John Updike

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.

her piece on lucia berlin was good but i haven't read any lucia berlin

Lucia Berlin is good. Believe the hype.

^^^^^

Priestdaddy is very much in the voice of her review work

well written crit def, i still like updike idk i think hes true to himself/honest in a misogynist & outdated way

maybe someone should make a lockwood thread

that was a fantastic piece, yeah. especially loved this: "he grows up, in short, but not into a real adult, just into a country club member."

It’s almost as if she absorbed his novelistic style and used it against him and absorbed his critical style as well and used it to restore the balance, to give some semblance of fairness.

Which is awesome

I myself used could never pull off such a feat, I used way too many “ands” in that sentence, just to name one thing.

“If you were worried that somewhere in this sweeping tetralogy Rabbit wasn’t going to ejaculate all over a teenager and then compare the results to a napalmed child, you can rest easy.”

john downdog

Yeah nearly bought the Berlin book yesterday but ended up getting a Pavese reader

i've only read the first of the rabbit books -- tbh the descriptions and quotes from the later ones in that article sound horrific

Redux is pretty terrible, a mess, but is Rich is his best book, I'd say.

Probably the best in this genre of "young woman reviews old white man" that you see a lot of editors in various publications throwing up. Its both a waste of her energies and yet one of her best essays, possibly one of the best things Lockwood will ever write. Which could be depressing.

I suspect editors don't really know what to do with her, she's clearly a very talented writer but does not really fit into post huffpo content genres very easily and sits awkwardly between cerebral and literal on one hand and "refreshing" and unpretentious on the other. Some of her poetry is terrible and her interests are so much about style and genre to the extent that when she turns to "real world issues" she can seem very half formed.

Is priestdafdy a real memoir or part fiction ?

piece is prob the best i've ever read on updike-- always liked the DFW one but it's v slight (+ the line lockwood quotes as its takeaway is iirc a footnote in the voice of a "female acquaintance"); the real previous champ was the vidal essay quoted towards the end, a long and largely biographical piece of character assassination i love to reread

Although Updike seems never to have had any major psychic or physical wound, he has endured all sorts of minor afflictions. In the chapter "At war with my skin," he tells us in great detail of the skin condition that sun and later medicine would clear up; for a long time, however, he was martyr to it as well as a slave to his mirror, all the while fretting about what "normal" people would make of him. As it proved, they don't seem to have paid much attention to an affliction that, finally, "had to do with self love, with finding myself acceptable ... the price high but not impossibly so; I must pay for being me." The price for preserving me certainly proved to be well worth it when, in 1955, he was rejected for military conscription, even though the empire was still bogged down in Korea and our forces were increased that year from 800,000 to three million--less Updike, who, although "it pains me to write these pages," confesses that he was "far from keen to devote two years to the national defense." He was later to experience considerable anguish when, almost alone among serious writers, he would support the Vietnam War on the ground that who am I "to second-guess a president?" One suspects that he envies the clear-skinned lads who so reluctantly fought for the land he so deeply loves.

he also says that in the beauty of the lilies would better be titled the evening dews and damps

anyway, a great long-running lil genre

I like the Gilbert Sorrentino takedown of him, but coterie writer of little distinction so not many have read it