Responding to Tanenhaus: August 13
Sam: Very tepid on your blog. Not hot at all. Am told the men caught another snake nuzzling into Keller’s neck and that the snake responded to your name. Who knew that serpents could colloquize? In any event, a missed opportunity with your latest post. To suggest that only one party can be right in this case is to miss the very particular points that Messrs. Wood and Baker were making. Wood responded to Updike’s passage with an aesthetic eye. Baker rejoined with a clear passion for language. Cannot both be right? To suggest that there is only one opinion on a passage is to have a very limited and incurious mind indeed. Those of us who actually love literature may love a sentence for its feeling while simultaneously loathing it for its bombast. Have adopted this gimmicky Orwell-inspired approach to blogging that I find quite fun, but one commenter lodged his displeasure. Is he right? I would not deign to suggest that I have a superior opinion of my own writing because I happen to have written it. But some may judge it good, others bad. But nobody is “right.” Nobody has the ultimate answer. Did you not learn from Freud, Sammy Baby, that when one presents a definitive codex of human behavior, it will be easily usurped and outmoded in half a century? And have you not learned in your years as editor of The New York Times Book Review that literary criticism or even the casual appreciation of literature is not a matter of being “right,” but of presenting a thread to be picked up by another resourceful stitcher.
AUTHORS: Do You Have What It Takes?
It’s the ultimate reality series, the ultimate game show and the ultimate half-hour of intriguing storylines. The Ultimate Author is an awesome television program packed with entertaining, engaging and interesting events. Each week, contestants go toe-to-toe in a writing competition that tests their ability to develop attention-grabbing content.
Casting Call: June 16, 2007. Fort Lauderdale, FL.
[via gawker.]
Temples of the Ideal
John Updike on the new MOMA: “It used to be said that airports were our new cathedrals, the spires replaced by ascending and descending planes. But they have become workaday and shabby, cluttered with the machinery of heightened security and menaced by airline bankruptcy—bus terminals on the brink, more like refuse-littered marketplaces than like places of worship. The art museums, once haunted by a few experts, students, and idlers, have become the temples of the Ideal, of the Other, of the something else that, if only for a peaceful moment, redeems our daily getting and spending. Here resides something beyond our frantic animal existence.”
Updike to Trade In Comfy Sofa for Expensive Davenport
John Updike has won the $30,000 Rea Award — an award granted to “a living American or Canadian writer who has made a significant contribution in the discipline of the short story as an art form.” It’s good to see that the Dungannon Foundation has gone out of its way to honor a writer who truly needs more cash and awards. It is rumored that Mr. Updike’s interior designer will apply these funds to the east wing living room.
Updike Misunderstood?
The London Times: “And that, I think, explains some aspects of the critical response. They want their terrorists to be explicable in the most banal terms. Kakutani, for example, whines on about ‘factors’ that do or don’t explain Ahmad’s conversion to terrorism. But great novelists know that people do not act according to ‘factors’. Updike’s Ahmad is as clear an illustration as one could have. The public enthusiasm for the book is, I think, a matter that lies far beyond the terms of critical discourse. Since 9/11, the Americans have been seeking authoritative voices to tell them what is going on…..Nothing has quite worked. In now turning to Updike, they are simply looking to a man whom they must sense is one of their finest. What does this snowy-haired sage have to say about it? They won’t be disappointed.”
For what it’s worth, I actually liked Terrorist, despite its narrative flaws. And so, apparently, did Ian McEwan. My own theory for why it was so critically reviled is because Updike dared to be sincere about his underlying humanism. (In fact, I would compare the book’s mixed reception to that of Richard Powers’ Gain, a novel that was slammed by some for reviving a Dreiser-like concern for corporate responsibility.) If one can set aside one’s personal ideology and read the book as an exercise in consciousness, then I think there are aesthetic rewards which excuse the book’s clunky vernacular. (via TEV)
[UPDATE: Steve Mitchelmore offers a different take.]
No More Absurd Than “Courtney Love: The Real Story”
Poppy Z. Brite hates John Updike: “Mr. Updike, I’m sorry you have arthritis. I truly am. Both my grandmothers suffered from it, I suspect I have a touch myself, and I know it is no picnic. Sometimes it’s torture. In spite of everything, I wouldn’t have wished it on you.“BUT WHY, O WHY, O WHY, O WHY, O WHY do we have to hear about your STIFFENED NETHER MEMBER?”
Also, Colson Whitehead hates ice cream, which is a very sad and possibly more troubling thing than damning a writer exclusively on a phrase. Note to all aspiring writers: don’t work in an ice cream shop! (Both links via Jenny D.)
The Bat Segundo Show #50
Author: John Updike
Condition of Mr. Segundo: Defending himself against obnoxious talk show hosts and ready to move on.
Subjects Discussed: Epigraphs, faith and disbelief, starting Terrorist with a Catholic priest, first person vs. third person, on writing upon Americana, post-9/11 symbolism, humanism vs. pessimism, blow jobs, Christopher Hitchens, the state of the September 11 novel, Norman Mailer, Neil LaBute’s The Mercy Seat, applying “On Not Being a Dove” to Iraq, airport X-ray machines, external sexual imagery vs. internal emotion in prose, why Updike concentrates on explicit anatomical detail, Goths, language, challenging Updike on the BEA speech and the Internet.
I’m Positive That Golf Game Partner Contemplations Are Next for Mr. Asher
Levi Asher serves up a you-are-there report on John Updike and gets all giddy and fanboyish: “John Updike looks directly at me with his blazingly smart eyes, says ‘Thank you’ (I’m not sure if he is thanking me for my brilliant phrasing or because I’ve just tossed him a big fat softball) and proceeds to agree that, while the Rabbit novels are significant to him because they take place in a Pennsylvania small town like the one he grew up in, he is sorry to hear of his other novels becoming ‘passe’. He then lists a few other books he considers his best, and I am very happy and satisfied that he names my personal favorite, Couples, as well as his Scarlett Letter trilogy (Month of Sundays, Roger’s Version, S), which I haven’t read yet but will now check out.
Gray Lady Interview Policy: No Depth Perception?
Chip McGrath talks with John Updike. While the results are certainly better than, say, a sycophantic and humorless conversation with Sam Tanenhaus, one reads this Updike interview wondering whether McGrath was operating on auto pilot. After all, how many times does one get to talk with Updike at length? Okay, so he’s no fan of the Internet, but shouldn’t you give the man some space to ramble at length?
Not only is an observation concerning Updike avoiding cell phones in his novels not followed up on, but there’s also Updike’s self-effacing remark about how he’s “not clever enough” to write a murder mystery that stops short of a full confession. Is this current NYT interview policy? Talking with one of the most distinguished American novelists without latching onto the potential depth he’s feeding you?
Maybe McGrath had a golf game or something that day, but I have to conclude that this was a half-missed opportunity.
Bad Sex Award Longlist
The Bad Sex Award longlist has been announced. And it looks like John Updike, ever the fey pervert, has finally made it into the mix. About damn time, if you ask me. I love Updike to death, but I cannot read any of his novels without that inevitable WTF moment, where an introspective sexual description comes out of left field. (Immediate example that comes to mind: early moment in The Witches of Eastwick where character is preparing salad and suddenly starts comparing cherry tomatoes to testicles without any particular impetus.)
Leave It to Updike to Pop Those Cherries
John Updike takes on the new Gabriel García Márquez novel. He decries the book’s narrator for not considering “the atavistic barbarism of buying girls in order to crack their hymens.” But more interestingly, he offers one of the oddest sentences ever seen in the New Yorker’s history: “The narrator’s asshole, we are told more than once, burns.”
Updike Wins PEN/Faulkner
The Hollywood Reporter (of all places) is reporting that John Updike has won the PEN/Faulkner.
[UPDATE: Here's the Reuters article. Damn, I was rooting for ZZ. I dig the Rabbit Angstrom books, but does Updike need another award?]
Quick Quickies
Since it is book-related, Paul O’Neill fesses up that the Iraq plan was in place well before 9/11. The first major blow from an insider.
Updike’s first short story: “The moment his car touched the boulevard heading home, Ace flicked on the radio.”
Anybody have any clues on the Key West Literary Seminar fracas? Moorish Girl (and all of us) wants to know.
Six Bay Area ladies talk mystery writing.
A big Blair-like blowup at USA Today. Jack Kelley has resigned.
The Times gives a lot of space to the image.
And an engineer attempts to deconstruct postmodern literary criticism.
