Takashi Nakatani, an associate professor at Yokohama City University who attended the First Biennial John Updike Society Conference, wrote an essay/report on “Updike Gakkai Soritsu-Taikai Shusseki-no Ki” (“Report on the Updike Society Inaugural Conference”) which was published in Web Eigo-Seinen (The Web Rising Generation) 156:9 (2010): 49-52. Web. 1 December 2010. Below is the first page. For the rest, see Web Eigo-Seinen.
The Pennsylvania Humanities Council “Humanities on the Road” Season 1 broadcast schedule includes a Dec. 3 program on John Updike’s Pennsylvania that will also be viewable via Internet streaming.
The program by Society member Frank Fitzpatrick (pictured), who’s a staff writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer, is illustrated with slides of Berks County locations important to Updike’s world. It will air on PCN-TV Friday, Dec. 3 from 6-7 p.m., Saturday, Dec. 4 from 2-3 p.m., and Monday, Dec. 6, from 10-11 a.m. The shows are also available as streaming videos during broadcast on www.pcntv.com, offered On Demand to Comcast subscribers, and on PHC’s YouTube Channel. Here’s the link.
Thanks to member Ken Krawchuk for drawing our attention to it.
Guernica: A Magazine of Art & Politics has just published an interview that Lila Azam Zanganeh conducted with John Updike “four years ago.” Here’s the link, with thanks to Dr. C. Greenhalgh for drawing our attention to it.
Bruce Cordingly, a Seattle resident who attended the First Biennial John Updike Society Conference on October 1-3, 2010, has written an article for The Millions on “John Updike, and the Curious Business of Sustaining Literary Reputations.” Here’s the link.
This poem by Evelyn Lau was published in the The Malahat Review 171 (Summer 2010), which was released in September and reprinted here by permission of both the author and the review:
Updike Redux
Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth.
—John Updike, “A Soft Spring Night in Shillington”
~
The sound of rain made you happy almost to tears.
Here, it’s November again. Lightning in the night,
the neighbor’s coughing through the drywall,
the tinny sounds of late night TV.
I try to remember gratitude, the wonder you felt
as a boy crouched under a wicker chair
on a porch in Shillington, storm showers falling
all around you like a benediction.
Is it possible we never met?
Perhaps your sleeve brushed mine, once,
in the desert where you spent the winter—
among the crowds on the baked streets
of Scottsdale, the avid tourists
and fake cowboys, you a tall man with a hawk nose,
skin red from psoriasis and sun.
Or perhaps we drove past your house
in the foothills of Tucson on our way back
from the Biosphere, microwave lines of heat
radiating above the road
as we crossed the dry riverbeds
toward the saguaro forest at sunset—
the talcum kiss of the parched air,
lurid watercolours in the sky. No,
this was April, you were in Beverly Farms,
it was the last spring of your life.
Here the soil sizzles, soaking up the downpour
after the Indian summer that lingered
like it would never end. Blue days of bluster
and blown leaves. The tree in the courtyard
a massed bruise, magenta and mauve,
the maples filtering blood through their spun keys.
If it was hard to be happy then, tell me how
to survive the winter. Tell me how
to get to Plow Cemetery, where soft fistfuls
of your ashes were scattered on stone.
Clouds of ashes, the colour of smoke and dust,
Lifting above the land
You loved so much, seeding with rain.
Member Jack Ruttle passed on the information that not just John Updike’s 1968 interview with Charles Thomas Samuels, but all of the interviews that The Paris Review published with writers are available online now, free.
Here’s the link.
Society member Richard Androne (Albright College) has announced the panel topics for the Society’s offerings at the American Literature Association, May 26-29, 2011, at the Westin Copley Place in Boston.
Updike in Massachusetts. Topics might include, but are not limited to, Updike and Harvard, Updike and Boston, Updike and any aspect of the Ipswich/Beverly/Essex County/North Shore/Salem contexts, Updike and Hawthorne, Updike and the fine arts in Massachusetts.
The Other John Updike. This panel will explore Updike’s work in areas other than prose fiction: poetry, drama, children’s literature, criticism, reviews, essays, public commentary, and texts in which he assumes the role of man of letters.
If you’re going to be at ALA and wish to submit a proposal, send your abstract directly to Dick via email (randrone@alb.edu) or regular mail (Dept. of English, Albright College, P.O. Box 15234, Reading, PA 19612-5234).
For more information about conference and hotel, click on the left-menu link for the American Literature Association.
Photo: Westin Copley Place (tallest building) and Boston Public Library (right).
Greta Cuyler of the Reading Eagle wrote a nice article about David Updike’s talk at Alvernia University on Tuesday, October 12. Here’s the link.
Meanwhile, Society member Joan Youngerman, who was one of Updike’s Class of 1950 Shillington H.S. classmates, announced Tuesday that she was donating her personal correspondence from John Updike to The John Updike Society Archive at Alvernia. That’s a real treasure trove, and the Society and Alvernia are grateful for the donation.
Earlier in the week, Peter Brown, who lives in Washington, D.C. and teaches fiction writing at The Writer’s Center, contacted the Society to say he will donate two Updike artifacts to the archive, framed magazines featuring Updike on the cover: a 1968 Time and a 1970 Esquire. They will make great additions to the room in which the archives will be housed, and we thank Peter as well.
The Los Angeles Times has published an article about “John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s deportation battle; The couple had powerful friends who helped them fight and win their deportation battle with the Nixon administration.”
One of those “friends” was John Updike, who, with fellow writer Joyce Carol Oates, sent a letter in support of Lennon and Ono. Writer and UC-Irvine professor of history Jon Wiener, who used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the information, has created a website on which he includes a photocopy of the Updike postcard written on their behalf. Wiener tells the whole story in his book, Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files, and the material is also the subject of a documentary, “The U.S. Versus John Lennon.”
It was announced at the conference in Reading and printed in the program that the Society board unanimously voted to give James Yerkes the first Distinguished Service Award. Today, Jim received his award, presented to him by Rich Boulet, director of the Blue Hill Public Library, a literary center in Maine near Yerkes’ home.
“Please express my sincere thanks to members of the Society,” Jim wrote in an email.
Yerkes, Professor of Religion and Philosophy Emeritus and former Provost of Moravian College, was honored for his extensive contributions to Updike scholarship, especially through The Centaurian, which he published from 1996 until it was forced to shut down in 2008. Yerkes is also well known among Updike scholars for editing John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace, published by Eerdmans in December of 1999. Updike wrote him afterwards that “I think you got it just right,” and The John Updike Society thanks Jim Yerkes for his many years of service to Updike scholarship and congratulates him on his award. The presentation was reported by the local press, and library director Boulet was kind enough to send a PDF of an article that also appeared in The Ellsworth American: Ellsworth American story