{"id":6664,"date":"2025-06-26T07:52:29","date_gmt":"2025-06-26T12:52:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/?p=6664"},"modified":"2025-06-26T07:52:29","modified_gmt":"2025-06-26T12:52:29","slug":"killing-time-by-chasing-updike","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/2025\/06\/26\/killing-time-by-chasing-updike\/","title":{"rendered":"Killing time by chasing Updike"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every creative person has preferred ways of taking a break. For cartoonist Michael Maslin (“Wednesday Spill: Hunting for the Whereabouts of an Updike Moment”<\/a>), one of those breaks began by looking at his Updike books and pulling one off the shelf. As it turns out, his diversion is the literary scholar’s method:<\/p>\n

“Gearing up for the book of John Updike letters<\/a>\u00a0coming out in October I thought I\u2019d once again travel through Adam Begley\u2019s terrif\u00a0Updike<\/a><\/em>. Curiosity took me on a hunt when I came across this sentence on page 426:<\/p>\n

\u201c’A decade later, when he came across a well-thumbed copy of S in a small public library in the Hudson Valley, he remembered how he had put his “heart and soul” into the heroine and concluded that the novel had at last been “recognized”.’<\/em><\/p>\n

“It was the ‘\u2026small public library in the Hudson Valley\u2026’ that sent me scampering to Google. As I live in the Hudson Valley and am acquainted with a number of its libraries, I figured I\u2019d be able to (hopefully!) quickly zero in on which library Updike visited. Researching the Peter Arno biography i wrote, I quickly learned things just don\u2019t go as smoothly as you might think when on a fact-finding mission.<\/p>\n

“The ‘Notes’ in Begley\u2019s Updike biography indicate the ‘\u2026small public library\u2026’ passage was sourced from Updike\u2019s Odd Jobs<\/em>, page 761. I headed right to\u00a0Odd Jobs<\/em>, page 761, but the passage wasn\u2019t there. Dead end. It happens (my biography of Peter Arno has its share of ‘issues.’). I briefly considered writing Mr. Begley, but decided that this was too small a ‘thing’ for him to be troubled with. A day or two went by. I tried to let the hunt go. Then, this afternoon, having worked on cartoons for hours, and in need of a break, I sat next to the Updike section of our bookshelves and thought for a moment. What if the page number 761 was correct, but the book\u00a0title<\/em>\u00a0was off. I began looking through Updike\u2019s various hefty collections, beginning with\u00a0Higher Gossip:\u00a0<\/em>zip.\u00a0Due Considerations<\/em>: zip.\u00a0More Matter<\/em>\u2026bingo! There, on page 761 is this from Updike\u2019s ‘Me and My Books’ \u2014 it was originally published in The New Yorker<\/em>, February 3, 1997:<\/p>\n

“‘On one steel shelf, in a Hudson Valley town with its own tributary creek gurgling over a dam and under a bridge near the library door\u2026’<\/em><\/p>\n

“I began thinking about the Hudson Valley libraries I was familiar with. None of them fit Updike\u2019s description. So back to Google and to the list of libraries lining the Hudson Valley. Using Google maps (aerial view) I was able to easily see if any library was that<\/em> close to water. I struck out with perhaps twenty or so libraries, when I saw this location in Marlboro, New York. And then using the street view, there it was, exactly as Updike described it: ‘tributary creek gurgling over a dam and under a bridge.’ This scene is directly across from the Gomez Mill House.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every creative person has preferred ways of taking a break. For cartoonist Michael Maslin (“Wednesday Spill: Hunting for the Whereabouts of an Updike Moment”), one of those breaks began by looking at his Updike books and pulling one off the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":818,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,53,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-person-singular","category-updike-in-context","category-updike-quoted"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/818"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6664"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6664\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6666,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6664\/revisions\/6666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}