It was the last piece the New York Times did on him while he was still alive, as I recall.  Charles McGrath interviewing Philip Roth.  And toward the end of it, he mentions how advance copies of new books arrive for him, exposing him to different corridors.  One, T.N. Coates, leads to a reference he follows.  Another, Will of the Worlds, and The Swerve...

At the very end of the interview, as published, a note, a lament, no one sends him first copies of anything, not like they used to.  His friends have died.  A brief final statement on life.

I got as far as tracking down his address from his publisher's website.  I was going to send him a copy of my book, via Amazon, a brief note maybe.  A month or two went by, and then, appropriately, bespeaking of his own final authority, he passed away.

C.M. Looking back, how do you recall your 50-plus years as a writer?

P.R. Exhilaration and groaning. Frustration and freedom. Inspiration and uncertainty. Abundance and emptiness. Blazing forth and muddling through. The day-by-day repertoire of oscillating dualities that any talent withstands — and tremendous solitude, too. And the silence: 50 years in a room silent as the bottom of a pool, eking out, when all went well, my minimum daily allowance of usable prose.

One cannot serve two masters.  At least not God and mammon at the same time...


After returning the rental car in the parking garage below the hotel I make it to bed finally after some wine with Goodbye Columbus.  The definition of how to write.  My writing cannot hold a candle in comparison, the work of a cave man.

But, I suppose, I share the instinct, toward the solitary concentration of writing and the thoughts that come.  I am my own Kilgore Trout, the bad science fiction writer in Vonnegut fiction who has good ideas and is a bridge between the thoughts of the character Billy Pilgrim and the reality of the narration of Slaughterhouse Five.

I am the idea guy, the lousy writer of little talent, but who has a natural sense of the different science fictions we tell ourselves as we get through life, the science fictions that are the archaic religions we still might have floating in our minds in some suspension of disbelief.  Writing lends itself to such fictions, and in a way, is one of them itself.


The iPhone buzzes, a robo-call, bringing me a sense of dread.  Then Mom calls to remember our visit.  I got some rest in.  I have to go in to work for training on the new computer system.

The master of writing versus the master of working in a restaurant amidst wine and talk, the lure of decent food.  I try to take care of myself.

From Mother's Day Sunday special menu night shift onward it had been a week of stress.  I didn't need having to deal with a different menu limited to three choices for each of five courses, the regular menu unavailable.  And here, at 5:30, as the door opens, the first party, South American, six, arrives, and then following upon them, parties jammed in, sent upstairs, to the idiots, when such diners had intended to eat in the staid and easy comfort of downstairs, the main dining room, perfectly table-clothed, the kitchen swinging door right there, an ease of everything.  But when they come upstairs, a greater effort, leaf cutter ants, the great blind unpredictability for he who must control the feast, the random nature of when the next course might arrive, and if the table has been cleared of the empty plates of the last.  Food running, busboy, explanations, courses, dessert, regulars out of joint, discourse on wine, and not one soul in the wine bar's dining tables familiar...

I got ready to go visit my mom.  The real estate people were concerned about an episode or two, but in daily conversations, she seemed to be doing okay, for the most part.  The grass pollen had joined in with the tree pollen making me miserable and lethargic, drained of energy, and the last night of the work week with the Gypsy Swing band in the corner and the big consulting firm having a big wine dinner in the back room, I was feeling stretched and stressed by work on top of everything else.  People at work made a big deal about the new champagne in a white bottle, off dry.  Sure, it tasted good, but I had lots of things going on in my head.


Back where I rested, in this situation I was in, to relax, I tried to read, and I'd been making headway through Archbishop Sheen's The Priest Is Not His Own, but I needed something else, and Slaughterhouse Five fell into my hands.  The same old blue clothbound book of it that I'd read in tenth grade, and the book had cast its spell of wisdom over me, in a way I awakened to strangely as I read, and I said to myself, 'ah-hah, this is why I am where I am, and who I am now, and reason for the things I have tried to do, because of the wisdom of this book, which I absorbed as a child, but could not tell anyone about, because it took a Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., to be able to tell such things, and who am I, but that I get it.'  But that my family always got that anyone could enjoy and get Vonnegut's point.

Time.  The Tralfamardorians who abduct Billy Pilgrim express their view of time.  Not dissimilar to what I saw on PBS in a show on higher physics, relativity, that sort of thing, about how the space-time continuum might be looked at as a giant loaf of bread, and in theory one could travel through the devices of relativity, back and forth, into the future, back into the past, and take a slice of it anywhere.  The slices would be to travel in time, to return to moments that have already happened, or will come to be, because it's all relative anyway.  The space aliens tell the human being that time is as simple as being a bug caught in amber.  Life is in the Fourth Dimension as well where our days all exist in a present moment simultaneously.  Just that we can't experience it that way, because we feel ourselves to be creatures of the Third Dimension.  In each and every moment, we live a slice of the time space continuum.

I'm not a physics expert, or anything like that, but I do see myself as a simple believer, that the poetic mind can see things in the same light as the highest of science truth.  The poet, or even the hack writer, can have something to say about it all, as far as moments go, as far as offering great interpretations.


Imagine me, being taken as a Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Whereas I really don't know what gives anyone any real authority in such matters, but except when they write such a thing as Slaughterhouse Five.  And books, these days, who knows what will get noticed, but to me, alas, quite regrettable, we have slipped into an era where war is not fought the old terrible way, but in the mind, in what constitutes the political realm of things.  A book is taken first as a political treatise, a show of unrepresented peoples....


Nowadays, at my age, now that he is old, the writer What's His Name takes naps to remember his thoughts, so that they might be in enough shape to write down.  Hay Fever certainly adds heavily to the feeling, as does a sense of one's own poverty.  So does the stress of work, the simultaneous duties of keeping conversations going at the bar, while also running all over the place to see to it that the parties of five in the back room are being well attended to, a completely different mode.  The regulars poke me as I'm doing all this.  Are you okay?  No, I'm not okay.  Grit your teeth, get through it, and then, at last, there is the final jostling, large bodies back and forth in my space behind the bar, in keeping up with the mad rush toward the end of the evening put on by those who will leave early, running about so much that they get in the way.

But if one can see the ghost of time such as it is, existing in a incredible gigantic sort of loaf of bread shape of space/time continuum, if one can get that, then perhaps there will be other ghosts to see, that come down the pike, in a way not unlike the events Dickens records in his Christmas tale.  The ghosts of adepts, who understand time themselves...  People like the Buddha, like the true Jesus Christ....  Probably like many of them, Adam, Noah, Isaac, Moses...  Here is the Ghost of Christmas Past, now, and now, here is the Ghost of Christmas Present....  And such ghosts attend all the little events of our lives, from getting onto school busses as kids, to graduations, to... all sorts and any matter of things.  The ghosts understand the whole, how each piece fits into the picture.  And it is not inappropriate that this remarkable tale of space/time is set around the meaning of Christmas as it too applies to time...


In the frozen amber of time that Vonnegut writes about, I, like Billy Pilgrim, am also caught in time, and almost always, I am caught in the act of hesitation, of uncertainty as to what to do, in what would be to other people awkward moments of silence when there should be talk or action.  I cannot explain these perpetuating instances away, except to speak of my own faults, my own inner understanding of fourth dimensional time I would rather not be instinctively privy to...  But I must emphasize this.

And I look at the people around me, and they do not operate by such a sense of time, knowingly, and in fact they see it a different way.  Time and moments are about sustained effort and progress, to a certain goal, retirement, the jobs of offices done with satisfaction.  The bug caught in amber in each and every strange moment of life and consciousness is not allowed to see things so, as much a matter of progress, and this is my perspective, as kind of missing Jesus who waits on people, listens to them, and they same sort of crap over and over again anyway...

But is seems, hard not feel guilty about, in time, actual time as it is conventionally recored, it seems, I am unable to do much.  Not much of action on my part.  No real use of the tool of a useful profession.  I go grocery shopping, to eat, to drink wine, I sleep a lot, make myself uneasily content by doing a few creative things on the side.  My art form is simple as walking through the woods, and also, largely, just coping with stress, which in and of itself is an art form.  It might well amount to very little, little more than just dealing with it, taking it straight, each day, evils sufficient.


All week my heart had pounded, and having to go to work and face people made me feel like vomiting, almost.  The barman is supposed to be Mr. Happy, and sometimes you can carry it off, but sometimes you can't.  All week was like waiting for a phone call, someone telling me I needed to pack up my mother's entire apartment, and do what with it...

All I could do was pray.  And I did pray.  I prayed to relieve the stress that had come down on my mother since getting her taxes in late.  I said Hail Marys.  I said Our Fathers.  I repeated them.  I watched EWTN instead of the stupid news, and I felt better.

Finally, pay day, I check my bank account, and my federal refund has finally come through, and that makes things better.




Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five, Fourth Printing, 1969, page 94:

      The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel.  In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had.  He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in all the other Gospels.
       So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground.  There couldn't possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought.  The reader would have to think that, too, since the new Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was.




In my own amber, I am doing the usual.  There is some continuity, within, just the way things are, quite beyond the usual order and social conformity.  In my own amber, I am a sort of writer, misunderstood as far as scholarly worlds go.  I am in amber trying to achieve a sort of perspective, and one my mom has long told me about.  What my mother tells me about is a decent place, more of a career than my own, and it involves the process of reading, in all its magic.  Louise Rosenblatt... Why did I reject such things, so stubbornly, mistrustful of authorities of readership I really would have liked to have been great friends on good terms with.  I had found my calling, but then, as if some bitterness, lost it, lost track, fallen by the wayside, indeed quite horribly.  What can you do...

I will agree:  life's been nothing, but fucking around, for me...

May 1, the Feast Day of St. Joseph the Worker (as Fr. James Martin, SJ, reminds us.)   "Never forget that Joseph worked.  That Mary worked.  That Jesus worked," he writes.  It is also International Workers Day.

And the word on my mind, in the back of it, is, "a shift."  Physicists make a shift seeing the world we live in in their Quantum theorizing, particle physics, etc.  And we grant them their professions and their work and the validity of it, of course.   The shift.  It's not the world as we see it before us, tangible, but in their higher math, they have it figured out.  They have shifted how we see, if we listen to them, and they are better at making this shift than we are.

We lead out our economic lives in certain ways.  Some would use terms like Patriarchal, or Corporate, or just simply plain practical.  Face it, the U.S.A. is a place where it is helpful to be good at self-promotion.

But still, there are workers, doing actual work, and many of them with their hands, with their bodies, as I do, people like chefs and bartenders, doctors and nurses, pharmacists, sanitation workers, construction, paving, steel, and, of course, carpenters, and on and on.  Even writing, I suppose.  And teaching, too.

The dignity of labor is a subject for the Mass today on EWTN, Father Mitch Pacwa, who grew up in Chicago, no stranger to factory labor unions and his father's mechanical shop.

And how would I make a thoughtful and intellectual shift of my work experience...

We do not dismiss people on the basis of a person being a "laborer," beneath us.  That would be a thing of the old pagan mentality, of patrician/philosopher class versus "laborer."  People are always willing to update that, the old pagan mentality, to sell things based on paganism, jewelry, torques, spears, etc., but that is paganism.  There must be some political relief in providing for an equanimity, an equality, for the acknowledgment of all people working together to make the daily bread, no CEO making ten thousand times what the guys on the line make...

To have great respect for that labor, that's a Christian development.  Paul made tents to make a living.  Joseph... of course.  Paul supports himself.   Thus he can evangelize without asking for anything.

And at work, you can in effect advance the love that comes through the Gospels.

The Marxists/Communists were of the opinion that to help the worker, society had to embrace atheism.  And ultimately, the nature of their philosophy became so abstract that in order to help the worker it was sometimes necessary to murder them en masse.



Work is drudgery sometimes...  Work is difficult.  Work is disheartening at times.  Work can seem to not offer us enough in return...



She is a singer.  We have an old CD of hers.  She comes in late, explaining that she was inspired from seeing John Pizerelli playing at Blues Alley and a bass player friend of hers calling looking for gigs just then, that she was inspired to drop in, as the Hot Club of DC plays on, gypsy swing.  It's almost nine and the young server kid comes up to tell me the kitchen's closing at 9, early, and this is sooner than I'd like, given the traffic that has just come in.  She doesn't make much at all giving music lessons she tells us, me and the former diplomat gentleman, a good friend of mine and a writer in his retirement.   She's on Medicare for health insurance, and she's concerned about getting bronchitis, and in the long term she's legitimately worried about becoming homeless.  And I'm busy enough, irritated enough by my help good at show and token, that I don't want to hear it.  But I've got a couple of sample of wine that aren't going anywhere, and I get through suggesting what she might order, economically, by gritting my teeth against distractions.  My blood sugar has just sunk low, a pang in my stomach, and people are irritating me....

A married couple comes up the stairs, and it is their pattern to arrive late.  "Kitchen's closing in a few minutes," the server tells them, and the seat.  "Oh, I saw the look on his face..."  And to tell you the truth my own face registered a little bit of 'oh shit' at the tail end of a slow night as the music begins to unnerve my calm.  Take your time, I tell the couple.  They were headed to a baseball game, but their nine month old is teething...  I pour the a couple of tastes after telling them the the night's specials.

The server is back in the corner quietly and peacefully enjoying a cup of yogurt, unconcerned.  And not long later he takes his backpack and departs, and I'm too busy to catch if he stopped to say goodnight, but I know he did not offer to see if I needed anything to restock.  Entree comes for the gentleman at the bar, and then, just as I'm clearing the appetizer plates, here comes the food running busser pushing their dinner plates on them, which always involves rearranging things on the small coffee tables, the bread plates, the silverware, the water glasses, the bread basket...

No job is without its disquieting moments, its disruption of the norm of calm and composure.

I get through it.  And when I get in, it's straight to the couch, and that's where I fall asleep, with the light on, the radio playing quiet classical music for the plants on the window sills behind the couch.  Not even a glass of wine.  Then, transferring myself to over to the bedroom.

I am trying to be a bit more productive during the daytime before the shift.  It can be awkward having to wait around, but you find things to do, dishes, old mom's to call, vacuuming.

But I am in need, in need of a shift in how I see things.  I cannot, at least immediately, change the things of where I am and what I do for a living.  I chose the life of labor, and it seemed to keep me busy enough, occupied, and maybe with a little bit of inspirations on the side, or, at least, a steady look at humanity as it is, when they have relaxed and opened up a bit, as you cannot catch people very well out on the street.  Why, how many times have I wondered in my mind, what am I doing.  What the hell am I doing...

Toward the end of enjoying her trout dinner, with spinach, potato puree and an almandine preparation, we at the bar are talking our heritage, much of which I miss as I make my back and forth from the bar out of the dining room and back, desserts to clear, busboy to dodge, checks to print, credit cards to run, the gentleman asks me, given my Polish last name, if I grew up Catholic.  Well, yes, but largely non-praciticng.  "My father was a Theosophist," I explain.  And the nice woman asks, "what's that."  So, I offer an explanation.  All the great religions speak of a deeper reality, a perennial wisdom, each expressing them in their own way.  The Hindus have it one way, the Buddhists, etc., but  there is a commonality.  You might even say that there's something of a pagan history to the Tree of Life that in Christianity will become The Cross...  A Theosophist might see a connection in between what the Buddha is telling us with what Christ is saying...


"I like listening to you talk," she says, after I clear her plates, grumbling around distractedly.  Thank you, I say, and then she needs a decaff espresso, and the night winds down, and then I'm alone.  Maybe for a brief time I eased her worried concerns, but I must get myself home.



Some of us, perhaps out of being Irish, think along matrilineal society's terms, perhaps placing one a bit of synch with modern society at large.  This is just our instinctive pattern, in our cells, in our DNA, I suppose.  That's just how things make sense to us.  And by the same, some of us are born with a respect for the dignity of work, of labors that some might find beneath them, beneath their intelligence and their sophistication and their own personal potential and abilities to save themselves.    Progress, the Koch Brothers, drilling the earth, the things of Patriarchal society, the conquest model of life... the diminishment of the working laborer seen as a material resource first, a human being second.  But, I suppose, the attitude is not so much a thing of my own possession.  As much as it may have cost me directly in my own life...