Writers pass along Updike advice

Caleb and Linda Pirtle are writers, and in a recent blogpost they quoted advice from “John Updike: A giant of American literature” that begins with the title: “John Updike: Five pages a day every day of your life.”

Writers write. It can be that simple.

“John Updike, he of the bushy eyebrows and hawkish nose, had a distinct style of prose that was described as baroque, exquisite, and prolifically poetic. He did win a couple of Pulitzer Prizes, a pair of National Book Awards, and the Pen/Faulkner Award. And such novels as Couples and Witches of Eastwick, not to mention his quartet of Rabbit Angstrom novels, have a definite place on the top shelf of American literature.

“His name is widely known.

“His work is widely praised.

“Yet, John Updike, the man, was very private. Not a recluse, perhaps, but, it’s said, he cultivated his embowered solitude and would rather sit amidst isolation in his home on the Massachusetts shore and write.

“No one wrote more.

“He left an unending trail of fiction, poetry, essays, and criticism, most of which appeared rather regularly in The New Yorker. In addition, he published almost one book a year for more than a half century.”

Read the advice that Updike gave writers, which Caleb Pirtle passes along.

What’s singer Tom Odell reading? Updike!

Vogue magazine interviewed British singer-songwriter Tom Odell before he embarked on a two-month European tour, and one of the questions was What book are you currently reading?

Rabbit, Run by John Updike. I read it once before when I was a lot younger; it’s about a very brilliant sports star who just sort of gets up and leaves his family. It’s very gritty, it’s somewhere between John Steinbeck and Charles Bukowski,” the 26 year old said. That, by the way, was Rabbit’s age in the first book.

Odell’s debut studio album, Long Way Downwas released in June 2013 and his second album, Wrong Crowd, was released in December 2016, along with the Christmas EP Spending All My Christmas with You.

“Five Minutes With . . . Tom Odell”

Blogger says Hollywood’s Rabbit is a ‘dumb lug’


Updike’s most famous character, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, appears in Insomnia File #26—or at least the Hollywood version of him does.

Blogger Lisa Marie Bowman writes about her late-night viewing—”You know how sometimes you just can’t get any sleep and, at about three in the morning, you’ll find yourself watching whatever you can find on cable? This feature is all about those insomnia-inspired discoveries!”—and this time her wheel of fortune stopped on the 1970 film version of Rabbit, Run, which aired on TCM.

Her rather hilarious and insightful 3 a.m. reaction?

Rabbit, Run is the epitome of a dumb lug film. In a dumb lug film, a male character finds himself living an unfulfilling life but he can’t figure out the reason. Why can’t he figure it out? Because he’s a dumb lug, with an emphasis on dumb. Usually the viewer is supposed to sympathize with the dumb lug because he doesn’t mean to hurt anyone and everyone else in his world is somehow even more annoying than he is. Typically, the dumb lug will have an emotionally distant wife who refuses to have sex with him and who is usually portrayed as being somehow at fault for everything bad that has happened in the dumb lug’s face. (Want to see a more recent dumb lug film than Rabbit, Run? American Beauty.) . . .

Rabbit, Run is based on a highly acclaimed novel by John Updike. I haven’t read the novel so I can’t compare it to the film, beyond pointing out that many great works of literature have been turned into mediocre movies, largely because the director never found a way to visually translate whatever it was that made the book so memorable in the first place. Rabbit, Run was directed by Jack Smight, who takes a rather frantic approach to the material. Since Rabbit, Run is primarily a character study, it needed a director who would be willing to get out of the way and let the actors dominate the film. Instead, Smight over directs, as if he was desperately trying to prove that he could keep up with all the other trendy filmmakers. The whole movie is full of extreme close-ups, abrupt jump cuts, intrusive music, and delusions of ennui. You find yourself wishing that someone had been willing to grab Smight and shout, ‘Calm down!'”

Read the full blog entry, (which features an embedded trailer for the film that looks more like a parody of a Rabbit, Run trailer)

 

Volume published on Legendary Authors and the Clothes They Wore

If you like literature and coffee table books, you might enjoy Legendary Authors and the Clothes They Wore, by Terry Newman.

“Out of the 50 writers included in the book—from T.S. Eliot and George Sand to Malcolm Gladwell and Joyce Carol Oates—there wasn’t one, Ms. Newman said, who didn’t prove a rich subject as she combed through their writing and interviews. Though they often overtly rejected the diktats of the runway, in doing so they drafted diktats of their own.”

“In the same way that pet owners sometimes come to resemble their animals, writers often come to resemble their discourse (or, in the case of John Updike, their main character — which is to say, suburbia). Ms. Stern refers to it as a ‘stylistic earmark.’ And she is not referring to just those authors who are part of the ‘write what you know’ contingent, or those who use their own life as fodder for their imagination.”

from “Your Literary Idols and Their Wardrobes,” by Vanessa Friedman (NY Times 29 June 2017)

Irish summer reading list includes Updike

The Irish Times just published “Suitcase full of stories: writers and readers on their summer reading,” subtitled “Ireland’s best-known writers and readers share what will be in their suitcases.”

John Kelly, a radio personality whose six-episode program, “The Reading List,” began airing yesterday, July 4, on RTÉ Radio 1 on Tuesdays at 10 p.m., chose an Updike book for his summer reading:

“The Reading List now on RTE Radio 1 developed from a more personal project—i.e., to read nothing this year but Penguin Modern Classics. Some have been re-reads but mostly these are books I should have read a long time ago. A Clockwork Orange, Wide Sargasso Sea, Herzog, Another Country, Bonjour Tristesse, A Rage in Harlem, The Haunting of Hill House, Cat’s Cradle, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and such. I try to alternate the “easy reads” with the less so, and with that in mind I highly recommend The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth and The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz. My own plan for the summer is Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick and having recently re-read Nineteen Eighty-Four, It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis.

The Reading List with John Kelly is on RTÉ Radio 1 Tuesdays at 10pm. Six episodes starting July 4th.

U and I and Ian Brown

The Globe and Mail recently published a summer reading feature and asked staff to share “The book that changed me.”

“Nicholson Baker’s U and I: A True Story changed the way I thought about books, writers, writing, reading and what it meant to be honest on the page. That’s quite a lot for one book to have accomplished.

“U and I is a (short) book-length essay about Baker’s obsession with John Updike – a writer his mother admired (she once laughed out loud at Updike’s description, in describing a golf game, of a ‘divot the size of an undershirt’), and whom Baker thereupon wanted to emulate. The book begins with Baker deciding not to write about Donald Barthelme, who had just died, but to write about Updike instead, because the stakes in writing about a living writer seemed higher, more consequential.

“At that point, the book departs from convention completely: Baker admits, for instance, that he has only read half a dozen of Updike’s more than 20 novels (he wrote nearly 60 books, in total). But lack of familiarity never stops a young writer from being obsessed by an older one! In fact, it’s lack of familiarity that stokes the obsession. And how obsessive he is! Baker wants to be Updike: He notes that, while he doesn’t golf, they both have psoriasis, both on their penises – which Baker desperately hopes gives them something in common. Of course, as the always hilarious, brilliant, stylish and readable Baker eventually reveals, what they really share is the ability to experience the world ecstatically.

“Baker somehow manages to take an ancient, rather pompous genre – the literary essay of writerly appreciation – and turn it into something it has never been before, an utterly candid, and therefore shocking, examination of the way we really read, and use books, as opposed to the way we pretend to read, loaded down by all our cultural pretensions. Baker thinks the stuff we forget we’ve read is more important than what we remember: Throughout the book, he keeps quoting Updike from memory, and then exposing how shoddy his memory is, by revealing the actual passage he thinks he’s remembering.

“And it’s very funny, and the story never flags. But I guess what I admire most about U and I is its compassion: for Updike, his industriousness and his failures; for the impossible challenge of writing – and living – honestly, and how often we fail at both; for, most of all, readers, via Baker’s assumption that every reader will want to admit the truth about themselves and books, and therefore feel freer than they were when they started the book. That’s what reading’s all about, isn’t it?”

Amazon link

Phil Jackson’s old news is Updike’s too

James Warren, in a June 30, 2017 column for the Poynter website, noted that Phil Jackson (pictured), the “fabled pro basketball coach got canned as chief executive of the New York Knicks. It’s open season on him right now, with nary a positive word being written about him.

“It reminds me, however, of a 1992 Chicago Tribune piece that I helped broker: a meeting between Jackson, then coach of the Chicago Bulls, and John Updike. The late Tribune writer Paul Galloway did a knockout job, including catching the fact that Jackson knew one Updike book better than Updike, along with Jackson having some distinct views about what were then big changes at The New Yorker.

If that Updike-Jackson interview sounds familiar, it was reprinted in Conversations with John Updike (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1994), ed. by James Plath.

Updike book reminds rugby lover’s son of his father

Mark Reason has been writing a blog “in search of” his late father John—”for 30 years the rugby correspondent of the Daily and then Sunday Telegraph. John began his tours of New Zealand in the ’60s and wrote two books chronicling the tours—and he came across a book that reminded him of his father.

That book was My Father’s Tears, by John Updike.

“I last saw my father a week before his death. He was sitting quietly in a chair looking out on the back garden in Twickenham. There was snow on the ground. He smiled at me, peaceful and, I now realise, happy to go. He wasn’t going to hang around. My dad’s smile was saying goodbye to me,” Reason writes.

“I am not sure I ever saw my father cry. The other day in the glorious Hamilton second hand bookshop I saw a copy of John Updike’s My Father’s Tears. Of course, I bought it, there seem to be a lot of Johns in this story.

“Updike’s father was seeing him off at the train station on the way to college. ‘It shocked me—threw me off track as it were—to see that my father’s eyes, as he shook my hand good-bye, glittered with tears.’

It was the only time Updike saw his father cry. A few, years later, with Updike trying to fly back from Europe in time to be with his seriously ill father, the news arrived that his dad had died. Updike’s wife put her arms around him and told him to cry.

“‘I saw the opportunity, and the rightness of seizing it, I don’t believe I did. My father’s tears had used up mine.’

“I find it the other way around. I can’t ever remember seeing my father cry, not even when my little brother died. I am sure he must have done, but not in front of the children. In some ways Victoria was still my father’s ruling monarch. And so I cry quite a lot. My father left me plenty of his tears.”

Read the whole blog entry.

 

How Rabbit, Run film was lost and found

Updike fans know that James Caan starred in a film version of Rabbit, Run that premiered in Reading and was so unwarmly received that the studio decided against a wider release. And Updike fans know that the film is rarely shown.

But who knew it was lost? And now found?

In “TCM Unearths the 1970 movie version of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run,” freelance journalist Shaw Conner cites a 2007 Reading Eagle story you may have missed. That article reported that “Rabbit, Run may have been lost forever if it wasn’t for Ray Dennis Steckler. Steckler, who made a name for himself in the ’70s for adult films such as Sexual Satanic Awareness and Red Heat (he also made the rather fabulously titled 1964 cheapie The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies), bought a 16mm print of the film for $1000 after seeing an ad for it in a magazine. Originally from Reading himself, Steckler wanted a little piece of home. He later gave the print to the organizer of a film festival in Berks County (a county in Pennsylvania that includes Reading).That print ended up at the Historical Society of Berks County.

Read the rest of the article.

New book published by Updike’s literary progeny

John Updike was famously one of the American writers who put sex in fiction because it’s part of “the continuum of life,” Updike had said. His depiction of sexual escapades in Couples landed him a Time magazine cover, and he paved the way for writers wishing to explore sexual situations and language in literature. But he may have been one-upped—at least according to Ron Charles, who reviewed the new book by Matthew Klam.

Klam was one of the New Yorker’s Best Fiction Writers Under 40 back in 2000, Charles writes, but then fell off the map until his recent publication of Who Is Rich?, “about a writer who once enjoyed ‘precocious success’ and then sank into obscurity. ‘I’d had an appointment with destiny,’ the narrator says. ‘I’d barely started, then I blinked and it was over.’

“We could speculate about how much this falls under the category of Write What You Know, but here’s what I do know,” Charles writes. “This is an irresistible comic novel that pumps blood back into the anemic tales of middle-aged white guys. Klam may be working in a well-established tradition, but he’s sexier than Richard Russo and more fun than John Updike, whose Protestant angst was always trying to transubstantiate some man’s horniness into a spiritual crisis.”

The novel is set at a summer artists conference “where hopeful adults of middling talent are taught by writers and painters of fading repute,” Charles writes. “Klam’s narrator is a 42-year-old graphic novelist named Rich Fischer, who first signed on with this summer program years ago when he was the hot new thing. Now he’s just a poor illustrator for a failing political magazine—a crisply satirized version of the New Republic.”

Full review

Amazon link