Theses and dissertations on Updike now number 256

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If you do a WorldCat search for subject: John Updike, thesis/dissertation you’ll get 26 pages of entries that are sortable by relevance, author A-Z, etc., and you might recognize quite a few names in this list. As of May 25, 2014, there have been 256 theses/dissertations written about Updike.

Here’s the WorldCat link to the first page. The link has been added to the bibliography in the left menu.

One of the theses—”The protagonists of John Updike,” by Charles Monroe Cock (Spring 1971) is even available as a PDF in full form: The protagonists of John Updike, which makes you wonder how long it will be before everything is available at a keyboard’s touch.

Updike poem inspires tuba composition

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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.

 

 

Head to Crane Beach for a chance to find Michael Updike “sand dollars”

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Screen Shot 2014-05-21 at 4.15.02 PMStarting Memorial Day 2014 and continuing through the summer, 50 silver-and-blue sand dollars designed by sculptor Michael Updike will be strewn across Ipswich’s Crane Beach, where Michael’s novelist father used to enjoy spending time. It’s a promotion for the local chamber of commerce, and the sand dollars are meant to be redeemed for prizes by the lucky finders. But there are more than a few members of The John Updike Society who would think one of those sand dollars treasure enough, and display it among their other Updike collectibles.

Here’s the story by Ethan Forman that appeared in the Salem News: “Dotted with treasure; Sand dollars on Crane Beach make beach-goers, businesses winners.”

The Other John Updike Society?

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UnknownMembers have grown used to seeing posts from The Other John Updike Archive, a treasure trove of lost-and-found paper objects related to all facets of Updike’s life. Now it seems there’s an Other John Updike Society—or at least another incarnation of one.

New member Norm Carlson, who retired in 2001 as an Associate Professor of English at Western Michigan University, writes in his letter asking to join, “Actually, what I’ll sort of be doing—in military-speak—is ‘re-upping,’ since I was a member of the original John Updike Society back in the 1970s.

“That organization, in my memory, was more-or-less owned and operated by Joyce Markle, whose Fighters and Lovers (1973) was one of the earliest scholarly books about Updike’s work. She produced a mimeographed newsletter and arranged for annual John Updike Society sessions at MLA meetings.”

Longtime Updike scholar Don Greiner had no knowledge of this previous Updike Society, so we asked search-engine wizards David Lull and Larry Randen—Jim Yerkes’ editorial team for The Centaurian, who are now diligently finding Updike-related news for the Society website and Facebook page—to see what they could find out.

They came up with two relevant bios from John Updike: A Collection of Critical Essays edited by David Thorburn and Howard Eiland (Prentice-Hall, 1979), the first critical anthology devoted to Updike’s work:

“Dean Doner is academic vice-president of Boston University and a writer of stories and criticism. He edits the newsletter of the John Updike Society.”

“Joyce Markle has taught English at Loyola University. A founder of the John Updike Society, she was a consultant in the filming of Updike’s story ‘The Music School,’ which was televised nationally by the Public Broadcasting System in 1977.”

So there you have it: the first artifacts of The John Updike Society’s early history. Hopefully more information will surface. Pictured is the hard-to-find dust jacket from Fighters and Lovers, featuring artwork by Markle’s sister, Susan Bonners, an American Book Award-winning illustrator.

UT’s Ransom Center acquires McEwan archives

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Screen Shot 2014-05-19 at 11.59.47 AMThe Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin announced days ago that they have acquired the archive of writer Ian McEwan, and an email from an employee at the Center confirmed that they believe “there is some correspondence with Updike in there. We will know more once the collection has been processed and catalogued.”

“Acclaimed Writer Ian McEwan’s Archive Acquired by Harry Ransom Center”

McEwan has written frequently “On John Updike,” as he did for the March 12, 2009 issue of The New York Review of Books. After Updike’s death, his remarks were included in a round-up of well-known writers published by The Guardian on January 27, 2009:

“He was a modern master, a colossal figure in American letters, the finest writer working in English. He dazzled us with his interests and intellectual curiosity, and he turned a beautiful sentence. Religion, sex, science, urban decay, small-town life, the life of the heart, the betrayals—who can follow him? Updike gave the impression he had a lot more writing to do. We are all the poorer now.”

Maybe the McEwan archive will shed some light about what other writing Updike had in mind.

The Harry Ransom Center was in the running for the John Updike archives, which eventually went to Harvard.

 

 

Begley bio sparks “Uptick in Updike Interest”

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If you’ve been following The John Updike Society on Facebook or on this website you’ve noticed that the news as of late has been dominated by responses to the Adam Begley biography of John Updike. But what we haven’t considered is that every article and every review needs photos to go with the copy, and as Writer Pictures, a source that provides copyrighted material for the media, observes, the Begley biography has sparked an “Uptick in Updike Interest.”

You’ve no doubt read that the Begley-Updike connection is Begley’s father, Louis, who was a Harvard classmate of Updike’s, and the article also includes a photo of the elder Begley.

New rom-com references Updike

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MV5BNzY2NDQxOTA4OF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwMjM4MDA2MTE@._V1_SX214_AL_Words and Pictures, a romantic comedy that opens in theaters abroad on May 22, stars Clive Owen as a popular English teacher at a private high school who gets into an argument with the new art teacher, played by Juliette Binoche: Are words more important, or are pictures?

The two try to involve their students in the debate, and according to Harvey Karten, who saw an advance screening and reviewed the film for CompuServe ShowBiz, Owen tries to make his case by “quoting from the great authors with a special emphasis on John Updike, to paint metaphoric pictures.”

Karten’s full review also appears on Shockya.com.

The screenplay, in case you’re curious, was written by Gerald Di Pego, whose prior credits include Instinct (1999), Message in a Bottle (1999), and Sharky’s Machine (1981).

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

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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:

Screen Shot 2014-05-17 at 6.05.05 AMOf 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.

Blogger features Begley Q&A

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Blogger Mark Stevens published a Q&A with Updike biographer Adam Begley on May 13 in which Begley talks about the issues central to Updike’s work and life.

Among Begley’s responses:

“I think his misbehavior was very fruitful for him: he made hay out of his peccadillos—or his sins, really, if you want to talk about it that way. The key passage for [me] is in Roger’s Version, when Roger finally allows Verna—his half-niece, his half-sister’s daughter—to seduce him and they are lying on the soiled futon in a rundown housing estate and they have just committed quasi-incest and adultery, because he’s married, and at that moment he, this character Roger, has this great religious epiphany, which is that even in abasement you are subject to God. I think that is a crystallization of his attitude, if you will, of his attitude toward his own transgressions and his religious faith. Both were equally important to him. I don’t think John Updike could have been the artist he was without his philandering and I don’t think he could have been the artist he was without his faith.”

“Q&A with Adam Begley — ‘Updike'”