Diary of a Bad Year: Death or Philip Roth, I Can’t Decide Which

I write down ideas, sometimes as titles, as they occur to me in preparation for this blog. What on earth was I thinking when I wrote “Death or Philip Roth, I Can’t Decide Which?” Try as I might, I can’t remember. So I’m going to wing it and start writing free association about Philip and maybe my original thought will find its way to my frontal lobe and I’ll end up writing what I originally intended.

A few years ago Mark and I started a Philip Roth book club with Mark Rudd. He lives in Albuquerque and we live two hours away in El Valle so we conducted our conversation via e-mail. I can’t really remember (this is a recurring theme, obviously) what precipitated the formation of our club, but it didn’t last very long. We encouraged Mark R. to read the Zuckerman trilogy, Roth’s alter ego at his funniest, but before Mark got there he was turned off by the newer novels, like Exit Ghost, and then didn’t much like Zuckerman Unbound and The Anatomy Lesson either, so our club fizzled. Mark and I had trouble, too, with Exit Ghost, but I thought Roth’s struggle about telling the “truth” in one's fiction, which no longer has much meaning in the postmodern world of relativity, salvaged the book. He apologizes for railing about cell phones and about his audacity to still feel there is a right and wrong way to be in the world, which is certainly something I sympathize with. I guess his alter egos, who constantly struggle to get through all the bullshit to what is “real” (and the way he becomes the women who call him on his own bullshit), allow him to make the attempt while acknowledging that we all come to our analyses with our neuroses, prejudices, and unalterable histories. I went on and reread not only the Zuckerman books but Goodbye Columbus, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and Portnoy’s Complaint, but the Monkey bit was too much for me. Roth’s obsession with young women is his recurring theme; in the novels when he’s preadolescent or a young man himself, or even a middle-aged man who also appreciates middle-aged women, it’s OK. But when he’s an old man, as in the later novels, it becomes, as Mark R. put it, “embarrassing.”

But wait. I just made the obvious connection with death and Philip, whose mortality is staring him in the face (although I still don’t know why I said “I can’t decide which” in the title of my blog). He must be in his late seventies now (I just googled him; he’s 78). Olympia Dukakis goes around asking all the men she meets in Moonstuck for an explanation of why her husband, Vincent Gardenia, chases women. Finally she gets her answer from Danny Aiello: “Because he fears death?”

Mark died at 62, much too young, at least for those of us in the western world whose life expectancy is somewhere in the late 70s or 80s, to have to face one’s mortality. I now think a lot about my own. Even though I’m on life’s downhill side, the end of that slide wouldn’t be so much on my mind if it weren’t for Mark’s death and knowing so many others my age who also have cancer and other illnesses. As James Woods points out in his New Yorker article “Is That All There Is?”, even those who believe in immortality aren’t immune to fear and dread of death. He quotes Columbia philosopher Philip Kitcher: “If your life is directed toward nurturing others who need your protection and guidance, and if, unluckily, you die before they are ready to cope without you, the fact that you will be restored—and maybe restored to them in some entirely different state—is immaterial. Your project, on which you have centered your existence, has still been compromised by premature death.” I don’t think I’m particularly fearful, but I dread leaving my kids behind.

If Mark had lived we would still be publishing La Jicarita News, working on books, traveling, gardening, cutting firewood, pretty much everything we’ve always done, but my life has changed irrevocably. While I don’t go around chasing young men, I’m less attached to my work and what my contribution to society has been. I feel that maybe I should be doing some things I haven’t been doing seeing as how I, too, could be gone tomorrow. I’m not sure what those things are, but I’m thinking about it.

Unplugged

Even in El Valle, at 8,000 feet, it’s been hot. So I planned to do some big-time weeding in my garden in the early morning when the hoop house throws some shade over my mess of bind weed, mallow, and grass. Instead, I spent that time trying to transfer information from my old laptop to my new used laptop (thank you, Jake Kosek) for all the editing jobs I’m doing, track down a UPS package that I thought was being shipped by the post office (see Marginalization blog), change the bank account on my electronic billing (my community bank got taken over by a multi-national), and answer a bunch of e-mails that needed answering. As I’m doing all this I’m keeping up a steady stream of complaint: I don’t want to be doing this, why am I doing this, computers are making my life more complicated (see The Scourge of Computers blog), not less, I can’t believe I’m talking to myself like this, I want to go back to my life before I had a computer.

I often think of my pre-computer life. I certainly was just as busy as I am today, but I was busy doing other things like building a house, raising children, fighting the Forest Service (a life’s work), gardening, knitting (I actually knit the kids and Mark sweaters and hats), writing stories (on the typewriter), fighting the developers (also a life’s work), and taking trips to Mexico and the mountains (see Productivity blog). I was younger, and had more energy, but it was also easier to generate that energy because my efforts produced something other than the busyness required to keep up with the bureaucratic bullshit that has taken over our lives.

Let’s take a closer look at the things I was doing that morning. Why in the world do I need two laptop computers? I have a hard drive back-up for all my important papers (two novels, a book of short stories, a memoir of my political activity in northern New Mexico, all unpublished) and other files, but you know how it goes: my old laptop is slow, it won’t run any of the constantly upgraded applications that Apple is constantly turning out so people have to spend more money to buy new computers, which means you have to buy one too or you can’t communicate and everyone tells you you’re a Luddite. After two sessions with my computer guru, Robin Collier, there is still stuff that hasn’t been transferred off the old to the new, and glitches that I’m still discovering on the new that make me run back to the old (or up to the old, as it’s upstairs and the new one is downstairs), cursing all the way.

Then I happen to look at my e-mail and realize that a package that I thought was mailed to me on July 27 and expected to arrive in three to five days was actually UPS’d to me and of course I’d provided the postal mailing address, not the UPS address. So I call the UPS center in Santa Fe (fortunately, the last time I managed to find the number, which is not listed in the phone book because they make you call a centralized number in anywhere U.S.A. that can only help you if you have a tracking number, I had the presence of mind to write it down) and give them the correct physical address (my mailing address is a physical address as well, but neither deliverer will recognize the other’s).

Moving on to the next distraction, I find myself once more on the computer trying to pay my credit card bill only to see that my old bank, the one I specifically chose because it was local, is still listed as the payer when it’s been taken over by some multi-national bank I’ve never even heard of because of the mortgage crisis. The new bank sends me about five letters a week explaining how this takeover is being handled and what I have to do and what I don’t have to do, which is change any electronic payment information because the new bank is going to take care of that. But of course it hasn’t and I’m worried that my payment won’t be correctly processed and the credit card company will charge me interest, which is usury, so I decide to make the change myself, which I can’t figure out how to do online, of course, so I have to call the credit card company and have someone walk me through it and then that’s done.

Lastly are the e-mails. Normally I don’t complain about e-mails. I know that some people get hundreds of them every day and end up throwing most of them in the trash. Of all the technological innovations associated with the computer I appreciate e-mail the most because it means I can impart information or ask a question or have a short chat without getting bogged down on the phone with certain friends who will remain nameless who think that anytime you call it’s an excuse to talk for an hour about much more than the purpose of the call. But you still have that nagging feeling that you need to read all those e-mails pertaining to your work or your political awareness and then like everyone else you throw them in the trash.

This posting is full of a lot of “see other blogs,” which may indicate that it’s redundant, but I think it’s more a reaffirmation of the need to chafe and complain and yes, even rant, about the bullshit we, the few and the privileged (see Some Things Are Relative blog) put up with, and really, promote, in this short time we have on earth. I remember a backpack trip long ago, walking the crest trail in the Manzano Mountains, thinking, I wish I could walk this trail forever and never go back. Sometimes it’s just all too much.