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

Posted on July 24, 2017 by johnupdikesociety

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”

Updike included in on-air trilogy

Posted on May 19, 2017 by johnupdikesociety

On WNYC guest host Sonia Manzano presented three works about “entering uncharted territories.”

“An early John Updike fable, ‘The Different One,’ imagines a bold bunny. It’s read by Michael Emerson. A gentrified town morphs into a dreamscape in Steven Millhauser’s ‘Coming Soon,’ read by David Morse. And Kristin Valdez Quade’s essay ‘Youth from Every Quarter’ looks at the harsher side of assimilation. It’s read by Manzano.”

Recorded live at Symphony Space in New York City.

Link

Rabbit, Run a bedtime story?

Posted on April 30, 2017 by johnupdikesociety

BBC Radio 4 thinks so. They recently posted an audio clip—Episode 1 of 10—of Rabbit, Run with the following description:

The post-war novel that summed up middle-class white America and established John Updike as the major American author of his generation. Rabbit, Run is the first in a virtuoso Pulitzer Prize-wining quintet featuring hapless Harry Angstrom, whom we meet as a 26-year-old former high school basketball star and suburban paragon in the midst of a personal crisis.

Episode 1 (of 10):
When Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom joins an impromptu basketball game, he sets in motion a chain of decisions that will free him from the responsibilities of adult life—or so he hopes.

Rabbit, Run established Updike as one of the major American novelists of his generation. In the New York Times he was praised for his “artful and supple” style in his “tender and discerning study of the desperate and the hungering in our midst’s”.

Radio 4 plans to broadcast all five novels in the series over the next few years.

Read by Toby Jones
Abridged by Eileen Horne
Produced by Clive Brill
A Brill production for BBC Radio 4.

Paris Review blog post recalls Cheever’s Updike scare

Posted on May 27, 2015 by James Plath

Today The Paris Review uploaded a blog post by Dan Piepenbring which featured the photo below of John Updike and John Cheever on The Dick Cavett Show and an entry from Cheever’s journal, circa 1974, 1978, that’s here titled, “False Alarm.”

It begins, “The telephone rings at four. This is CBS. John Updike has been in a fatal automobile accident. Do you care to comment. I am crying. I cannot sleep again. I think of joining Mary in bed but I am afraid she will send me away.”

Later, Cheever writes, “As for John he was a man I so esteemed as a colleague and so loved as a friend that his loss is indescribable. He was a prince. I think it not difficult to kiss him goodbye—I can think of no other way of parting from him although he would, in my case, have been embarrassed. As a writer of his generation I think him peerless; and his gifts of communicating, to millions of strangers, his most exalted and desperate emotions was, in his case, fortified by immense and uncommon intelligence and erudition.”

It would be Cheever, Updike’s senior by two decades, who would die first, in 1982. Here’s a link to the October 14, 1981 Dick Cavett Show featuring the two luminary Johns.

WAMC includes Updike reading in September line-up

Posted on August 30, 2014 by James Plath

WAMC/Northeast Public Radio—a regional network serving parts of New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, New Jersey, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania—released its “Programming Notes: September 2014” and the month’s offerings include Labor Day readings from Updike.

“At 11AM, we’ll bring you two of the short stories from American writer John Updike. In this Selected Shorts special, hosted by television actress and comedian extraordinaire Jane Kaczmarek, Kaczmarek will read Updike’s “Unstuck,” and screen legend Sally Field will perform “Playing with Dynamite.”

Radio Open Source uploads David Updike clip

Posted on July 7, 2014 by James Plath

Radio Open Source, which recently uploaded a podcast featuring Adam Begley intercut with John Updike audio quotes, also uploaded “From WHAT MAKES RABBIT RUN?: David Updike on being a writer’s child.” The clip only runs a minute and a half, but Updike enthusiasts might appreciate seeing the difference in philosophy between Updike and his son, who is also a writer.

David Updike is the author of numerous books, among them Old Girlfriends: Stories, of which Kirkus Reviews noted, “Thoughtful work from a writer clearly unintimidated by the family name.” And a reviewer for Elle wrote, “David Updike does himself—and his late father, John—proud with his second collection, Old Girlfriends . . . these 10 ruminative stories set in New England sport a winning sense of whimsy, quiet surprise, and fresh, frank sensuality.”

WBUR presents The John Updike Radio Files

Posted on July 4, 2014 by James Plath

Radio Open Source, “arts, ideas & politics with Christopher Lydon,” yesterday posted “The John Updike Radio Files,” which includes a video clip of Lydon interviewing Updike “on the occasion of his second Pulitzer win in 1991 for Rabbit at Rest, from The Ten O’Clock News.”

Adam Begley is also featured. “We’ve discovered some old gems in our radio archives and sprinkled them through a conversation with John Updike’s biographer, Adam Begley, for our show this week.

“Begley talks about Updike’s Pennsylvania boyhood, his wives and lovers north of Boston, his children, his spiritual life, his voracious reading, his travels—and how he created the most graceful prose of our time by cannibalizing all of it for his art.”

Radio Boston reexamines John Updike’s Ipswich years

Posted on May 12, 2014 by James Plath

John Updike, Ipswich, Massachusetts’ most famous resident, began living there in 1957 and continued to reside in the North Shore area not far from Boston until the end of his life. On May 7, 2014, Radio Boston offered a story on “Reexamining John Updike’s Years in Ipswich.”

BBC’s Great Lives series focuses on John Updike

Posted on January 9, 2014 by James Plath

Several days ago the BBC ran a program that the website is listing as “David Baddiel on John Updike.” Click on the pop-up option and you’ll be able to hear the 30-minute broadcast.

“There can be few successful novelists who so divide critical opinion,” Matthew Parris begins. “John Updike was one of the 20th century’s most read of serious American writers” whose style charmed most critics, but, he adds, most famously not Harold Bloom, who called him a minor novelist with a major style.

Parris talks to guest David Baddiel, who builds a case for John Updike, as well as Justin Cartwright, a novelist himself.

“I think it’s a huge mistake to think that the ‘mundane’ is easier to write,” Cartwright says, comparing Updike to George Eliot and Jane Austen.

Selected Shorts readings of Updike stories now online

Posted on December 10, 2013 by James Plath

On November 22, a special broadcast of Public Radio International’s Selected Shorts titled “Updike Redux” featured two of the readings that were a part of the Library of America / Symphony Space event last October 16. Now, those who missed it can access the show online. It’s available as a podcast. To hear it, scroll to the bottom of the page and click the “Listen to the Show” button.

The show opens with Tony Kushner reading from the introduction to Updike’s 2003 Knopf volume The Early Stories. Then, in the story “Unstuck,” a minor mishap strengthens a young couple’s marriage. That story is read by the show’s guest host, Jane Kaczmarek. Two-time Oscar winner Sally Field, making her Selected Shorts debut, concludes the program by reading Updike’s “Playing with Dynamite,” in which an aging man looks back on his life and loves.

THE JOHN UPDIKE SOCIETY

Celebrating one of the most significant American writers of the 20th century

Category Archives: Broadcasts & Podcasts