Philip Roth is dead, and I don't feel so good either

When David Bowie died, the news was given to me by a woman that I assumed at the time I was going to marry. Early in the morning, the phone rang in Manchester, England. "David Bowie died."

It is stupid, the way I react to such things, but it is because I am confronted by the thought that this stupid planet populated with all these stupid chimp people is diminished when someone like David Jones Bowie meets his end. Bowie was not a chimp. If anyone had ever managed to transcend our own pathetic DNA, it was Bowie.

And so, last night, I open my web browser and "Philip Roth, American Novelist, Dead at 85." It is as perfunctory a headline as one might write on such an occasion, and equally as meaningless. Philip Roth was perhaps not a worthy compass, but my compass he was. His use of the language, his angry need for precision, his disdain for the stupid, and his unrelenting self-criticism and self-examination were nothing less than my aspiration. Yes, Philip, I admired you. I know you'd hate that, but there is no hiding from it.

There was no one more adept at stringing words together to form sentences, grouping them into paragraphs, and writing them down, top to bottom, left to right. No one. He cites influences and you see why. Turgenev. Conrad. Roth.

Specific, specific to the point of pain, was Roth's writing. I am sometimes ashamed at how horribly I attempted to copy his style, unintentional though it was. How badly I wanted to write like that. How specific. How critical. And how, much like the topic of self-pleasure, I chose such a mundane subject as football as my medium.

Onanism, in and of itself, is such an everyday occurrence that to devote so many words to it beggars belief. "I am wanking. I am wanking again. I am still wanking. At some point, I will cease to wank."

"Goodbye, Columbus." I am not Jewish. I am circumcised, however. I was raised by a mother who used the iron fist of religion (Southern Baptist, so perhaps we can sit down over some wine and discuss guilt at some point) to control her family, and in a community where everyone shared a commonality of some type of "faith" in a deity who in turn controlled all of us. I am not Jewish, but Roth's words, his place, resonated with me like no other writer of fiction.

Hell, I can barely stand fiction at all. And yet whose books sat on my bookshelf, who did I carry with me through multiple move after multiple move? Roth.

I will never be as good at anything, not even masturbation, as Philip Roth was at writing. The world is diminished today, and I doubt we chimps even recognise it.