Law review article cites prison censorship of Updike

Posted on April 30, 2017 by johnupdikesociety

An article by David M. Shapiro published by The George Washington Law Review on “Lenient in Theory, Dumb in Fact: Prison, Speech, and Scrutiny” exposes inconsistencies and illogical practices regarding the restriction of reading matter in prisons, and mentions Updike in so doing.

Abstract
The Supreme Court declared thirty years ago in Turner v. Safley that prisoners are not without constitutional rights: any restriction on those rights must be justified by a reasonable relationship between the restriction at issue and a legitimate penological objective. In practice, however, the decision has given prisoners virtually no protection. Exercising their discretion under Turner, correctional officials have saddled prisoners’ expressive rights with a host of arbitrary restrictions—including prohibiting President Obama’s book as a national security threat; using hobby knives to excise Bible passages from letters; forbidding all non-religious publications; banning Ulysses, John Updike, Maimonides, case law, and cat pictures. At the same time, the courts have had no difficulty administering the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), which gives prisons far less deference by extending strict scrutiny to free exercise claims by prisoners. Experience with the Turner standard demonstrates that it licenses capricious invasions of constitutional rights, and RLUIPA demonstrates that a heightened standard of review can protect prisoners’ expressive freedoms without compromising prison security. It is time for the Court to revisit Turner.

Shapiro noted that “A prison allowed magazines such as Playboy and Maxim but prohibited works by John Updike as salacious. . . .”

“No to John Updike, Yes to Porn”

“The following example, and those that follow, are instances in which courts struck down speech restrictions under the Turner standard. Again, not all courts that have applied Turner treat it as a rubber stamp.228 These examples, however, illustrate restrictions that prison and jail authorities thought they could impose under the legal standard, even if incorrectly. While these restrictions ultimately did not survive scrutiny, the fact that officials tried to implement them at all provides further support for the view that Turner’s ability to deter constitutional violations at the outset is limited.

In Cline v. Fox, 229 the district court considered a purge of a prison library, which resulted in the removal of 259 books, which, in the view of the prison, constituted ‘obscene material.’ 230 Prison staff were instructed to read every book in the library and ‘to eliminate any book that contained language that might arouse the reader.’ 231 Books purged from the shelves included ‘William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge, and a number of works by John Updike.’ 232 The court noted that ‘[t]he prohibition also applies regardless of the context of the depiction or the content of the work as a whole. Therefore, literary classics like George Orwell’s 1984 and religious texts like the Bible technically violate this regulation.’ 233 Meanwhile, prisoners were allowed to receive commercial pornography, including such magazines as Playboy and Maxim. 234 Based on this inconsistency, the court struck down the regulation under Turner. 235 [. . .]

from The George Washington Law Review Vol. 84:4 (July 2016). 972-1028.

Terrorist and Jihadi fiction: a scholarly paper

Posted on March 30, 2017 by johnupdikesociety

Jago Morrison’s paper, “Jihadi fiction: radicalisation narratives in the contemporary novel” is available online, published 6 March 2017 by the Taylor & Francis Group. Here’s the abstract (link to full text also available):

“As Ulrich Beck suggests in World at Risk, fear of Islamist extremism has become a dominant strand in contemporary perceptions of risk. In the media, a set of ‘stock’ radicalisation narratives have emerged in which, typically, a misguided loner is brainwashed into embracing a violent perversion of Islam. In the background, the wider Muslim community is accused of a dangerous complicity and complacency. This essay explores some notable attempts in fiction to unpick such popular radicalisation narratives. In novels by John Updike and Sunjeev Sahota, the psychological and faith dimensions of suicide bombing are a key focus, attempting to explore from the inside, how an educated young Muslim might be impelled along the path to martyrdom. In texts by Mohsin Hamid and J.M. Coetzee, the ideological staging of ‘radicalisation’ and ‘fundamentalism’ themselves is brought into question. Current counterterrorist measures include indefinite detention of US citizens without trial, while in the UK, over two million public sector workers have been recruited to the largest surveillance exercise ever codified in British law. In this context, the essay shows how recent fiction has attempted to trouble the frames of representation through which a perpetual state-of-emergency is passed off as our ‘new normal.'”

“In John Updike’s Terrorist,” Morrison writes, “both radicalisation and its contexts are portrayed rather differently. Again, the focus of the novel is to explore the risk of a devastating suicide attack, but to do so through an individual, human story. This, however, is very much an American tale, in which the impulse towards extremism is seen as rising, at least in part, out of the bleakness and inanity of contemporary suburban life. Like Sahota, Updike begins by drawing a protagonist who is damaged and ripe for influence. No visit to Afghanistan is required for Ahmad: between the machinations of a local imam and those of a CIA agent, the manipulations all happen close to home, in an ordinary city modelled on Paterson, New Jersey. In Updike’s portrayal, Ahmad is an impressionable and (somewhat cartoonishly) zealous American teenager, product of a broken home and in search of self-esteem. Raised non-religious after his Egyptian father abandoned him as a young child, he is described by his mother as ‘trusting’ and ‘easily led.’”

Continue reading →

Prospect’s Edward Pearce on John Updike

Posted on March 30, 2017 by johnupdikesociety

Prospect: The leading magazine of ideas, published an essay in their March 2000 issue (posted online 20 March 2000) by Edward Pearce titled, “You’re not so vain: In praise of John Updike.” In it, Pearce considers Updike-as-reviewer.

“Notoriously, the author of the Rabbit tetralogy, the delectable Bech stories and a compendium of superlative writing, is a kind reviewer. He shares the view of Anthony Burgess (also a victim of loftiness from below) that writing a book is a great toil underground and that to be smashed on the head afterwards—even with a cardboard shovel—is a rotten experience. Decent fellow writers should withhold such smashing.”

Later, Pearce writes, “Updike as a critic has the gift of interest. His scope is continental . . . . Updike is intelligently nostalgic. He is sufficiently independent of the arts community’s requirements to be able to field the latest buzz topic—then turn back to a film star of his childhood, or indeed a mediocre novel of 30 years ago, and write about it with affection.”

“There is also,” Pearce maintains, citing a review of Camille Paglia, “a delightful cross-over from Updike the moviegoer and 1950s nostalgist” in Updike the reviewer.

Read the full essay

Myth and Gospel in the Fiction of John Updike reviewed

Posted on February 3, 2017 by James Plath

Kathleen Verduin has written a review of John McTavish‘s Myth and Gospel in the Fiction of John Updike for Perspectives: A Journal of Reformed Thought, calling the book “a kind of bricolage: revisions and expansions of essays and reviews McTavish published since the 1970s in such venues as Theology Today, the United Church Observer, and the Huntsville Forester; reprints of articles by Alice and Kenneth Hamilton from the Christian Century and Radix; an interview with Updike appearing originally in the magazine Episcopal Life; previously collected memorial tributes by the poet J.D. McClatchy and Updike’s son David; and a selection of reminiscences solicited from various readers of Updike . . . about how they first encountered the author and why he attracted them.

“Still, it seems to me that such an anomalous makeup makes this a publication of interest. Looked at on its own terms, McTavish’s book bears witness to half a century of authentic engagement with a writer he calls ‘one of the few literary links with the historic Christian faith’—and thus provides a diachronic record of Updike’s reception . . . among literate Christians exhilarated by a gifted artist who, as Michael Novak wrote in 1963, was ‘beginning to make religion intelligible in America.'”

Read the full review.

Beyoncé, James Cone, and Updike’s Skeeter

Posted on January 9, 2017 by James Plath

In a scholarly essay posted January 9, 2017 on The Other Journal website, Lauren D. Sawyer considers Updike’s controversial character Skeeter from Rabbit Redux in a larger context: “No Savior at All: Updike’s Black Jesus and the White Church.”

There is much to digest here—too much to excerpt, except for the author’s concluding paragraph:

“In Black Theology and Black Power, [“father of black liberation theology” James] Cone writes that ‘the time has come for white Americans to be silent and listen to black people.’ It is clear that white Americans, and in particular the white church, have not listened well. We have insisted that our culture be the norm, making it difficult to embrace the blackness of Beyoncé, let alone broader representations of blackness in America. We have insisted that our Christ be white and have used him to justify racism from slavery to the mass incarceration of black men. Maybe what we need is a black Jesus to come and disrupt our perspective, to show us the extent of our sin. Updike’s black Jesus does not quite get us there. He may reveal to us, the white church, our sin, but he does not offer liberation to black lives. Skeeter as Christ functions only to help the white church begin to address its privilege and racism by forcing us to see our racism for what it is. To black lives, Skeeter is pure antichrist—he is a misrepresentation of what it means to be black and is thus no savior at all. It is the black Jesus imagined by Cone who fully functions as Christ to both black and white lives: liberating black persons from oppression and liberating white persons from their role as oppressor.”

Read the full essay.

Is Updike’s Rabbit rare, or common?

Posted on January 5, 2017 by James Plath

In a January 5, 2017 post on The Guardian, writer Matt Lewis notes that “Rabbit, Run is about a rebel we all know; John Updike’s disappointed young man dreams of escaping a workaday existence in a way that’s still familiar nearly 60 years on.”

Updike famously intended Rabbit, Run as a “riposte to Jack Kerouac’s 1957 beatnik classic On the Road,” Lewis writes. “Rather than beating morality into his readers, Rabbit gives Updike a means to explore the urges that exist in everyone—however secretly.”

That’s the common part. But as Lewis observes, “Like James Joyce and DH Lawrence before him, Updike treats sex and sexuality with a frankness that was uncommon among his contemporaries. The descriptions of sex have retained their raw freshness. In an essay, David Foster Wallace named Updike one of three Great Male Narcissists in U.S. postwar fiction and said that friends had criticized Updike for being ‘just a penis with a thesaurus.’ But that feels grossly unfair when considering his early novels like this one.

“For all of the prose’s curlicues and self-conscious prettiness, there is undoubtedly meat on the bone. Through Rabbit, Updike confronts major topics in a minor way: unravelling the tapestry of the suburban American male psyche and reweaving it into beautiful images. On reading, we become like his protagonist: restless strivers yearning for something different and altogether bigger than ourselves.”

Blogger considers Updike, Rabbit and Tolstoy

Posted on December 26, 2016 by James Plath

‘Twas the night before Christmas, and blogger Richard Smith (Richard Smith’s non-medical blogs) spent the evening pondering the connection between John Updike and his alter ego, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom—specifically, by reading, considering, and including quotes from the novella Rabbit Remembered, with a comparison to Tolstoy thrown in for good measure:

“One of the characters in Rabbit Remembered says of the detective novels she is always reading, ‘How do they make all this up? They must have a screw loose.’ John Updike I feel is mocking himself. I’m sure that he thinks he has a screw loose, and he’s glad about it. He wouldn’t have wanted to have all his screws tight; who does?

“I came to read Rabbit Remembered by mistake. I’ve been slowly—here and there, for a shot of humor, color, and inventiveness, like a glass of Cognac—been reading my way through Updike’s Licks of Love. When I started reading Rabbit Remembered I thought I was reading another short story, but it’s a full novel, or at least a novella. I read more than half of it in one go on the plane yesterday from Bengaluru to London. That’s the way I read. (I seem to have given up watching films on planes: they almost always disappoint. My novels, never—I’m too choosy.)

“Every sentence of Updike carries poetry and sharp observation—and often a joke as well. I’ve been reading Rabbit Remembered at the same time as reading Anna Karenina, and most sentences of Tolstoy contain insights—but they don’t have the fizz, the joy of words, the poetry of Updike (they probably have more poetry in Russian). The beauty of Tolstoy is in the vast range and the deep and timeless psychological understanding. In Anna Karenina marriage (“that bloody business”) is examined from every angle. Updike too exams relationships acutely, but in a lighter, funnier way. Perhaps some would find Updike overwritten, but his sentences sing and seem effortless, which, of course, they can’t be.”

The full post can be found here: “Rabbit and Updike remembered.”

Those intrigued by Smith’s insights may want to also read his Dec. 25, 2016 post, “John Updike on the demented as a ‘dead weight’ on society,” also sparked by his reading of Rabbit Remembered.

Marry Me the subject of a University of Tehran thesis

Posted on December 22, 2016 by James Plath

Member Narges Zarei has completed her thesis on “Postmodern Manifestation of Romance in Updike’s Marry Me: A Romance: Dissociation from Conventional Romance,” in which she concludes that “not only does Updike relate his novel to the eight essential characteristics of a romance novel, but he also employs the other three minor features in Marry Me. He deconstructs some of these essential elements to depart his romance novel from conventional ones in order to make it a postmodern romance. Updike sticks to elements of conventional romance novels namely society defined, the meeting, the attraction, the declaration, point of ritual death, wedding, dance, or fete, scapegoat exiled, and the bad converted. Nevertheless, Updike dissociates from conventional romance novels in terms of the barrier, the recognition, and the betrothal.”

Here is her full thesis: zarei-marry-me. She would be pleased if people who read it might post comments.

Updike theses, dissertations now number 260

Posted on December 11, 2016 by James Plath

World Cat now lists 260 theses and dissertations on John Updike, the most recent of which is Michael Anthony Collina’s The construction of masculinity in post-9/11 literary narratives (Drew University).

Here’s the link.

Blogger explores Midpoint as a Pointillist Poem

Posted on July 29, 2016 by James Plath

In a July 18 post on the blog Vertigo: Where literature and art intersect, with an emphasis on W.G. Sebald and literature with embedded photographs, a writer identified simply as “Terry” considers “‘Midpoint’: John Updike’s Pointillist Poem.”

His argument: “The pictures [included in Canto II] speak for themselves. A cycle of growth, mating, and birth. The coarse dots, calligraphic and abstract, become faces with troubled expressions. Distance improves vision. Lost time sifts through these immutable screens.”

“Updike doesn’t seem to have made any attempt to make the photographs approximate any poetic form. There is no apparent rhythmic pattern to the way the photographs are placed on their five pages and the only organizing principle is chronology. The photographs themselves, which are reproduced as halftones, are purposely printed in such a way as to show the dots formed by the halftone screens. (Although, curiously, the halftone dots are strikingly less noticeable on three of the photographs—each of which is a head shot of Updike himself.) At first I wondered if his decision to emphasize the halftone dots might be related to the Pop Art of the time, especially Roy Lichtenstein. While it is certainly possible that Lichtenstein’s work created an awareness on Updike’s part of the underlying dots in halftone reproductions, Updike’s writing is not at all aligned with the goals of Pop Art. Rather, we should take Updike’s word for it that he sees the halftone patterns as a visual symbol of lost time and as a metaphor for distance. A halftone image—like life itself—is easier to see from afar.

Terry concludes with a final argument followed by an excerpt from Midpoint: “The poet strives to conclude, but his aesthetic of dots prevents him. His heroes are catalogued. World politics: a long view. Intelligent hedonistic advice. Chilmark Pond in August. He appears to accept, reluctantly, his own advice.”

Reality transcends itself within;
Atomically, all writers must begin.
The Truth arrives as if by telegraph:
One dot; two dots; a silence; then a laugh.

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