You have to read this book: Patrimony, by Phillip Roth. I have been walking around for weeks, running my fingers across my bookshelves…waiting for a book to choose me, a great great book that I can’t put down, can’t stop talking about (remember the Shadow Divers summer? how I couldn’t stop pushing that book? hocking Kurson, hock hock hock. Remember the cod phase? my pirate phase? and that whole Pilgrims thing?) I love nothing more than being completely obsessed and colonized, seduced, haunted, taken in, and completely defragged and reconfigured by A New Book.

Patrimony by Phillip Roth isn’t new. It’s from 1991. 1991!  What were you doing that year, the year this book won prizes? Before you got email from amazon.com and before you spent your reading lunchtime on facebook?

A friend of mine loves Phillip Roth and so I wanted to read some Phillip Roth, having not read him at all since he was assigned to me by Doug Fowler in American Lit. I read about Roth’s books and Patrimony sounded like the shortest, easiest, least intense.

Oh

My

Goodness

Phillip’s dad is dying, and the way he describes the difficulty and beauty and weirdness of having a father, of having a dramatic hilarious very very old strong weak father, the way he describes what it is to watch a person trying to put a life together, at the very end of life–I read and reread each page…I’m only on p 62 and I am dreading the book being over. I never want it to end. I love this book. I love this book.  You have to read this book.  If you have a father or love anyone.  You will find something in this book.

And his sentences!

That’s a whole other topic.

I’ll probably stil be obsessing on this in November. February.Forever.

I love this book and I love how it makes me see my dad, how it outlines the love I have for him, and fills it in some too.

My Summer Screens Rant…

Dave Eggers, interviewed in the new issue of Creative Nonfiction, talks about e-readers. And how most of the people in the world can’t afford e-readers. “Secondly,” he says, “I just plain won’t read books on a screen. It just seems nuts to put every last aspect of our lives continually onto a screen. We moved entertainment onto screens (TV), and then we moved most of our work onto screens with computers. And I know so many people who just can’t wait till they can read everything on a screen…”  (He goes on, and it’s a great rant—for my students I assign this interview as required summer reading.)

I could see myself reading a book on a screen, I suppose. I haven’t yet. I’m not against it. I have get emails from readers asking me why my books aren’t e-available. I’m sure they will be. Very soon. And I feel lucky about all that. I’m not anti-screen. But, I have to say, the happiest week of my year this year was the one I spent at the retreat center—no computers, no television, no e. No screens except the ones in the window, overlooking the mirror lake.

I work by hand. I sleep by hand. Eat by hand.  And I use my computer—I use it a lot.

But I need lots of breaks from screens. My eyes need the breaks and my heart needs the food. I love book books. I love non-electronic things: jewelry, flowers, friendship where you take a walk together. I love food and bicycles and love—these things are completely non-e-able.

I’m getting a web cam this week, so I can talk to a soldier I love, a kid on a tropical island, far far far away. I love vast stretches of the e world.

As I write this, I see a kid in the park across the street from my house. He’s in the branches of the ancient mulberry tree. He is reading a book.

I love unconventional farmers in the age of agribusiness. I don’t want to lose touch with paper, pencil, chalkboard, hopscotch. I like DIY and wrinkles. I need the kid, across the street from my house, in the park this afternoon, lodged in the limbs of the mulberry tree tree with a book. A book book.

He is his own battery charger, which is never lost, which he knows, intuitively how to repair (read another book).

Retreat

Why retreat? Doesn’t it sound like defeat, withdrawing, pulling back? Something an entity does when beaten, hopeless?

Yes! Yes! Yes!

Every year, I go on a retreat, and spend a lot of time in silence. I came across a terrific quote on this year’s retreat: Prayer is you talking to God. Meditation is God talking to you.

Every year, I give up. In a very intentional way, I say to myself, let’s go back. It feels like being a child again in many ways—all meals are prepared for us. There’s no shopping, no meal planning, no dishes, no leftovers to tyrannize my Sub Zero. I think that’s the most freeing part of the whole thing: the food thing. When you are a kid, you have tons of free time because you aren’t working for food, planning around food. You’re given a window—eat now—and then the kitchen closes.

I walked a labyrinth every day for six days. On the seventh day, I came home.

It’s like going to the dentist. After my six months visit, I always floss vociferously, and then it falls off again.  After the retreat, I’m calmer, wiser, simplified. It will fall away.  For me, going to church helps extend the half-life of the retreat—in that pure hour, the counter gets reset to zero again.  Every week, every day, a little retreat, a small pulling back, to see what is.

I expect to forget all this and then remember it again. Like sleep/wake. Like flossing. Like any long term love relationship.