Monthly Archives: June 2014

Telegraph names Begley bio a best book of 2014

Posted on by
Reply

The Telegraph has come up with a list of “The best books of 2014—The must-read novels, memoirs and history books released in 2014 so far.” In the category of biography, Adam Begley’s Updike made the cut with a five-star (out of five) rating, flanked by biographies on Updike’s literary frenemy Philip Roth, T.E. Lawrence, British politician Roy Kenkins, and Karl Marx’s daughter, Eleanor.

“Begley’s biography shows just how closely and relentlessly Updike mined his own life for fiction,” the editors write.

Dybek reviewer cites Updike as a major influence

Posted on by
Reply

paperlanternCharles Finch, in writing a review of MacArthur recipient Stuart Dybek’s most recent collections of short fiction, Paper Lantern and Ecstatic Cahoots, begins by trying to describe a style of writing that he feels is characteristic of the American short story, and credits John Updike for being a progenitor of style:

“For a while there the American short story was in dismal shape. It was never a problem of skill—many of the notable story collections of the 1990s and 2000s were technically beautiful, morally subtle, narratively refined—as much as a problem of tone. The stories that dominated the serious magazines and journals seemed to share a flat fireless quality, something like politeness, perhaps even fear. It was all so tasteful. The sense of drama was minimal. Characters dropped half out of love, or endured a minor crisis, or just wandered around treasuring their sense of dismay about, you know, the fallenness of the world. And above all, of course: that wheedling and constant push toward epiphany.

ecstaticcahoots“I think of John Updike’s 1961 story ‘A&P’ as either the infectious agent or the patient zero of this style. It’s narrated by a teenager working in a grocery store, who quits on behalf of a group of girls his manager is hassling for shopping in bathing suits. They don’t even notice his gallantry, and in the last line of the story he leaves the store, looks back, and says, ‘and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.’

“What a line! No wonder its example has been intoxicating. Its vagueness expresses such a specific ache, and it expands the meaning of the story’s mild events to suddenly and deftly. Writers before Updike had used such a turn—think of ‘Araby’ or ‘The Little Joke’—but his captured some modernist blend of longing, boredom, and elegy just behind the speakable, which has lingered in the form ever since.”

But while, in his Slate review, Finch has praise for the master, he’s critical of the limitations that imitation has imposed on American short fiction.

Read the whole review in “The ‘A&P’ Problem,” published June 6, 2014.

 

Updike letter offered for $4,206.73

Posted on by
Reply

Screen Shot 2014-06-23 at 6.41.25 AMUpdike aficionados were no doubt wondering what effect, if any, the Adam Begley biography would have on Updike studies and all things Updike, and one apparent result of the upsurge in Updike publicity is an inflated price of Updike collectibles.

Case in point: A typed and signed letter from Updike has a price tag of $4,206.73 at Sports Memorabilia.com, where they had better stick to assessing the value of materials signed by overpaid sports stars. Updike would have been amused by the hugely inflated price (and giggled at the 73 cents, wondering if that might be for his trademark cross-outs), even for a so-called “content” letter in which he shares information:

“I can’t claim to be a great Jamesian unlike xxx Leon Edel and the x late James Thurber. I read Portrait of a Lady in New York, on the subway, 85th street down to Times Square on the Broadway line, twenty minutes back and forth, and find I don’t remember much about it. I read Wings of the Dove somewhat later, and the Golden Bowl recently, with great difficulty, xxxxxxxxx straining as I was against his insufferable late style. . . . Where I do admire James without reservation is as a critic—I have the Library of America volume and dip into this whenever I want to clarify my own impressions.”

The market will correct, but with so many letters out there a fairer price would be $400-600—though letters like this do whet the appetite for a second Updike biography, there’s so much more information out there to be gathered!

Updike’s rawly titled Cunts fails to draw auction interest

Posted on by
Reply

Screen Shot 2014-06-22 at 11.59.32 AMThis past April, Heritage Auctions of New York City featured one of only 26 signed and lettered copies of Updike’s ribald poem “Cunts,” which is subtitled “(Upon Receiving The Swingers Life Club Membership Solicitation).”

There were no bids, and the item did not sell. Here is the description:

John Updike. Cunts (Upon Receiving The Swingers Life Club Membership Solicitation). New York: Frank Hallmann, printed by Andrew Hoyem, [1974]. One of twenty-six lettered copies, out of a total edition of 276, signed by Updike (this is copy “J”). Oblong octavo. [4, blank], [17], [3, blank] pages. Publisher’s burgundy paper over boards, printed paper labels on front board and spine. Spine a bit sunned, minor rubbing to binding, text block a bit loose. A very good copy. [Together With]: [John Updike, contributor]. Cunts… New York: New York Quarterly, 1973. Summer 1973 issue, Number 15. One of 457 copies signed by Updike on page 65 of this issue (Cunts appears on pages 63-65). Octavo. 220 pages. Original wrappers. Minor rubbing, else fine. Both versions of this poem housed together in custom-built burgundy cloth clamshell case, with hidden drawer housing the New York Quarterly issue. From the collection of Alexander J. Jemal, Jr.

Russian director heralded for Centaur-inspired film

Posted on by
Reply

Yana_Skopina_01The Calvert Journal, A Guide to Creative Russia recently published an article on “Shooting Stars: five Russian female directors to watch,” and one of them—Yana Skopina—was heralded for her short film Milky Way Galaxy:

“Milky Way Galaxy is based on John Updike’s novel The Centaur, which chronicles the complex relationships between a father and son. Shot on 35mm film, a rarity for a short, Skopina made the film as a tribute to Updike ‘In choosing the film’s color scheme, I studied the works of Andrew Wyeth extensively (an American realist painter). Updike and Wyeth were like twin brothers. They even had similar intonations.'”

“Shooting stars: five Russian female directors to watch”

Christian Scholars’ Conference includes Updike papers

Posted on by
Reply

This past June 5-6, the Thomas H. Olbricht Christian Scholars’ Conference at Lipscomb University (Nashville, Tenn.) featured an emphasis on John Updike. In addition to  attending the world premier of “John Updike’s Roger’s Version,” which was announced in an earlier post, attendees could sit in on a session convened by Kimberly Reed (Lipscomb University) on “John’s Version: Updike and Christian Faith,” with panelists Ralph C. Wood (Baylor University), Ami McConnell (Sr. Fiction Editor, Thomas Nelson Publishers), and David Dark (Belmont University).

Another session on “John Updike and Christian Thought” was convened by Steve Weathers (Abilene Christian University) and featured papers on “Impudence and Desperation: John Updike and his Childhood’s Faith” (Mark Cullum, Abilene Christian University), “John Updike’s ‘Pigeon Feathers,’ Fear of Annihilation, and God” (Michael Potts, Methodist University), and “Run on Home: Updike’s Celebration of Ceremonies in ‘Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded Car'” (James W. Thomas, Pepperdine University).

A third session was offered on the topic of “The Flesh Became Word: A Discussion of the Themes From and Sciences Behind the Stage Adaptation of John Updike’s Roger’s Version,” with Greg Greene of Blackbird Theater convening a panel featuring the play’s director, Wes Driver, and Clifford Anderson (Vanderbilt University).

Here’s the link to the complete schedule.

Omnivoracious features Updike trivia

Posted on by
Reply

It’s come to our attention that in April, to promote Adam Begley’s biography, Updike, Begley supplied the readers’ website Omnivoracious with a brief bit of trivia:  “Five Things You Didn’t Know About John Updike.” 

But my guess is that most members will know the first and third “fun facts,” and anyone who attended the Second Biennial John Updike Society Conference in Boston will know the fourth one, and, if they were paying attention, the fifth!

 

Updike included in an Everyman’s Library fatherhood anthology

Posted on by
Reply

On May 13, Everyman’s Library published a volume in their Everyman’s Pocket Classics series that revolves around the theme of fatherhood.

Stories of Fatherhood, edited by Diana Secker Tesdell, includes the John Updike short story “My Father’s Tears,” and is available in both hardcover and paperback.

Here’s the publisher’s description:

Screen Shot 2014-06-02 at 6.12.36 PM“Stories of Fatherhood gathers more than a century of classic short stories about having, becoming, loving, and losing fathers.

“Frank O’Connor’s hilarious tale of a tiny boy’s war against his paternal rival in “My Oedipus Complex” sits beside Ann Packer’s touching portrait of a man preparing for the wonder and terror of his first child’s birth. At the other end of the lifespan, John Updike’s “My Father’s Tears,” Jim Shepard’s “The Mortality of Parents,” and William Maxwell’s “The man who lost his father” bring us face to face with a loss that is like no other.

“In between, we encounter a full range of emotions connecting men and their offspring: tenderness and devotion, anxiety and incomprehension, admiration and regret. Powerful patriarchs cast a long shadow in Katherine Mansfield’s “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” and D. H. Lawrence’s “The Christening,” while Edith Wharton’s “His Father’s Son” sheds a more ironic light on the paternal legacy. E. L. Doctorow’s young protagonist, forced to write letters impersonating his dead father, arrives at a deeper understanding of him, while in Helen Simpson’s “Sorry?” an old man’s hearing aid seems to reveal what his children secretly think about him.

“Paternal bonds are forged outside biology, too: Graham Swift portrays a man wistfully seeking a substitute son, while Guy de Maupassant’s forlorn waif triumphantly acquires an ideal father. In these twenty stories, an array of great writers—ranging from Kafka, Joyce, and Nabokov to Raymond Carver, Harold Brodkey, and Andre Dubus—offers a wonderfully varied assortment of fictional takes on paternity.”

Read too, if you’re curious, a review/article by Peter Tonguette for The Christian Science Monitor: “‘Stories of Fatherhood’ offers 17 portraits of parenting from a very diverse group of writers.”

List price for the hardcover is $16.00, but Amazon.com is currently selling it for $12.19.

 

Preview of staged Roger’s Version applauds director and writer

Posted on by
Reply

Screen Shot 2014-06-01 at 7.02.34 AMFiona Soltes, writing for The Tennessean, published a preview of Wes Driver’s stage adaptation of Roger’s Version, which had its world premiere on May 30, 2014 and continues its initial run at Nashville’s Blackbird Theater through June 8.

Soltes notes that Driver received special permission from the Updike estate to adapt and stage the play, and quotes Clifford Anderson, director for scholarly communications in the Jean and Alexander Heard Library at nearby Vanderbilt University, as saying that Roger’s Version is “perhaps more relevant today” than it was when Updike published it in 1986.

“One thing that’s obviously different now is that, when Dale was trying to do this, we would have said it was an impossible task. . . . But I think what Updike had in mind, he was almost prescient in thinking that this would be something that scientists would be trying to do. That article [in Nature on ‘re-creating the history of the universe since the Big Bang through computer simulation’] has nothing to do with theology, but there is a very strong—much stronger than in the 1980s—theology and science discussion. In a way, this book was ahead of its time in projecting the themes that would become prevalent in that discussion.”

Anderson, Soltes writes, “has been impressed with the way Driver has cut to the ‘pithy aspects’ of the story while maintaining its drama. ‘It’s going to be quite innovative, and even sharpens the points of the book,’ he says.”

“‘Updike’s works are not known for making easy transitions to other media,’ Driver says. ‘But so much of this book already played out like great drama. . . . To me it cried out to be staged. To be incarnated. What a privilege that the Updike estate has let me do just that.'”

Pictured are actors Kris Wente (Dale) and David Compton (Roger) in a promo shot taken by Driver.

“‘Roger’s Version’ searches for truth at Blackbird Theater”