Rip sweet prince (1 Viewer)

chronicler of sex and lung cancer John Updike has died at age 75 after battling lung cancer


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I'm sad to hear this.

I've read a dozen or so of his books and was a fan.

I have a few here by him that I haven't read yet. now I'll have to dig them out.

Buk didn't like Updike (I'm pretty sure I read that somewhere), but that doesn't mean I don't have to.

ah well.
 
I read a lot of Updike books when I was a teenager (yeah, I know I got that backwards), but kind of lost interest in him after a while.

All the big names are going or gone. I wonder who will replace them. Has the age of literary giants passed?

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On a different but somewhat related note, why doesn't anyone ever suffer from cancer? They always battle it. I have never understood that little linguistic tic. Even if you just lay there and say, "Let me die, please," your obituary will invariably say that you "battled" cancer.
 
I don;t believe that Allen Ginsberg battled cancer, but succumbed to it. If I remember correctly, he found out that he had cancer and then slipped into a coma and died within a week.

Maybe someone can correct me on the dates.

Bill
 
All the big names are going or gone. I wonder who will replace them. Has the age of literary giants passed?

Very little is being done. It's a very dry, do nothing period. There aren't any giants -there isn't any force -it's very nil. There isn't any power anywhere. That's what I feel about it.

I wonder who's the author of the second quote ;)
 
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I saw him speak at a Writers Guild function in Beverly Hills in 2006; a very charming, self-effacing man, always a warm smile dancing on his lips. Norman Mailer once famously quipped that Updike was the kind of author appreciated by readers who know nothing about writing ... hilarious on the face of it when one considers that Mailer's WWII drama "The Naked and the Dead" does not read very fresh today but Updike's "Rabbit Run" still leaps off the pages and remains as relevant a study of the decay of the articifical postwar boom in America as any novel ever written. Before Al and Peg Bundy there was Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom and his hilariously and sadly tortured family.

RIP.
 
Well... despite the odds, Thom Wolfe is still going. So there's that...

Very sad about Updike though. I heard earlier today and was surprised. He's on my list of authors to read... someday. I'll probably start with the Rabbit series. Eventually.
 
A Harvard man, a critic, a reviewer and an academic. I never trusted him. But he did have a suburbanly twisted wit and wrote some decent cold-war taboo.
There are no doubt as many giants writing right now as ever...but not unlike all the other arts, they are not as easily identified among the throes of the oceans of material that is getting put out. They may or may not eventually rise to the top...but they, those undeniable, one-person literary forces, shouldn't give a shit...because THEY are the giants, and nothing can be better than that.

But I'll have an extra cup of merlot tonight in honor of Updike, for sure.
 
But he did have a suburbanly twisted wit and wrote some decent cold-war taboo.

One must seperate the Cold War experience from the postwar experience in America (though the two are intrinsically linked ... first the artificial postwar economic boom spurred by the G.I. Bill and then the creation of an "enemy" -- the dirty Communists -- who would take it all away). Updike was fairly apolitical and only touched upon the politics of the time when it had a direct impact on his upper middle-class New England protagonists.

The graphic, taboo-busting sexuality that Updike injected into novels like the groundbreaking "Couples" and "The Witches of Eastwick", as well as the "Rabbit" series, must be taken in context. The "sex" in some of Updike's works is rarely "sexy"; it's human sexuality in its most primal and shameful pose, the mixed emotions brought about by stifling Protestant and Calivinistic values that teach sex as a procreation act and nothing more (or less). He had more in common with Bukowski's aesthetic than one might realize at first blush, he simply studied a different social strata than Bukowski but the end results were often the same.
 
Someone emailed this to me... allegedly Updike wrote it and it was on NPR today...

Perfection Wasted

And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market --
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories
packed in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That's it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren't the same.
 
I DO like the handiwork...some great lines. But the content; this fretting over lost perfections and achieved reverence, seems sissy. There are much greater and deeper losses to lament...or to withstand, or to laugh at.
 
Spot on Carversdog......

'He had more in common with Bukowski's aesthetic than one might realize at first blush, he simply studied a different social strata than Bukowski but the end results were often the same.'
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So very true...... would be interested to have some evidence of any antipathy from Buk if any?

I slipped into Updikes narrative as easily as Buk.......

RIP Mr Updike....
 

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