Ann Beattie speaks to Updike’s descriptive powers

In a March 2023 interview with V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell, Ann Beattie talked about her new collection of essays, More to Say: Essays and Appreciations, which contains an essat on “John Updike’s Sense of Wonder.” Beattie was the keynote speaker at the 1st Biennial John Updike Society Conference in Reading, Pa., back in 2010, and a version of her talk—and this chapter—was published by The John Updike Review in 2011.

The Lit Hub-hosted interview series noted that in the interview Beattie discussed “her recent LitHub essay about Donald Barthelme’s short story ‘The Balloon’ and the Chinese spy balloon. She also talks about her recently published first collection of essays, More to Say: Essays and Appreciations, in which she writes about the work of authors, photographers, and artists she admires, including Elmore Leonard, Sally Mann, John Loengard, and her own husband, visual artist Lincoln Perry.

“Beattie explains why as a nonfiction writer, she prefers close looking and reading; considers defamiliarization in the hands of Barthelme and Alice Munro; analyzes former visual artist John Updike’s depiction of the natural world; and reflects on developing increased comfort with writing about visual art. She also reads excerpts from both her Lit Hub piece and the essay collection.”

Here’s the link to the Lit Hub interview.

A 2009 broadcast on Updike and religion is now online

Shortly after John Updike died, Radio National of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation asked Updike scholars Avis Hewitt, James Plath, and James Schiff to talk about Updike’s “unparalleled legacy of writing that combined an abiding interest in sex with a profound belief in God.”

That broadcast, which aired on Sunday, March 1, 2009, is now available online. Here is the link.

Updike poem is the subject of The Christian Humanist Podcast

The Christian Humanist Podcast recently turned to John Updike’s poem “Americana” for Episode 332, with MIchial Farmer and David Grubbs talking about the poem, airports, and hotel rooms.

The Christian Humanist Podcast is the work of “Three Christians, teachers, and intellectuals [who] gather digitally to hold forth on literature, theology, philosophy, and other things human beings do well. Taking the question at hand utterly seriously and ourselves not at all, the Christian Humanists attempt to record weekly during the school year and take on some interesting questions.” Nathan Gilmour, who is not a part of this episode, is the third Christian Humanist.

Updike’s 90th Birthday Celebration streamed on Facebook Live

John Updike was born 90 years ago on this date. To celebrate, John Updike Childhood Home Director of Education Maria Lester organized and hosted a reading featuring prominent Berks County residents. Watch the Facebook Live recording of the 90th Birthday Celebration at The John Updike Childhood Home, 117 Philadelphia Ave., Shillington, Pa., featuring readings from Updike’s works, interviews, letters, and even personal love poems written as a 10 year old in Shillington.

:01—Introduction and reading by Maria Lester, Director of Education at The John Updike Childhood Home (pictured)

4:54—Samantha J. Wesner, Senior Vice President Student & Campus Life, Albright College

17:18—Conrad Vanino, Shillington Councilperson and Fire Police Lt.

22:13—Charles J. Adams III, Editor, The Historical Review of Berks County

35:48—Bill McKay, Superintendent, Governor Mifflin School District

44:55—Melissa Adams, Executive Director, The Reading Public Library

49:10—Jackie Hirneisen Kendall, Updike’s classmate and first “crush”

53:55—Dave Silcox, Updike’s Berks County contact for 10 years

57:40—David W. Ruoff, former student and friend of Wesley Updike

1:01:00—Jack De Bellis, author of Updike’s Early Years, The John Updike Encyclopedia, and John Updike Remembered

Member’s Updike podcast airs a fourth episode

Bob Batchelor, a longtime member of The John Updike Society and the author of John Updike: A Critical Biography, started an Updike podcast that’s slowly building.

Batchelor has produced four episodes thus far for his podcast, John Updike: American Writer, American Life: “America,” “Falling in Love with John…,” “Who Was John Updike? and “John Updike’s Poetry.” Check them out!

Batchelor said he’s always looking for people knowledgeable about Updike to appear on a future podcast with him “to share their John Updike knowledge and love.” You can contact him through his website, BobBatchelor.com.

New Yorker February podcasts start with an Updike story

Yesterday The New Yorker podcasts began the month with playwright David Rabe reading John Updike’s short story, “The Other Side of the Street,” which was published in a 1991 issue of the magazine. He was joined by Deborah Treisman for the reading and discussion.

Here’s the link.

For the book lovers out there, “The Other Side of the Street” was collected in The Afterlife, a group of short stories published by Knopf in 1994.

Andrew Davies’ “Rabbit” adaptation may be streamed

The bulk of a recent interview Colin Drury conducted with famed British producer-director Andrew Davies was devoted to talk about his recent “nobody sings” adaptation of Les Misérables. But for Updike lovers, tantalizing news comes in the very last paragraph of The Guardian article:

“Another is a series based on John Updike’s Rabbit novels. which may be Davies first work made for a streaming service. ‘It’s early days but that might be on the cards,’ he says, mentioning both Netflix and Amazon as potential platforms. ‘It would be a thrill.’ And neither, I suggest, is averse to turning up the phwoar factor. ‘I know,’ he says and gives that mischievous laugh one last time.”

Given all the Updike books available through Amazon, it would seem a natural for them to stream the “Rabbit” series and essentially promote their entire Updike catalog.

Christian Humanist Profiles podcast features Updike scholar

We’re just learning about it now, but the podcast series Christian Humanist Profiles interviewed Michael Farmer last year about his book, Imagination and Idealism in John Updike’s Fiction. Nathan P. Gilmour asked the questions for the podcast “Christian Humanist Profiles 115,” which he introduced by talking about the philosophy of religion:

Immanuel Kant famously distinguished between things, existing as they are, impervious to our mental probings, and objects, those pieces of our world that only come to us as organized and mediated by senses and understanding and concepts.  Later on, philosophers who would come to be called existentialists–whether they liked it or not–came to regard the imagination, our mental power of organizing and even shaping our world, as one of the core realities of human existence.  Michial Farmer, in his recent book Imagination and Idealism in John Updike’s Fiction, follows the course of imagination as a weapon, an escape, and sometimes even as a mode of redemption in John Updike’s novels and stories and poems, and today he’s joining us on Christian Humanist Profiles not as interviewer but as author” (In “Christian Humanist Profiles 195: The Watchmen” Farmer interviewed Gilmour and David Grubbs about Alan Jacobs’ essay by that title).

Echoing Updike himself, Farmer says that “the work of art is an act of seeing” that “creates a new world.” He says that Updike’s writing depicts a world where “humanity wrestles with the material world and ritual longings.”

Farmer describes the “mechanized universe” as both attractive and repelling. “Updike is fascinated by science, and he’s terrified by it,” Farmer says. “He sees a universe that is meaningless, but he can’t accept that, and something deep within him revolts against it.”

Farmer suggests that Updike’s philosophy aligns, to some degree, with atheist existentialism. “Updike conceives of faith as an act of the imagination where you’re imprinting meaning on an apparently meaningless universe,” Farmer says. “Whatever meaning you’re going to find in the universe, you’re going to put into the universe.”

The theory of “parents forming a mythology for their children” also comes up. Farmer wonders whether Updike’s mother served as a “mythological figure” in both life and fiction as she “dominated his early life and central trauma of his childhood.”

Farmer emphasizes the dependence of the mind in forming the fundamental meaning for life. He concludes, “the only solution to the loss of faith in the modern world is to increase the imagination.”

Listen to the podcast here.

Rabbit in Prime Time?

Variety magazine reported that “BBC Worldwide-backed producer Lookout Point has secured the rights to John Updike’s ‘Rabbit’ novels, with ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’ scribe Andrew Davies (Photo: The Telegraph) set to adapt the series of books for TV.”

So in the future, does that mean Rabbit Reruns?

Not much is known yet. “No co-production or channel partners have been announced,” the story by Stewart Clarke reported, but writer Davies is quoted:

“As a young man, I read Rabbit, Run when it came out and thought: Gosh, this is what life is all about,” Davies said. “I have hoped for a long time to adapt Updike’s novels and I’m thrilled to embark on this journey now.”

Peter White, who first broke the story for Deadline Hollywood, reported that Lookout Point “won the rights and the support from the Updike estate,” which suggests there may have been other interested parties—a good sign for Updike’s legacy.

The link to the Variety story is below, after which there’s a link to an expanded story that appeared days later in the Boston Globe, who speculate that “this may be the beginning of a new understanding of Updike—triggered by the Brits.”

“BBC-Backed Lookout Point Options John Updike’s ‘Rabbit’ Novels”

“John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom novels will be adapted for TV”

 

About that David Foster Wallace-John Updike thing . . .

John Updike Society president Jim Plath appeared as a guest on an episode of The Great Concavity podcast that was recorded live in front of attendees at the fourth annual David Foster Wallace conference at Illinois State University in Normal, Ill. Roughly one hundred people were in the audience to hear ISU’s Charlie Harris and Plath, from nearby Illinois Wesleyan University, talk about the life and legacy of Wallace . . . and, of course, Wallace’s infamous scathing review of Updike’s Toward the End of Time.

The podcast, which is dedicated to DFW, is hosted by Matt Bucher and Dave Lair. Anyone who saw the DFW biopic The End of the Tour (2015) knows that Charlie Harris not only hired Wallace, but was a close personal friend whose daughter also dated Wallace. Plath was part of the Bloomington-Normal literary community when Wallace first arrived, and recalls introducing him at the Bloomington Parks and Rec “WordsFair” and running into him at parties and literary gatherings. As an Updike scholar, he also offers insight into Wallace’s anti-Updike remarks.

“Episode 29: Live from the ISU David Foster Wallace Conference, featuring Charlie Harris and Jim Plath”