John Updike

i've never been able to read updike. don't know why. i usually love that kind of stuff. maybe when i'm older or something. everytime i've tried a novel i've ended up getting really bored.

(this is me and richard ford too.)

I know why you can't read Updike - it's because reading him is like the process of extruding a turd but backwards.

He also wrote an introduction to a book by Bruno Schulz called Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, which he seemed to like (although I admit I read it through tightly slitted eyes). It was a very bad book and it made me say very bad words and do violence at it.

last time i tried to read some richard ford short stories i saw my life flash before my eyes. sooooooo endless and tedious.

i think i just read louis auchincloss instead of updike. probably nowhere near as "brilliant", but way more entertaining.

i wanna read more cheever. i've got a really nice big fat hardcover collection of his stories that i need to get to.

Wow, Scott, you like Auchincloss? Glad to see a fellow fan.

He reminds me a bit of William Dean Howells: not a single sentence surprises, and he's so obsessed with a certain kind of professionalism that some of his scenarios aren't as conceived as fully as I'd like; but, wow, a certain kidn of professoinalism goes a long way: he publishes a book (two sometimes) a year.

and he's so obsessed with a certain kind of professionalism that some of his scenarios aren't as conceived as fully as I'd like

example of these "scenarios"? this doesn't really make a lot of sense to me. I think his sentences, on a prose level, can be quite surprising: rich and lyrical. but his novels all read the same. maybe this is what you mean? i think his rabbit books are his best work and his stories are pretty boring.

Haha -- I was talking about Auchincloss; I guess I wasn't clear.

as for Updike, if he's written a novel as good as A Modern Instance or The Rise of Silas Lapham, I've missed it.

(to be fair, Updike did much to get Howells rehabilitated in the eighties)

well "as good as" is pretty subjective--and Howells and Updike are aiming for different things, so i don't think comparing them will get us anywhere

Subjective: "as good as"
Objective: died this morning.

had to read this sentence abt 5 times in one of the pieces in self-consciousness (which is v good btw)

I seem to remember, on one endless drive back home in the dark down Route 93, while my wife sat in the front seat and her hair was rhythmically irratiated with light from the opposing headlights, patiently masturbating my back-seat neighbor through her ski pants, beneath our blanketing parkas, and taking a brotherly pride in her shudder of orgasm just as we hit the Ipswich turn-off.

!!

Hope he cracked a window.

that's precisely what I dislike about Updike: the precision with which it's overwritten.

lol turnoff

lol privilege embedded even at the grammatical level

but mainly lol turnoff

My problem is less with the writing and more just that he writes about doing kind of gross things in a self-congratulatory tone

well i mean it's updike. that is the writing

xp otm

actually I also hate "patiently masturbating" and also the fact that it's ski pants.

i hate brotherly pride. . . ew!!!!!

haha oh yeah that too. Really the whole thing is about as unsexy as it could be.

Google has "comradely pride"

Google has been known to be wrong

That he's so casual and even eloquent about adultery makes the whole thing creepy and unnerving.

The 60's man

That he's so casual and even eloquent about adultery makes the whole thing creepy and unnerving.

hes an asshole, thats his thing. i read "rabbit run" again last year. still enjoyed it and i love his style. i dont think the book condones his actions if anything it points out his delusions (and his immaturity).

So does Amazon

?

lol classic xp

maybe it's changed to comradely in later editions - i verbatim copied it out of the copy of the book i have - hardcover, tho sez First Trade Edition 1989 hm

not that it makes me like it, but "comradely" is much better than "brotherly" there and adds a lot of meaning to the passage -- it implies conspiracy and secret revolt rather than incest

The 60's man

― waterface, Wednesday, July 24, 2013 3:05 PM (46 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is otm btw. the very next sentence (which tbf is a new paragraph), he talks abt smoking pot and wearing dashikis. the essay is abt him being the least liberal/dove-ish of his circle of peers

can a lil bit hear his voice saying 'do you take advantage of the new freedoms?'

That single sentence really is quintessential Updike. Vermeer with ski-pants and a hard-on.

http://www.vulture.com/2014/03/john-updike-life-in-fiction-adam-begley.html

http://i57.tinypic.com/v4xuoh.jpg

Hanging wit U

70s swinger look new england division. also is that a bust of the author over the door? the shades made me think of andy warhol

Messy depths had opened under me, where poverty and government merged. You sleep with someone in a moment of truth and the obligations begin to pile up nightmarishly.

bury me in this lede https://t.co/YGsHFb3nlr pic.twitter.com/GWBw5zQ9fU

— rachel syme (@rachsyme) October 2, 2019

It's a great piece.

My day has been saved

It's so good. I guess I'm going to have to get over the creepy-sounding title of her book, because I want to read more like that.

(the whole lrb piece, not just the lede)

i hadn't known about the foster wallace-mary karr thing she obliquely refers to o_O

When he is in flight you are glad to be alive. When he comes down wrong – which is often – you feel the sickening turn of an ankle, a real nausea. All the flaws that will become fatal later are present at the beginning. He has a three-panel cartoonist’s sense of plot. The dialogue is a weakness: in terms of pitch, it’s half a step sharp, too nervily and jumpily tuned to the tics and italics and slang of the era. And yes, there are his women. Janice is a grotesquerie with a watery drink in one hand and a face full of television static; her emotional needs are presented as a gaping, hungry and above all unseemly hole, surrounded by well-described hair. He paints and paints them, but the proportions are wrong. He is like a God who spends four hours on the shading on Eve’s upper lip, forgets to give her a clitoris, and then decides to rest on a Tuesday. In the scene where Janice drunkenly drowns the baby, it wasn’t the character I felt pity for but Updike, fumbling so clumsily to get inside her that in the end it’s his hands that get slippery, drop the baby.

ftr I admire Updike's criticism: thanks to him, I discovered Henry Green and Muriel spark, among others. And he was generous toward Cheever. But I could never finish his fiction, not once. The facility, the complacency of the descriptions -- it had a lulling effect. He and Cheever get bound together, but Cheever was fuckin' weird.

Her book, Priestdaddy, is great.

Best revive ever

apart from her lrb pieces, has she been doing criticism elsewhere, because its much better than her other writing. I have her most recent book of poems and it was v disappointing. haven't read priestdaddy though.