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.
Dana Spiotta, an associate professor in the MFA program in creative writing at Syracuse, has been named recipient of the John Updike Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Other writers honored in 2017 by the American Academy of Arts and Letters are Joan Acocella, Ayad Akhtar, Chris Bachelder, Paul Beatty, Judy Blume, Kathleen Graber, Jennifer Haigh, Lee Clay Johnson, August Kleinzahler, Elizabeth Kolbert, Robert Macfarlane, Karan Mahajan, Jamaal May, Dominique Morisseau, Lynn Nottage, Richard Sieburth, Safiya Sinclair, and Luis Alberto Urrea. ( “Judy Blume among authors given prizes by arts academy.”)
The American Academy of Arts and Letters is chartered by Congress, established in 1898 to “foster, assist, and sustain an interest in literature, music, and the fine arts.” Among the founding members were Republican Teddy Roosevelt and Democrat Woodrow Wilson.
The John Updike Award in Literature ($20,000) is given every two years to a mid-career writer whose “work has demonstrated consistent excellence.”
Spiotta’s first novel, Lightning Field (Scribner, 2001), was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her second novel, Eat the Document (Scribner, 2006), won the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a National Book Award finalist. Stone Arabia (Scribner, 2011) was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Her most recent novel is Innocents and Others (Scribner, 2016).
Ed Phillips, a polyolefin specialist by profession and the most recent member to join The John Updike Society, says he reread John Updike’s Toward the End of Time and “realized how more timely it is today compared to when it was released in 1997.”
At least in America, Phillps writes, “1997 was a relatively calm year” that was “way pre-9/11. Nobody had heard of al Qaeda or Osama Bin Laden except the CIA. NEOCONS biding their time. Arguably the biggest story of 1997 was the death of Princess Diana . . . .
“Updike was 66 at the time, writing about 66-year-old Ben Turnbull, a comfortably retired wealth management manager living with his second wife in a seaside manse outside of Boston in the year 2020,” and Phillips, now 66 himself, decided it would be a good time to reread the novel . . . .
“It’s been 20 years, but I don’t recall it as one of Updike’s more memorable books. Normally for me his writing often blurs the line between extremely fine prose and poetry. I love gliding through his 150-word descriptive sentences. But the critics were not too fond of it either. One predicted that he had run out of juice. Thank goodness that wasn’t true. Maybe he was just intellectually exhausted from writing In the Beauty of the Lilies, perhaps his best work, just the year before. But Toward the End of Time was dark. An ineffectual Congress led by an incompetent President Smith had gotten the United States into a failed nuclear war with China. What a preposterous storyline! Vast areas have been seriously ‘de-populated.’ Our infrastructure and economy are badly damaged, travel between coasts is impossible, the dollar has been replaced with local emergency currency, script that is used to pay off entrepreneurs for basic services and security.
“Updike paints Turnbull as a man far past 66. I can say this being 66. Admittedly, though there are days when I feel much older. . . .
“No one can ‘observe’ like Updike. Read Just Looking (1989) or Still Looking (2005), Updike’s essays on art. They are works of art in themselves. But in Toward the End of Time, through Turnbull he describes every leaf and every petal and pistol and stamen in his wife’s gardens as they evolve and change texture and color and decay and smell over the course of four seasons. Almost as fillers, Updike throws in some golf talk and religious history and a few Vonnegutiann sci-fi elements.
“But Turnbull (Updike?) is also obsessed with sex, the act, in uncomfortable and incredibly graphic detail, fluids and all and has or recalls a lot of it throughout the book until of course he, Trumbull, being 66, becomes impotent and incontinent (again with the fluids) as a result of prostate surgery.
“Twenty years after its release, we are living in darker and certainly more uncertain times and the storyline doesn’t seem so preposterous now, and neither does the mood. Updike couldn’t possibly have foreseen the first 100 days of the Trump administration. But Toward the End of Time is far timelier now and should be given a second read. When Kellyanne Conway spoke the term “Alternative Facts” in a CNN interview, sales of Orwell’s 1984 shot up to #3 on the best seller list, with sales increasing by 10,000 percent. I think Toward the End of Time is far more relevant.
In 1963, a 16 year old was tired of hearing about symbolism from his English teacher, wondering, as many students still do, if teachers read too much into a literary work. So he mailed a four-question survey to 150 novelists asking them about symbolism in their work. Exactly half of them responded, among them John Updike. Had young Bruce McAllister sent that survey just three years earlier, he could have included Ernest Hemingway, who famously once remarked, “All symbolism is shit.”
Specifically, McAllister wanted their opinion of symbolism in The Scarlet Letter, which his class was reading, but some of the responses were more general . . . and eye-opening.
MacKinlay Kantor (Andersonville, Gettysburg) was the most blunt: “Nonsense, young man, write your own research paper. Don’t expect others to do the work for you.
Jack Kerouac offered the briefest response to the question of placing symbolism in his work. “No,” Kerouac wrote back.
“Consciously?” Isaac Asimov responded. “Heavens, no! Unconsciously? How can one avoid it?”
Normal Mailer defined the best symbols as “those you become aware of only after you finish the work,” while Ralph Ellison seemed more reflective and representative of the writer’s method: “Symbolism arises out of action. . . . Once a writer is conscious of the implicit symbolism which arises in the course of a narrative, he may take advantage of them and manipulate them consciously as a further resource of his art.”
John Updike, meanwhile, spoke along the lines of writer-as-mystic, answering “Yes” to the question of whether he consciously, intentionally places symbolism in his writing, adding, “I have no method; there is no method in writing fiction; you don’t seem to understand.”
To the question of whether readers ever infer what is not intended, Updike responded, “Once in a while—usually they do not (see the) symbols that are there.”
Asked if he feels the great writers of classics consciously put symbols in their works, Updike wrote, “Some of them did (Joyce, Dante) more than others (Homer) but it is impossible to think of any significant work of narrative art without a symbolic dimension of some sort.”
As for the last question, whether he has anything to add that’s pertinent to a study of symbols, Updike sounded like Kantor: “It would be better for you to do your own thinking on this sort of thing.”
Read the full Mental Floss article.
Already in Serbia there is excitement and anticipation of the upcoming Fifth Biennial (International?) John Updike Society Conference in Belgrade, scheduled for June 1-June 5, 2018 and hosted by the Faculty of Philology at the University of Belgrade. Conference director Biljana Dojčinović reports that a doctoral student of hers “who is also a very devoted member of the organizational committee of our future conference, Nemanja Gllintić, has made an interesting teaching experiment.
“As he is a primary school teacher of language and literature, he lectured at two of his final grade classes (15-year-old children) the story ‘Friends in Philadelphia.’ The reception of the story by the pupils has been fantastic. Everybody read it (it had been translated into Serbian in 1966), did their research, and understood everything about the narrative techniques as well as the documentary elements.
“The teaching staff colleagues that Nemanja invited to be at these lectures where stunned by the pupils’ performance and all the enthusiasm that permeated these lectures. Also amazed were some of the parents I spoke later to—their children made them read the story in order to discuss it with them!
“Nemanje is now writing the report, and there will be a written and video poll among the pupils, which will be translated into English. Right now, the pupils are busy with their homework, which is to write a sequel to the story.”
Call for Papers and Other Fifth International JUS Conference posts
John Updike wasn’t only one of America’s greatest writers; he was also among the most prolific, averaging a book a year during his long career. So it’s more than a little surprising to see his name turn up on a list of “Authors who have made us wait for their books,” which was recently published in the Life & Style section of The Times of India.
But the concept is this: the gap between an original book and a sequel.
“Author John Updike took a gap of 24 years between his books The Witches of Eastwick (1984) and The Widows of Eastwick. Updike revisited the witches more than two decades later to wrap their story up before he died less than a year later in 2009. He explained why he wrote the sequel: ‘Taking those women into old age would be a way of writing about old age, my old age.'” (Photo credit: Wikipedia).
Visitors to Chicago may not be able to walk through the George Lucas museum—Friends of the Park shot that project down—but a new American Writers Museum near the Art Institute recently opened, and it includes, not surprisingly, John Updike.
The emphasis is on the published word rather than artifacts, so it’s an interactive museum of ideas. As a Chicago Tribune editorial recently pointed out, “This playful, thought-provoking museum encompasses the entire scope of American letters, from important novels, poetry and nonfiction books to potboilers, children’s literature and, yes, even journalism.
“If you’ve ever had a favorite book (or wanted one), your interests will be piqued. You’ll find everything from Vladimir Nabokov’s shocking Lolita to Robert McCloskey’s endearing Make Way for Ducklings. Not to mention Richard Wright, Sylvia Plath, Willa Cather and Henry Miller, among others. . . .
“American writing, protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution, tells the ongoing story of our turbulent nation with unfettered creativity and zeal. That’s the big idea this museum hurls at visitors through interactive exhibits, quotes, lists and the like.
“The museum, which opens Tuesday, is the brainchild of Malcolm O’Hagan, a retired manufacturing executive from Maryland who saw a museum of Irish writers in Dublin and thought America needed a similar one. He organized a board that has raised nearly $10 million in private funding. It’s located in a compact space on the second floor of 180 N. Michigan Ave. but packs a big punch of intellectual energy. John Updike, Octavia Butler and the Federal Writers’ Project (which employed Saul Bellow and Nelson Algren in Chicago) get mentions, among scores more. . . .
“The museum’s setup is modern, thankfully, with lots of video screens and quick capsules of information, as if to cater to the depleted attention spans of young people while subversively wooing them to read nice long books.”
Read the full editorial: “Lots of reading and thinking at the American Writers Museum”
Data is everywhere these days, but Ben Blatt offers a wonderfully refreshing apolitical crunching of numbers in a Slate article that asks the question, “Do Semicolons Make You Pretentious?”
His conclusion?
“While semicolons are more present in the Pulitzer winners on the whole, it’s not a necessary condition to have them to appeal to literary circles. Some writers, like Larry McMurtry, whose Pulitzer Prize–winning Lonesome Dove had almost 650 semicolons per 100,000 words, choose to use them often; others, like Cormac McCarthy, who won a Pulitzer for The Road without using a single semicolon, choose to follow [Kurt] Vonnegut’s advice and avoid them.”
Open access online archives continue to spring up, and the latest Updike-related essay to become available is an essay written for the April 1, 1984 Commentary by Joseph Epstein. And no, it’s not an April Fool’s Joke or anything remotely Orwellian. “Sex and Euphemism” is a consideration of sex in western popular culture, and of course that means John Updike merits a mention.
“It is not always clear what the purposes of other novelists are in placing elaborately described bouts of sex in their novels. It might be kindest to say that they are, in manifold senses, just screwing around. But I think these writers rather desperately need sex in order to stay in business as writers. It isn’t that sex is all they know; it is merely that sex seems to be what they know best. To restrict myself to American novelists alone, I can think of three prominent figures who, but for the opportunity that the contemporary novel allows them to write about sex, would probably have to go into the dry-cleaning business: John Updike, Philip Roth, and Norman Mailer,” Epstein writes.
“These three gents, to be sure, make quite different uses of sex in their novels. For John Updike sexual descriptions often provide an opportunity for a metaphor-soaked, lyrical workout; exceptions are the frequent sexual paces Updike puts his character Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom through, when it becomes lower-middle-class sex, plain-spoken and snarly and nasty. Philip Roth plays the sex in his novels chiefly for laughs, but play it he does, over and over and over. But whereas Up-dike can be by turns pretentious and repellent, and Roth depressing while trying for humor, Norman Mailer, in his handling of the sexual subject, is unconsciously comic (not, I hasten to add, that reading him is likely to cheer anyone up). Sex almost always provides the big moments in Norman Mailer’s novels; in these novels, sex, somehow, is always a challenge, a chance for triumph, an over the hill, boys, walk on the moon bullfight, though when it is over what one mostly remembers is the bull. Quotations on request.”
Epstein concludes, “Suffice it to say that in contemporary writing about sex, we are not talking, and haven’t been for some years, about your simple Sunday afternoon fornication. Not only must sex in the contemporary novel grow more regular but it must become more rococo. Thus Updike presents us with an activity known euphemistically as California sunshine; Roth in his most recent novel has a woman whose purse contains a “nippleless bra, crotchless panties, Polaroid camera, vibrating dildo, K.Y jelly, Gucci blindfold, a length of braided velvet rope”; Mailer, relying on fundamentals, concentrates on heterosexual sodomy. Ah, the literary life.”
Read the full article.
Christopher Borrelli‘s Chicago Tribune think piece on “Building a baseball story: 7 lessons Red Sox can teach Cubs” invokes that most famous of sports stories, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” which Borrelli calls “a kind of gospel of the Red Sox, as hallowed as a prayer in New England,” written, of course, by John Updike.
“Like the New Englander he became, Updike romanticized the Red Sox, both ups and downs.
“He fed the narrative,” Borrelli writes, offering ideas on how the Chicago Cubs can “serve its narrative and wrangle its history, broaden its reach and nurture its relationship with fans” and it involves the celebration of pop culture’s baseball embrace. He recalls one saturated moment in Boston:
“Driving to Fenway from the diner, I flipped through the radio: On a sports station, a former Red Sox player was telling stories about how former manager Terry Francona would sit naked on the toilet during meetings in his office. Someone on local NPR was reading from Updike’s classic. On music stations, songs about the Red Sox, songs that have become synonymous with Fenway, ‘Dirty Water’ and ‘Sweet Caroline’ and ‘Shipping Up to Boston’ and Jonathan Richman’s ‘As We Walk to Fenway Park in Boston Town.’ A Budweiser commercial has a bro doing a bad Boston accent, giving an opening-day rally speech that makes no sense in 2017: ‘We’re Boston! We’re not supposed to win!”
Part of that pop-cultural narrative includes the story of how Theo Epstein and the team’s new management “slapped Updike’s words on that wall, alongside the water cooler” to inspire players. He might as well have broken into a chorus of Fiddler on the Roof‘s “Tradition”. . . .