from the centers of ambition as a lone anonymous amount of artistic integrity another maybe that was an example for me i don't know i mean i certainly is staying as far away as possible from the literary centers and no avoid the literary politics

at all cost less at duke your work and a more private were more personal work or when you stay away from the centers of ambition in new york or in los angeles area man to a certain extent in seattle if you travel say for writer travels in literary circles then used the emphasis starts to move from the work to the way the work is received you're more concerned with what people are saying about your work then you are about the work itself and that's if the emphasis i think is extremely dangerous to writer mistook us at the lawyer says melissa it's very misty snow skier nikki

or so when all those things were going on in an hour at that time it is that they were using stones as the games or any and i asked these things don't think they did i don't think that's true well no no i know all about that i'm all about that than the man who headed the program became a very close friend of mine and james daley who was a year ahead of the parma pharmacology the people who took lsd it a riskier washington as part as part of their organized program we'll talk about students and later did in their own time on their own time or first of all graduate students and all volunteers and more carefully carefully screened

before they were allowed to ingest leader and that that was not dangerous it's absolutely not dangerous so are the less and i used to know where the cia used it given it to american soldiers without their knowledge now that could create some severe problems and it did but the university of washington did not have it very widespread are long lasting our program a mix of psychedelic experimentation our but while a deer that was conducted and a very very responsible manner you know i have a pipeline to them drug prohibition on talk

about that town will say this now the lsd that i had in nineteen sixty three was directly from sandoz chemicals in switzerland so it was the absolute purist stuff has ever been made and it meets me by way of the laboratories of the unrest in washington unofficially though i loved the record and i had never been on anything the day that i took it and it was the one day in my life and i would not trade for any other there were some of the most rewarding live my life and certainly a watershed we were part of

that first experiences the vital one home after that his men women a refresher course is because humans do tend to forget been in the most overwhelming of experiences knows a psychedelic some other and damon talk about drinks because it's so much less understanding of the subject in our culture and more today than has ever been done because there is now a multibillion dollar anti drug industry flourish in this country and remain more lives actually than drugs themselves but down i'm actually hurt weary magazines and vanity fair recently somebody made somewhere from steer lsd ethics and no such thing as an lsd and it cannot become addicted to lsd because first of all it's not physically

addicted and is not psychologically addict about it because it's too powerful and overwhelming sight some genuine are repaid every other day reading every other week you think you can't get into some of the incredible percent to sixty they i think rome the value of psychedelic say for an artist is that they eradicate boundaries and nine you start it is a way of introducing a short time in a rather dramatic fashion to the fact that there are many more levels of reality in existence then you had heretofore thought possible people around them had a psychedelic compare can only compare it to be and drop and advocacy

officer to be in drug alcohol works on the mine like this are like alcohol to it closes down the brain psychedelic is open it up and the rational part in

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