Updike poem inspires tuba composition

Posted on May 22, 2014 by James Plath

The San Jose Mercury-News ran a story about a physics professor and composer named Brian Holmes who says he was inspired to write a piece for chorus and tuba by John Updike’s poem, “Recital.”

That composition will have its world premiere on May 31 at Lincoln Glen Church, featuring Symphony Silicon Valley tuba player Tony Clements as soloist.

“Updike was inspired to write the poem after seeing a headline in the New York Times that read ‘Roger Bobo Gives Recital on the Tuba’ on a story about the tuba virtuoso who spent 25 years with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

“‘I agree with Updike that the words ‘Bobo’ and ‘tuba’ are immensely silly in one headline,’ Holmes says.

“Updike took this silliness and ran with it; the first stanza of ‘Recital’ reads, ‘Eskimos in Manitoba / Barracuda off Aruba / Cock an ear when Roger Bobo / Starts to solo on the tuba.’

“Holmes’ piece sticks to the poems text but plays with Bobo’s name a bit more.”

According to the article by Anne Gelhaus, it’s not the first time that Holmes has found inspiration in Updike.

Here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson: Begley on “Mighty Mothers”

Posted on May 17, 2014 by James Plath

The ubiquitous Adam Begley has written a piece for The Wall Street Journal titled “Adam Begley on mighty mothers,” in which he names five books that feature dominant matriarchs. Given his recent biography of John Updike it’s no surprise that he included Updike, and even less of a surprise that the book he chose was Of the Farm, the novel that Updike has said was written about his mother. You need to subscribe to access the full article, which was published in the Bookshelf/Life & Culture section on May 16, 2014, but here’s what he had to say about Updike:

Of the Farm

By John Updike (1965)

4. There are only four voices in this gem of a novel, a fractious quartet performing under a spotlight in and around an elderly widow’s isolated Pennsylvania farmhouse. Joey Robinson, a 35-year-old mama’s boy, has brought his second wife, Peggy, and her young son to visit Joey’s garrulous, manipulative mother. By the second night, Joey’s mother has bullied him into agreeing that Peggy is vulgar and stupid and that divorcing his first wife was a mistake. After an emotional melee worthy of Edward Albee, mother and son achieve a kind of mutual forgiveness. But when all the skirmishes are done, and all the wounds more or less neatly bandaged, Joey and his mother engage in a bit of pointed banter about selling the farm after she is dead. She refers to it as “my farm,” and before he replies, Joey reflects: “We were striking terms, and circumspection was needed. I must answer in our old language, our only language, allusive and teasing, that with conspiratorial tact declared nothing and left the past apparently unrevised.” He says, “Your farm? . . . I’ve always thought of it as our farm.” The mother-son conspiracy endures.

The Other John Updike Archive is posting again

Posted on May 13, 2014 by James Plath

After a brief hiatus, The Other John Updike Archive is posting again:

“In Every Dream Home A Heartache”

“Will you still love me tomorrow?”

“And In The Beginning…”

“Couples: The story you’re about to read is true…”

“Celestial Seasonings (on being JUish)”

“Here’s looking up your old address”

“Cape Fear Redux”

“Ex Pat Updike? Not bloody likely!”

Begley weighs in with his Top 10 Updike short stories

Posted on May 7, 2014 by James Plath

In a story that appeared today, Updike biographer Adam Begley shared his picks for “Top 10 John Updike short stories” with The Guardian. Click on the link for details, but we won’t keep you in suspense for his picks:

“The Happiest I’ve Been” (1958)

“Separating” (1974)

“A&P” (1960)

“A Sandstone Farmhouse” (1990)

“The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother’s Thimble, and Fanning Island” (1960)

“The Bulgarian Poetess” (1964)

“Bech in Czech” (1986)

“Problems” (1975)

“Here Come the Maples” (1976)

“My Father’s Tears” (2005)

Whether by choice or by happy accident, it’s worth noting that Begley’s list contains a story from every decade Updike worked as a professional writer.

Updike, transubstantiation, and John Donne

Posted on May 1, 2014 by James Plath

More literary musings from Paul Elie of Georgetown University. In his April 30, 2014 Everything That Rises blogpost he springboards again off of “Louis Menand’s characterization of John Updike as a novelist who understood his way of writing as ‘transubstantiating'” and explores a connection between Updike and poet John Donne, speculating on others. Here’s the link:

“John Updike, Calling John Donne”

John Updike, Transubstantiator?

Posted on April 25, 2014 by James Plath

Georgetown University blogger Paul Elie is at it again, riffing off of a Louis Menand review of the new Begley biography of Updike in a short think piece titled “John Updike, Transubstantiator.”

In an April 25, 2014 entry on Everything That Rises, Elie begins with Menand’s characterization of Updike as “a priest of literature who performed rites of transubstantiation akin to those of Joyce and Proust” and acknowledges that there’s “plenty of testimony” to be found to support such a view. But he also suggests that one shouldn’t make too much of this “congenial” argument—”not to make it the skeleton key that will unlock his large and various body of work.

“Yes, Updike hung photographs of Joyce and Proust on his office wall. But he also revered Nabokov, whose sense of transcendence is strictly, fiercely artistic; he had American realists like Sinclair Lewis in the front of his mind; and unlike the modernist priests of art he cherished his readers, many of them people who saw no reason that American life should need transubstantiating—people who recognized postwar America as a kind of earthly paradise.”

John Updike, Chronicler: a review of a review

Posted on April 23, 2014 by James Plath

Everything That Rises, out of Georgetown University, published a think piece by Paul Elie that’s a review of (or at least reaction to) writer Orhan Pamuk’s review of Adam Begley’s biography, Updike.

In “John Updike, Chronicler,” Elie notes that Pamuk “all but came out and said the thinkable-unsayable—that Updike was more vital as an essayist than as a novelist” and wonders,

“So why isn’t Updike appreciated as an essayist? Possibly because just as there is no single essential Updike novel, there is no single essential Updike essay (the one about Ted Williams’ last game comes closest). . . . That Updike was a chronicler is true of his essays, too. He chronicled his own life: his coming of age, and his aging. He chronicled the art world through several decades of museum and gallery show reviews. And he chronicled postwar fiction from Nabokov to Pamuk himself in several hundred book reviews. He even chronicled the waxing and waning (mainly the waning) of religious feeling and current trends in Christian theology. The essays, beautifully turned in themselves, were never meant to stand along (though many do). They are set at a very wide angle to their time and place—the angle formed by the pages of an opened New Yorker.”

Ozick: Kafka did not transcend his Jewishness, no matter what Updike claimed

Posted on April 19, 2014 by James Plath

In a review of Kafka: The Decisive Years and Kafka: The Years of Insight, by Reiner Stach (Princeton University Press), writer Cynthia Ozick took exception with Updike’s remarks made in the introduction to Kafka’s Collected Stories:

“In an otherwise seamless introduction to Kafka’s Collected Stories, John Updike takes up the theme of transcendence with particular bluntness: ‘Kafka, however unmistakable the ethnic source of his ‘liveliness’ and alienation, avoided Jewish parochialism, and his allegories of pained awareness take upon themselves the entire European—that is to say, predominantly Christian—malaise.’ As evidence, he notes that the Samsas in ‘The Metamorphosis’ make the sign of the cross. Nothing could be more wrong-headed than this parched Protestant misapprehension of Mitteleuropa’s tormented Jewish psyche. . . . The idea of the parochial compels its opposite: what is not parochial must be universal. And if the parochial is deemed a low distraction from the preponderant social force—’that is to say, predominantly Christian’—then what is at work is no more than supercilious triumphalism. To belittle as parochial the cultural surround (‘the ethnic source’) that bred Kafka is to diminish and disfigure the man—to do to him what so many of Kafka’s stories do to their hapless protagonists.”

Here’s the full review, which appeared in the April 11, 2014 Books section of the New Republic: “How Kafka Actually Lived; He did not transcend his Jewishness, no matter what Updike claimed.”

Flavorwire offers The Skeptic’s Guide to John Updike

Posted on April 14, 2014 by James Plath

Today Flavorwire posted an article from Jason Diamond that was obviously inspired by the release of Adam Begley’s biography, and yet it’s not a review. In “The Skeptic’s Guide to John Updike,” Diamond mistakenly credits the Boston area for Updike’s “rearing,” but offers that people who already like Updike’s work will like Begley’s “excellent new biography,” which “will give you more insight into a writer you might still be conflicted about reading.” He also advises resistant readers to try The Complete Henry Bech, Hub Fan Bids Kid Adieu, and the LOL volume of the complete short stories.

NPR spotlights Begley’s UPDIKE

Posted on April 5, 2014 by James Plath

NPR spotlights Adam Begley’s biography Updike today, featuring an audio interview and a published version that includes “Interview Highlights”:

“Biographer Explains How John Updike ‘Captured America'”

Asked what kind of dinner guest Updike was, Begley responds, “You would be aware that he was noticing you with terrific intensity, and you might find even that he’d put you in a story next time.”

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