Doctor of Pipes
strange and loving communiques from inside the briar brotherhood
by
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Rumpled bed sheets. The work clothing stacked in your hands is chin high as you move silently toward the early morning doorway and the stairs and the coffeepot and the hundred monstrous daytime things waiting to confront you. But something gives you pause. Your wife is lying there, still asleep. Maybe she has pajamas on. Maybe she doesn't. You stand there looking down, and as surely as you know anything, you know you are standing at the center of your world, true north on the compass of your life. And like all those unseen cosmic magnets tugging at all those quivering little campers' needles, you too feel a pull. It is the urge to remain, to resist the hubbub of the work-a-day world and climb back into bed. But then there is that counter-pull, the need to earn a paycheck for children who like to eat. So maybe you don't. Or maybe you do. But either way, the pull to stay is tangible.
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About the Book
Ralph William Larsen would have you think of his latest effort, DOCTOR OF PIPES, as you would a cracking good piece of hard candy, a Tootsie Pop of a book, its chewy center being the dog doody dull subject of briar pipe smoking. But as he asserts in his introduction to the very same book, yes, there are pipes here, lots of pipes. But for those who could care less about the stinky old habit of briar pipe smoking, yes again, there is lots more as well. As the author himself boldly asserts, when he's "writing well" - and we all must hope he is writing well here - the discussion of pipes is for him "but a safe harbor from which to sail forth toward some greater understandings."
Within the teeming pages of DOCTOR OF PIPES you will encounter Dud, the stoner brother-in-law who good-naturedly drills holes in other peoples' pipes, Edgar Gower, the compassionate undertaker who goes the extra mile and places smoking pipes in the cold dead hands of corpses, Karl, the Buddha-like German POW who sits out WWII sporting soccer shorts and munching breakfast crumpets in four-star English hotels. For exotic flavoring there are even some up-to-no-good Russian Indian chiefs and the violent death-by-briar of the obnoxious Safari Man. And as the cherry on the sundae, you'll be treated to a whole host of worthless tidbits about how to smoke a pipe from a man who professes to know nothing about the subject.
And hold onto your hats, because as if all that were not enough, there's even a series of priceless illustrations by Mr. Lizard (Michael Jodry), who has finally consented to play Ralph Steadman to the Ironist's Hunter S. Thompson. It almost sounds too good to be true. It's another verbal pinata, a grand mishmosh of high holy Ironist mirth.
About the Author
Ralph William Larsen was born in Brooklyn, New York. His spirit resides in Berkeley, California, although his body still remains trapped in a mountainous region of northern New Jersey. He continues to refer to his writing as being “inside out.” By this verbal contrivance he hopes to convey to his reader some inkling of what it is that keeps him writing at all. Because while fellow clatterers seem intent on bearing down on the big picture, beheading sentences and pillaging whole paragraphs in their “take no prisoners” campaigns to get finished stories between covers, this author accepts it as his lot to be habitually caught up in the nuts and bolts. It’s not that he disdains the story. It’s just that he loves the sentence to distraction. It’s always been so. Consider this. When afforded the honor of addressing his hero, Norman Mailer, all he could think to say was, “I don’t believe you ever quite got around to writing the Great American Novel, but in my opinion you wrote the Great American Sentence many times over.” And he meant it as a high compliment, no matter how badly the remark was taken by the older author. Because for ralph in jersey, always, the be-all and end-all of time spent before a keyboard is the sentence. He begins his tales with no clear idea of how they will develop. Endings are nowhere in sight. Undeterred, he commences each new verbal contrivance in the hope that if he stays with it long enough, straddles it in his mind like Old Ahab on the back of his white whale, stabbing, always stabbing away at its heart, then perhaps smaller things will come. So like his spiritual brother-in-arms the deep-sea fisherman, ralph in jersey lashes himself to his swivel chair, hook baited, hoping against hope with the casting of each new line that a great fish of a sentence will rise.