Category Archives: Updike in Pop Culture

Updike’s Of the Farm is now an apple cider

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Literary tourism just took a flavorful turn.

Phoenixville (Chester County) Pa.’s Excursion Ciders “uses local apples that are presssed and made in-house, also utilizing other locally-grown ingredients to make their drinks. Currently, the star of the show is Of the Farm: Core. This cider has an ABV of 7.5 percent and is made with apples from Plowville Orchard. Author John Updike spent time there and they named this cider after his novel, Of the Farm.” Here’s the link to the full story.

Of course, Weaver’s Orchard in Morgantown is the Updike site in Plowville for apples. The Updikes sold land to the Weavers, and one of the Weaver family owns and lives in the Updike ancestral farmhouse in Plowville and also spoke to our members at two conferences.

Keillor on leaving home, mementos, and Updike

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Keillor at the 2016 Updike conference with society president James Plath

The New Hampshire Union Leader recently published “Garrison Keillor: The art of leaving home.” Keillor, who was the keynote speaker at the 4th Biennial John Updike Society Conference in Columbia, S.C., wrote, “The pleasure of moving is the excavation of the past. I open a box and here’s a photo of my fifth-grade class, the eager neatly-combed-and-dressed boy with glassing sitting behind John Poate is me. I am still that eager boy, heavier but anxious to do well.”

Keillor wrote that he kept “artifacts of a long life. . . . I kept all these and other souvenirs. I never listened to the show [A Prairie Home Companion] myself and I have no memorabilia from it. It would only give me remorse that the show wasn’t better than it was. John Updike told me once that he rather enjoyed reading his early work but then he was a naturally cheerful man, rare for an author. Critics resented him for that and gave him grudging reviews; they preferred writers who had suffered, been imprisoned, exiled, or at least had abusive fathers. John was too American. There wasn’t much Russian or Spanish about him. He wrote because he was good at it and he knew it.

“And now in my old age I’ve found useful work as a stand-up cheerleader for adult cheerfulness, the basic goodness of life, a counter-voice to the diversity cops and agony aunts who’ve taken over publishing, journalism, public radio and TV, and much of academia. DeSantis’s anti-woke campaign is stupidity on toast; the real problem with MacWoke is its penchant for dismal pessimism, its humorlessness. I grew up with fundamentalists who looked forward to the end of the world and now progressives do too.”

In a March 13, 2024 column for the New Hampshire Union Leader, “Mature man available for speaking, easy terms,” Keillor cited Updike again:  “And my hero John Updike, back in the days of White Male Authorship, got me into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, one of only three humorists in the club, which looks darned good on my résumé. People from my hometown of Anoka, Minnesota, look at that and think, ‘Him? He didn’t even make National Honor Society in high school. He got a B minus in English and even that was generous.'”

Updike’s Couples in the news again?

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The Gothamist recently published a small news-muse item about an establishment in Berlin, Connecticut that was “busted for violating the town’s ordinances on sexually oriented businesses.”

Couple swapping is apparently legal there, but not charging an entry fee for swingers. “Gotta love suburbia,” The Gothamist wrote, adding, “John Updike literally wrote the book on couple swapping: Couples. And The Ice Storm featured key parties and wife-swapping (read the book or watch the film).”

Influential German musician cites Updike as an influence

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A Time News entertainment piece spotlighted Bernd Begemann, a “‘boy from the provinces,’ as he never tires of emphasizing, from East Westphalia to be more precise. He was also the first punk in Bad Salzuflen. Tocotronic and all the economic champions of the Hamburg school would be unthinkable without Begemann and his urban folk-electro album called Rezession, Baby! from 1993. He is a pioneer and also a bit of a knight of the sad figure, he gallops through the musical landscape with his own unshakable personality, always a tip of his nose ahead, often a gallop too far.”

“In more than 20 albums and over 400 songs, he sings of love, preferring to be ‘twice second choice’ to being content with the monotony of monogamy. . . . The man in the gold silk shirt is a charmer and a crooner wild at heart and somehow, thanks to generosity, also a feminist, because he leaves women spoiled for choice in song and life. He admires Bert Kaempfert and offers Berlin, Passing, Barmstedt and Ostfildern insights into what is not so loud and garish in life: a big heart, a noble spirit, drama and cappricci. He sharpened his senses as a reader of Balzac, Updike and, quite gallantly, Prince Valiant, as he explains . . . . “

On John Updike, he said:

“A brilliant writer who seems unread today, which is a shame. Maybe because the kind of relationship his books are about doesn’t seem to exist anymore. But of course the patterns in monogamous couple relationships are still the same, they are the sweet futilities embedded in the structure of a neighborhood, a city, an economic cycle. John Updike shows us this with ease. He’s basically the Blueprint for Jonathan Franzen and so on.

“I think 1968’s Couples is Updike’s first big hit book, before the Rabbit series. At the time it was a silent revolution. There are no loud things happening in the book, no big explosions, no train derailments. He says how we live – and that’s breathtaking and that’s very dangerous, even though it looks so ordered. I appreciate the book very much.”

Daiquiri recipe article cites a Rabbit, Run passage

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Given an article about the daiquiri, it would be reasonable for a lover of literature to expect to read about Ernest Hemingway and one of his two favorite Havana, Cuba bars: La Floridita, “Cradle of the Daiquiri cocktail.” The Floridita is here as a vintage photograph, but the writer mentioned isn’t “Papa” Hemingway, who is commemorated in a statue at that bar. Instead, the writer is John Updike.

In “The Spirits #17: The Cardamon Daiquiri,” Richard Godwin offered the recipe and added, “If you haven’t ever made a basic Daiquiri, please do so immediately – follow the recipe minus the cardamon. I figure with winter, you either need to lean into it or run away from it. Run away run away run away run away run away!” Which, of course, led him to Rabbit Angstrom.

“There’s a memorable double-date scene in John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, where our protagonist Harry Angstrom orders a Daiquiri in a Chinese restaurant because both of the girls have. He imagines it will taste like limeade…and finds it does sort of taste like limeade, ‘riding like oil on a raw transparent taste.’ He has a few more and when he emerges, ‘the pavement is a shadow of the Daiquiri’s luminous transparence; he is light-hearted, and skips once, to get in step with the girl he adores.’

“Like Updike’s midcentury hero, the Daiquiri (rum, lime, sugar) is simple and direct but capable of the greatest lyricism. When its constituent parts are held in perfect harmony, something amazing happens. The dogs lose their bark; the eels cease to reel; oil paintings come to life. And then everything resets and goes back to normal and everyone forgets that ever happened. There is a luminous transparence around, though, if you care to look.”

Where everybody knows your name: Updike on Cheers?

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John Updike never made a personal appearance on the long-running CBS-TV series Cheers, but the two-time Pulitzer Prizewinner was referenced several times in a Season One episode.

Cheers: The Complete Series Blu-ray was released on April 25, 2023, and as fans re-watched one of TV’s smartest sitcoms they heard Updike’s name mentioned several times in Episode 12: “The Spy Who Came in for a Cold One,” which aired Dec. 16, 1982. Earlier that year, in April, Updike had been announced as winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, honored for Rabbit Is Rich. In this episode, an eccentric (guest star Ellis Rabb, pictured below) visiting Cheers first pretends to be a spy, and then a writer. Thinking the man a literary prodigy, intellectual (read: snobbish) waitress Diane rushes to the phone to call someone in the publishing industry that she knows, and we get the following one-sided phone conversation:

“Yes. May I speak to him?

This is Diane Chambers.

He’s chatting with John Updike?

Well, interrupt.

No, I’m not kidding. I have something that makes Updike seem like small pommes de terre.”

Cheers was set in a bar near Boston Common that was run by former Red Sox pitcher Sam Malone (Ted Danson), whose baseball career had been derailed by alcoholism. With a great ensemble first-season cast that featured Shelley Long, Nicholas Colasanto, George Wendt, and John Ratzenberger, Cheers quickly grew on fans.

Cheers was created by James Burrows, Glen Charles, and Les Charles. Directed by Burrows, it was written mostly by the trio—though this particular episode was penned by David Lloyd.

Even with turnover in key roles, Cheers won 28 Primetime Emmys over its 11-year run and finished as a Top-10 TV show for eight of those years.

Fairway Philosophy blogger focuses on Updike the golfer

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Fairway Philosophy blogger Matthew Chominski had Updike on the mind this past week. Two of his posts were devoted to Updike the golfer.

In an April 27, 2023 post, “Golf and the Shortness of Life,” Chominski wrote, “The great American author and golf devotee was once in the presence of a young woman who informed him that life was too short ‘for crossword puzzles and for golf.’ His responsory ruminations are worth quoting at length:

“‘The nature of humankind must be considered before we decide what life is too short for. Is it too short for sex, for instance, or is sex its business? Men and women need to play, and it is a misused life that has no play scheduled into it. Crossword puzzles, even, have a fit place in some psychological budgets. With them, as with golf, we set ourselves to solve a puzzle nature has not posed. Nothing in natural selection demands that we learn how to beat a small ball into a hole with a minimum number of strokes. . . . The great green spaces of a golf course remember the landscape in which the human animal found his soul. Certainly the sight of our favorite fairway wandering toward the horizon is a balm to the eyes and a boon to the spirit. Our mazy progress through the eighteen is a trek such as prehistoric man could understand, and the fact that the trek is fatiguingly long constitutes part of its primitive rightness.'” Read the whole post.

Then, on an April 29, 2023 post titled “Golf’s Peculiar Bliss,” Chominski reminded golfers and Updike fans of a video clip in which John Updike was filmed on his home course, Myopia Hunt Club, intercut with footage and a voiceover of Updike reading from his golf essays.

Rabbit Is Reference: Reviewing the Richard Avedon show

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John Updike and his fictional legacy continue to be a part of American pop culture, the most recent case-in-point being a Washington Post review of a one-person show featuring fashion photographer Richard Avedon.

In “Review: An electrifying exhibit shows Richart Avedon at his most ambitious,” Sebastian Smee wrote, “The first of the ‘murals,’ as he called them, was a group portrait of Andy Warhol and 10 other members of the Factory. Avedon photographed the superstars in his studio over several weeks in the fall of 1969. Clustered together near the center of the image are five naked figures, one of them the transgender actress Candy Darling. The clothes crumpled on the floor at their feet feel oddly eloquent, legible both as statements of liberation and the shadows of their social selves. (I thought of Rabbit Angstrom, in John Updike’s ‘Rabbit, Run,’ enjoying, as he shed his clothes, the way ‘the flying cloth puts him at the center of a gathering nakedness.’) ‘You couldn’t keep the clothes on anybody in those years,’ Avedon later joked. ‘Before you could say “hello,” they were nude and ready to ride.’”

Avedon will be celebrated with “Avedon 100,” May 4-June 24, 2023 at Gagosian, 522 West 21st St., New York—an exhibition commemorating the centenary of Avedon’s birth featuring 150 “celebrated artists, designers, musicians, writers, curators, and fashion world representatives” and their favorite Avedon photographs.

Did Updike fans like Alex Katz’s portrait on the cover of Time magazine?

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Not according to a Time magazine story celebrating “A Century of Impact: See How TIME’s Cover Evolved Over 100 Years.”

Updike, as painted by Katz, appeared on the cover of Time after he had won the Pulitzer Prize for Rabbit Is Rich. “Speaking of Katz—the Oct. 18, 1982, cover of novelist John Updike also created an interesting pairing. Painter Alex Katz, whose work generally flattened the subject’s perspective and reduced the features, was commissioned to paint Updike, whose fans were not all pleased with the result: “What a washed-out portrait of Updike on the cover!” one reader complained. But Katz offered some advice to viewers of art: “You can wreck a painting very easily,” he noted, “if you get obsessive about likeness.”

Updike had previously appeared on the April 26, 1968 Time magazine after Couples was published and drew attention to the “post-pill paradise” of suburban America.

Yahoo! feature identifies celebrities living with psoriasis

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Surely there were more than 21 celebrities who had psoriasis, but a writer for news aggregate site Yahoo!’s “women’s health” section settled on that number . . . among them, John Updike (#20).

“The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and poet penned a 1985 essay for The New Yorker aptly titled ‘At War With My Skin,‘ where he addressed his struggles with the autoimmune disease. In his essay, Updike wrote, ‘Why did I marry so young? Because, having once found a comely female who forgave me my skin, I dared not risk losing her and trying to find another.'”

Read the entire article.