Tag Archives: John Updike
Poetry & journalism
“Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.”—John Updike As with David Shields, when Archibald MacLeish talks about “poetry” he means poetry in the larger sense of writing that is literary art vs. writing … Continue reading
Filed under journalism, NOTED, poetry
Kindle (& Updike) redux
As I was saying early in January, I was almost through Jonathan Franzen’s 576-page novel Freedom—wow, what a Mississippi river of a book, churning with social criticism, human portraits, narrative power—when I dropped and broke my Christmas Kindle. In two … Continue reading
Review: Nabokov’s ‘Speak, Memory’
Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited by Vladimir Nabokov. Knopf, 268 pages. “There is, it would seem, in the dimensional scale of the world a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point, arrived at by diminishing large … Continue reading
Filed under aesthetics, honesty, memoir, REVIEW, theme
John Updike’s impressive sentences
We are all so assimilated. Last Saturday, Hope was watching the evening news and the newscaster instead of Tom Brokaw was a perfectly stunning young woman, light topaz eyes as far apart as a kitten’s, sharp-cornered wide mouth pronouncing everything … Continue reading
Filed under NOTED, style, syntax, working method
Narrative among the dark Danes
K. Brian Soderquist, U.S.A.-born and now a Danish citizen, co-author of Kierkegaard’s Concept of Irony, teaches my son Tom’s Kierkegaard class this winter in Copenhagen. While on a recent field trip, Brian conveyed to Tom and to his study-abroad classmates … Continue reading
Filed under evolutionary psychology, existentialism, memoir, MY LIFE, narrative, spirituality, theme
For the well-read writer . . .
If there’s a writer of any stripe on your holiday gift list, you could do worse than to buy The Paris Review Interviews, Vols. 1-4, a new boxed set that collects the journal’s fifty years of interviews with famous and … Continue reading
Filed under essay-classical, memoir, NOTED, reading
Honesty and chronology, part two
William Zinsser addresses the issue of fidelity to chronology in his On Writing Well, and I was surprised by his answer. Perusing the thirtieth anniversary edition of this sober classic on nonfiction, I expected Zinsser to be very conservative in … Continue reading
Review: ‘Self-Consciousness’
Self-Consciousness: Memoirs by John Updike. Ballantine/Fawcett. 271 pages. Without trying, I was always reading something by John Updike. It was hard not to, especially if you read The New Yorker, where his fiction, essays, and reviews appeared for fifty years. … Continue reading
Filed under aesthetics, fiction, honesty, memoir, point of view, REVIEW, technique
