Monthly Archives: July 2017

Phil Jackson’s old news is Updike’s too

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James Warren, in a June 30, 2017 column for the Poynter website, noted that Phil Jackson (pictured), the “fabled pro basketball coach got canned as chief executive of the New York Knicks. It’s open season on him right now, with nary a positive word being written about him.

“It reminds me, however, of a 1992 Chicago Tribune piece that I helped broker: a meeting between Jackson, then coach of the Chicago Bulls, and John Updike. The late Tribune writer Paul Galloway did a knockout job, including catching the fact that Jackson knew one Updike book better than Updike, along with Jackson having some distinct views about what were then big changes at The New Yorker.

If that Updike-Jackson interview sounds familiar, it was reprinted in Conversations with John Updike (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1994), ed. by James Plath.

Updike book reminds rugby lover’s son of his father

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Mark Reason has been writing a blog “in search of” his late father John—”for 30 years the rugby correspondent of the Daily and then Sunday Telegraph. John began his tours of New Zealand in the ’60s and wrote two books chronicling the tours—and he came across a book that reminded him of his father.

That book was My Father’s Tears, by John Updike.

“I last saw my father a week before his death. He was sitting quietly in a chair looking out on the back garden in Twickenham. There was snow on the ground. He smiled at me, peaceful and, I now realise, happy to go. He wasn’t going to hang around. My dad’s smile was saying goodbye to me,” Reason writes.

“I am not sure I ever saw my father cry. The other day in the glorious Hamilton second hand bookshop I saw a copy of John Updike’s My Father’s Tears. Of course, I bought it, there seem to be a lot of Johns in this story.

“Updike’s father was seeing him off at the train station on the way to college. ‘It shocked me—threw me off track as it were—to see that my father’s eyes, as he shook my hand good-bye, glittered with tears.’

It was the only time Updike saw his father cry. A few, years later, with Updike trying to fly back from Europe in time to be with his seriously ill father, the news arrived that his dad had died. Updike’s wife put her arms around him and told him to cry.

“‘I saw the opportunity, and the rightness of seizing it, I don’t believe I did. My father’s tears had used up mine.’

“I find it the other way around. I can’t ever remember seeing my father cry, not even when my little brother died. I am sure he must have done, but not in front of the children. In some ways Victoria was still my father’s ruling monarch. And so I cry quite a lot. My father left me plenty of his tears.”

Read the whole blog entry.

 

How Rabbit, Run film was lost and found

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Updike fans know that James Caan starred in a film version of Rabbit, Run that premiered in Reading and was so unwarmly received that the studio decided against a wider release. And Updike fans know that the film is rarely shown.

But who knew it was lost? And now found?

In “TCM Unearths the 1970 movie version of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run,” freelance journalist Shaw Conner cites a 2007 Reading Eagle story you may have missed. That article reported that “Rabbit, Run may have been lost forever if it wasn’t for Ray Dennis Steckler. Steckler, who made a name for himself in the ’70s for adult films such as Sexual Satanic Awareness and Red Heat (he also made the rather fabulously titled 1964 cheapie The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies), bought a 16mm print of the film for $1000 after seeing an ad for it in a magazine. Originally from Reading himself, Steckler wanted a little piece of home. He later gave the print to the organizer of a film festival in Berks County (a county in Pennsylvania that includes Reading).That print ended up at the Historical Society of Berks County.

Read the rest of the article.

New book published by Updike’s literary progeny

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John Updike was famously one of the American writers who put sex in fiction because it’s part of “the continuum of life,” Updike had said. His depiction of sexual escapades in Couples landed him a Time magazine cover, and he paved the way for writers wishing to explore sexual situations and language in literature. But he may have been one-upped—at least according to Ron Charles, who reviewed the new book by Matthew Klam.

Klam was one of the New Yorker’s Best Fiction Writers Under 40 back in 2000, Charles writes, but then fell off the map until his recent publication of Who Is Rich?, “about a writer who once enjoyed ‘precocious success’ and then sank into obscurity. ‘I’d had an appointment with destiny,’ the narrator says. ‘I’d barely started, then I blinked and it was over.’

“We could speculate about how much this falls under the category of Write What You Know, but here’s what I do know,” Charles writes. “This is an irresistible comic novel that pumps blood back into the anemic tales of middle-aged white guys. Klam may be working in a well-established tradition, but he’s sexier than Richard Russo and more fun than John Updike, whose Protestant angst was always trying to transubstantiate some man’s horniness into a spiritual crisis.”

The novel is set at a summer artists conference “where hopeful adults of middling talent are taught by writers and painters of fading repute,” Charles writes. “Klam’s narrator is a 42-year-old graphic novelist named Rich Fischer, who first signed on with this summer program years ago when he was the hot new thing. Now he’s just a poor illustrator for a failing political magazine—a crisply satirized version of the New Republic.”

Full review

Amazon link

Updike society honors retired librarian

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For half of its 13-year run, The Centaurian counted on Dave Lull to scour the Internet for Updike-related news so that editor James Yerkes could keep the site interesting and useful for scholars and the just-plain-readers Updike most appreciated. Then, two years after a server problem forced that site to close in 2009, Lull, a librarian in charge of technical services at the Duluth Public Library in Duluth, Minn., began doing the same thing for The John Updike Society website.  Over the years he’s provided editor James Plath with the material to post more than 700 articles, both popular and academic—fitting, since over the course of his 39-year career as a librarian Lull has worked in both academic and popular libraries, in both reference and technical services.

Lull retired from library work in 2015, but not from Updike studies. “He sends me so many Updike-related stories and articles that it’s hard for me to keep up,” Plath said—something he shares in common with Yerkes, who could never manage to publish all of the items that Lull located. “I fall behind, and then go through my emails to play catch-up,” Plath said. “But I can’t imagine trying to maintain a society website/blog without Dave’s help. He has really enriched our society’s site.”

Because of all that Lull has done for Updike studies and for all he continues to do, the board of directors of The John Updike Society unanimously approved him to receive the society’s Distinguished Service Award.

Yerkes never had the pleasure of meeting Lull, who lives in Superior, Wis. across the bay from Duluth, but because Plath was going to be in Saint Paul for an F. Scott Fitzgerald conference he suggested meeting halfway in Hinckley, Minn. Appropriately, they gathered at the Hinckley Public Library, where one of the librarians offered to take a photo of the presentation.

“When I walked in, Dave was already there and I asked him if the library had any Updike books,” Plath said. “Of course, being both a librarian and an Updike fan, Dave had already checked. ‘Only one book,’ he said. ‘The Maples Stories.'”

Lull’s academic background is in political science (mainly political philosophy) and philosophy, and he received a B.S. from the University of Wisconsin-Superior in 1970. Then he earned a Master’s in Library Science from Rosary College (now Dominican University) in 1976 after a four-year stint in the Navy. “I have wide-ranging interests with no areas of expertise, so librarianship has been a good fit for me,” Lull said. “I do have a special interest in writing and writers, though I’m not a writer.”

In presenting the award on behalf of the society, Plath noted that it was awarded “with gratitude to Dave Lull, for his many years helping to promote John Updike’s legacy through The Centaurian and JUS website.”

“If you see an article on our website, odds are it’s from Dave,” Plath said.

“I’m delighted to know that I’ve been of service,” Lull said.

This is the fifth Distinguished Service Award the society has presented in its nine years of existence, with the first one going to Yerkes back in 2010.