December 9, 2009 at 2:43 P.M. A new advertisement was forced upon this site against my will: "NJ Background Checks, Call us for background checking and Pre-Employment Screening today. http://www.thedrugtestingco.com/ " ("Burn Notice.")
False police reports and accusations can always be manufactured in New Jersey for a small fee.
December 8, 2009 at 10:04 A.M. This morning I experienced many difficulties and attempts to intrude into my computer: 12 viruses have been detected (so far), one has been removed. An advertisement containing explicit partisan political content was imposed on this site against my will: "Is Obama a socialist? Do you support Obama and the decision for the U.S.? [What decision?] Vote here! [For what?] http://www.newsmax.com/ " Cubanazos?
This advertisement purports to come from "Ads by Google." The illiterate quality of the message suggests that Right-wing Cuban-American PACs or the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) may have been involved in developing this "message."
Perhaps Senator Menendez can shed some light on this mystery? Mel Martinez? Ms. Ross-Lehtinen? Albio Sires? Marco Rubio?
Michiko Kakutani, "Intuitive and Precise, a Relentless Updike Mapped America's Mysteries," The New York Times, January 28, 2009, at p. A1.
Christopher Lehman-Haupt, "John Updike, a Lyrical Writer of the Middle-Class Man, Dies at 76," The New York Times, January 28, 2009, at p. A28.
John Updike, "On Such a Beautiful Green Little Planet," in Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism by John Updike (New York: Vintage, 1984), pp. 292-296.
January 29, 2009 at 5:13 P.M. This essay was posted this morning at my MSN group which (I am told) no longer exists. The text has been altered once already. I will do my best to make corrections of inserted "errors" as often as necessary. No images can be posted at these blogs and my second book is still suppressed. I wonder what is the connection between Lulu and New Jersey? Publish America? ("How Censorship Works in America.")
There is a peculiar intimacy that accompanies the reading experience. You come to know someone whose writings become familiar to you. The writer is transformed into a presence or a relationship that is felt just as intensely or in as "real" a way as relationships with persons we encounter in the empirical world. Of course, the physicality is missing. We do not touch or kiss famous authors, usually. Nevertheless, we seem to inhabit a shared psychological or mental space with them and their creations. Peter Ackroyd's biography of Dickens begins with a fictional walk with the author and his now almost mythical characters.
We are "intimate" (there is no other word for the experience) with Jane Austen, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and many others, especially those of our contemporaries who have accompanied us on our life-journeys. Roth, Vidal, Mailer, Parker, Jong, so many others have provided this company for me.
John Updike became that sort of pervasive presence in my life. Updike's death is the loss of a friend. Updike's absence will be felt in American literature. Political correctness and feminist litmus tests nothwithstanding, Updike will be remembered (deservedly) as a great American writer.
Middle class males in America and all non lesbians from the Upper West Side are discouraged from literary interests, also from voting for political candidates in New York city. This may account for the hostility to Updike in some New York media enclaves.
" ... These [literary] experiments did not always work. 'S.' (1988) used Hawthorne's 'The Scarlet Letter' as a jumping-off point for a crude attack on feminists. ..."
Ms. Kakutani ("Jennifer Shuessler"?) should reflect on this comment. With all due respect to this seasoned reviewer for the Times, Updike was not capable of "crudity," especially in his criticisms of alternative views of the world and politics.
Updike was generous, elegant, fair and subtle to the point of genius. These qualities were evident even in his polemical writings, such as his many political essays and literary criticisms of colleagues. Updike was never merely a polemicist in novels.
Is Ms. Kakutani also Jill Abramson?
Fictitious names allow journalists to escape responsibility for their comments and errors. The ethical qualities of this practice seem doubtful (to me). It is easy to say nasty and false things about people when you lack the courage to attach your real name to your writings. A.O. Scott?
"S" is a sensitive portrayal of a comfortable American white woman's experiences and search for independence as well as self-awareness in the middle of life's journey. Incidentally, "carpet munchers" (Updike was a self-proclaimed "expert" in the art of "pleasuring a woman orally") will delight in one or two female same-sex romances described in this novel.
No good novel is a political argument and nothing more. Such political ideas as novels may contain are incidental -- even in explicitly political literature, like Orwell's and Huxley's dystopias -- to a vision of life and all human suffering or joy.
Updike was no antifeminist. He was not "hostile to women." I have read "S." and I expect to review the book as a response to Ms. Kakutani, also as a way of saying goodbye to Mr. Updike.
I'd say the work is a feminist interpretation of a woman's life that is roughly contemporary with Updike's journey. It is touching and poignant, also "real," amounting to one writer's projection of his "womanly perspective" on things or upon a plausible literary character.
No, John Updike was not gay. Antifeminist? Why?
Ms. Kakutani cannot be all bad since she provoked Norman Mailer to say that he would like to "punch her in the nose." This is a compliment from Mailer.
Any Times reviewer has great power which is not always used wisely. I remember reading reviews by Ms. Kakutani which seemed intelligent and well-written, but somewhat lifeless and unfeeling or unimaginative and, weirdly, unsympathetic to the author's project.
Somehow this ignorant comment on an Updike novel does not seem like the kind of thing Ms. Kakutani would say because it is clearly the remark of a person who has not read Updike's novel.
"Ms. Kakutani" usually "seems" very diligent and thorough about reading the books that she reviews. I say this regardless of whether I agree with her opinions or share her tastes.
A great critic -- perhaps our best essayist in the twentieth century and beyond -- once suggested that the reader and reviewer's task is to seek to inhabit the work to be evaluated, to be "had" by the artist's magic, evaluating or judging only after the full experience of an aesthetic encounter.
Many reviewers can no longer enjoy the works they judge. This death of joy or aesthetic delight in literature is lethal to critical faculties.
Don't you want books and movies to be good? I do. I feel delight, joy, celebration at Updike's flawless prose. I am happy to see the English language used so well. I am also inspired to write as well as I can in response. I know that politics and corruption in America will make it difficult -- if not impossible -- to publish or disseminate my work in the U.S. I will write anyway.
I recall an interview or conversation on the old "Dick Cavett Show" feturing Updike and John Cheever. They were utterly civilized and articulate, so considerate of one another's feelings and achievements. I recall thinking that I hoped to be that sort of person someday.
This is not to diminish the anger expressed by Updike for the real evils of racism and social injustice. I would not wish to be nice to Mengele or Eichman. Yes, those angers are in his work -- and in mine -- as well as part of all of us forever.
Cavett noted the similarities detected by critics in their writings as "chroniclers of the suburban bedroom and affluent people's despair." I like it very much when affluent people despair. This is an example of my own empathetic responses. ("'Revolutionary Road': A Movie Review.")
Cavett mentioned that "one of you has been to college and the other has not."
Cheever smiled and explained that he was "the drop out, whereas John enjoys the obvious benefits of a Harvard education."
Updike was quick to interrupt:
"Well, when reviewing and doing other busy work, I sometimes dust off my English majoring. Otherwise, my college education is mostly irrelevant to what I do that John Cheever does so well."
Graciousness, tact, sensitivity came easily to Updike. This has nothing to do with excess humility which can injure a writer. Like Mailer, Vidal, Styron and others, including Morrison or our goddess of the poisoned pen, Mary McCarthy, Updike could dazzle on the page and he knew it.
Updike's poetry displays bravura moments and his romanticism -- romanticism not least about America as revealed in lyrical flights on the subject of American women's mysteries will guarantee his lasting importance.
No one is better at describing making love to a woman than John Updike.
Updike on Monroe or (this is a fantasy!) his description of Kate Winslet at the Golden Globes are to die for.
Having dusted off my non-English majoring to acknowledge a debt and loss that is deeply felt, I now leave you with some words of the Master and an invitation to read "S." and then to discuss it among yourselves:
"Looking back, and trying to compare the class of 1950 with what I know of children now" -- "Full Frontal Feminism," duh! -- "I suppose our horizons were rather narrow -- ... we took our racial and economic homogeneity all too easily for granted. But we assumed the world necessarily had rules and never for a minute believed that life was a free ride. Learn to Live, Live to Learn, the motto read on the orange brick facade of old Shillington High. I was sorry when, not many years after I graduated, the school name ceased to exist, though the building did not. The motto I noticed recently is still up."
