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.]
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.”
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.
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.]
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.)