Markmaking

Daniel Kehlmann on John Updike

Daniel Kehlmann zum Tode von John Updike: Seine Zeit und die Verlorenheit und das Glück - FAZ.NET

Er war womöglich der letzte fromme Erzähler von Rang, der die Welt für abgefallen von Gott hielt und der doch Gottes Angesicht in dessen Schöpfung suchte und deren Menschen und Dinge und Lichtstimmungen in einer Prosa von atemberaubender Zärtlichkeit nachformte. So trug er Prousts impressionistische Beschreibungskunst in die Welt der Autos und Malls, der Eisdielen und der Collegeabschlussbälle hinüber, in eine Neue Welt, die für ihn der Möglichkeit der Erlösung so fern gerückt war, dass sie sich dem Sex ergeben mußte.

Vor einigen Jahren hat David Foster Wallace ihm vorgeworfen, dass Sexualität kein Ausweg sei aus der existentiellen Verzweiflung, aber genau davon, dass sie es eben doch ist, lebte Updikes Kunst, und sein Leben scheint auch nicht darunter gelitten zu haben.

Patrick Bahners on Updike

Zum Tod John Updikes: Ein Klassiker ohne Nobelpreis - faz.net

Denn kein Schriftsteller unserer Zeit ist in so emphatischem Sinne ein amerikanischer Autor gewesen wie er. Alle Bücher dieses unerhört produktiven Wortarbeiters sind Beiträge zur Selbstauslegung und Selbstdarstellung Amerikas. In seinen Romanen und Kurzgeschichten geht er dabei aus von einem scheinbar anachronistischen, dem historischen Begriff Amerikas.

Seine Geschichte spielen auf dem Territorium der dreizehn ursprünglichen Kolonien, in einer überschaubaren Gesellschaft, deren Werte noch puritanisch oder durch die diversen Überwindungen und Umwertungen des Puritanismus geprägt sind. Updikes Ästhetik, seine atemberaubende Beschreibungskunst, ist die verführerisch schöne Außenseite einer Sündentheologie.

Ben Myers on Updike and theology

Faith and Theology: John Updike, 1932-2009: a glance at his theology.

Just think of the Lutheran pastor Fritz Kruppenbach in Rabbit, Run (1960), a deeply Barthian minister who utters this thunderous denouncement of pastoral work – in conversation with another minister, he asks: “Do you think this is your job, to meddle in these people’s lives? I know what they teach you at seminary now: this psychology and that. But I don’t agree with it. You think now your job is to be an unpaid doctor, to run around and plug up holes and make everything smooth. I don’t think that. I don’t think that’s your job…. I say you don’t know what your role is or you’d be home locked in prayer…. In running back and forth you run away from the duty given you by God, to make your faith powerful.... When on Sunday morning, then, when you go out before their faces, we must walk up not worn out with misery but full of Christ, hot with Christ, on fire: burn them with the force of our belief. This is why they come; why else would they pay us? Anything else we can do and say anyone can do and say. They have doctors and lawyers for that…. Make no mistake. Now I’m serious. Make no mistake. There is nothing but Christ for us. All the rest, all this decency and busyness, is nothing. It is Devil’s work.”

Vidal, Updike, the New Yorker

Gore Vidal, looking down his nose at Updike: Rabbit's own burrow - Times Online.

Easily, it would appear, he became an all-round writer for the New Yorker "of the William Shawn era (195187) . . . a club of sorts, from within which the large rest of literary America . . . could be politely disdained . . . . While I can now almost glimpse something a bit too trusting in the serene sense of artistic well-being, of virtual invulnerability, that being published in The New Yorker gave me for over thirty years . . . ." During much of this time, he seemed unaware that the interesting, indeed major, writers of the period did not belong to his club, either because they were too disturbing for the mild Shawn or because they could not endure the radical editing and rewriting that the quintessential middlebrow magazine imposed on its writers. "I shook with anger", Perelman wrote in 1957, "at their august editorial decisions, their fussy little changes and pipsqueak variations on my copy." Nabokov, published at Edmund Wilson's insistence, needed all of Wilson's help in fighting off editorial attempts to make his prose conform to the proto-Ralph Lauren house impersonation of those who fit, socially, in the roomy top-drawer-but-one.

Updike, Psoriasis, New York, and the Beach

Profile: John Updike | Books | The Guardian

Since a bout of measles at the age of six, Updike has suffered from psoriasis, a dermatological condition that gives the victim "the sense of another presence co-occupying your body and singling you out from the happy herds of healthy, normal mankind". In a poem in his most recent collection, Americana (2001), he refers to himself as a "literary Mr Sunshine", a piquant description, since it refers not only to his evident good nature but to his annual effort, over many years, to obliterate his psoriasis by hammering it with ultraviolet rays, once the only known remedy. In summer months, Updike was indeed "Mr Sunshine", but with the onset of winter his psoriasis flourished again. He suggests that "having this disability, which was really quite shaming, forced me to be more adventurous and daring than I ordinarily would have been. I'm at heart a kind of cautious, conservative person, and without the skin ailment I might not have left New York, but just stayed and grown old in New Yorker harness. It was the need to get to the sun, get to the beach, that forced me to leave the city and my job, and of course to earn my living as a freelance writer."

Updike on Politics

John Updike | Books | The Guardian.

Updike stands apart from the ranks of contemporaries in leaning to the right in matters private and political. In 1966, in a symposium dedicated to writers' views on Vietnam, he found himself more or less isolated as a hawk. The New York Times pointed this out, without giving proper consideration to his ambivalence. In reaction, Updike wrote "On Not Being a Dove", a 50-page essay in which he attempted to chart the ins and outs of his resistance to the peace movement, and to explain the roots of the untrendy patriotism fortifying his position. "I was sort of embarrassed not to be a dove, since most writers are doves," he says. "It's not my nature to go against the grain. But it was arresting to someone raised in the depression to witness the hatred, venom, fury of those years. In general, I think that these men we elect should be left to do the job, and my guess is that they're doing about as well as they can do, given the problems they face. And I'd be willing to give the benefit of the doubt even to Richard Nixon... which maybe is eccentric of me. I find it very hard to believe that the government leaders are villainous, of our democracy or the British democracy. But maybe I've been brainwashed."

Updike on Karl Barth

David Lodge reviews Roger's Version (nyt).

The central character and narrator, pipe-smoking, 52-year-old Roger Lambert is a professor of divinity, a former Methodist minister who adopted an academic career after the scandalous breakup of his first marriage and his union with Esther, 14 years his junior. He teaches the history of the early Christian heresies at a large university in an unnamed Northeastern city that might be Boston. He is a somewhat dilettantish disciple of Karl Barth, the austere Swiss theologian who fiercely insisted on the utter separateness of the divine and the human, and the utter dependence of the latter on the former. Roger admits to insulating this ''hot Barthian nugget'' in ''layers of worldly cynicism and situation ethics.'' Mr. Updike is well able to evoke the ethos of an academic theology department, and to have sly fun with its professional rivalries, pretensions and jargon (this one has specialists in ''Ethics and Moral Logistics'' and ''holocaustics''). He has manifested an interest in religion and theology in previous books. If there was ever such a species as the Protestant novelist, comparable to that much discussed animal, the Catholic novelist, Mr. Updike may be its last surviving example.

Updike on the WASP-Irish feud

Richard Brookhiser, author of The Way of the WASP: 

"The nuances of the regional Irish-Yankee feud [in Boston] escaped Brad" Schaeffer, a character in an Updike story, "since to his Midwestern eyes the two inimical camps were very similar--thin-skinned, clubby men from damp green islands, fond of a nip and long malicious stories."

Poe in Germany

What do the Germans have to say about the 200-year-old Edgar Allan Poe?

At Die Zeit: Peter Kuemmel: Mann im Abgrund. * Sherko Fatah, Poes Einfluss: Expedition ins Imaginäre. * Jens Jessen: Umweg zum Ruhm. * Ein Gespräch mit Roger Corman über seine Poe-Filme. * * * At Perlentaucher: Hans-Dieter Gelfert, Edgar Allan Poe: Am Rande des Malstroms. * Wolfgang Martynkewicz, Edgar Allan Poe. * Die Maske des roten Todes: Erzählungen. * * * CDs: Im Wirbel des Malstroms. * Der Bericht des Arthur Gordon Pym. * Umständlicher Bericht des Arthur Gordon Pym aus Nantucket (Rolf Michaelis review). * * * At the NZZ: Ulrike Brunotte, Die Innenschau der Obsessionen: Edgar Allan Poe – ein Pionier in den Abgründen der menschlichen Seele. * * * At the HU: Renate Hof, Edgar Allan Poe.

Inger Christensen 1935-2009

Jutlandish poetess Inger Christensen has passed away. She had been struck by Chomsky's ideas about the language instinct and generative grammar.

Obits: Perlentaucher roundup; 

Harald Hartung, "Das Recht zu dichten, so, wie der Baum Blätter treibt" FAZ

Ina Hartwig, "Die Schmetterlingsfrau" FR

Beatrice von Matt, "Grosse Sprachmusik -- seriell und organisch" NZZ

Tobias Lehmkuhl, "Im Schmetterlingstal: Das Alphabet der Poesie" SZ

Butterfly Valley: A Requiem, trans. Susanna Neid

Up they soar, the planet's butterflies,
pigments from the warm body of the earth,
cinnabar, ochre, phosphor yellow, gold
a swarm of basic elements aloft.

trans. Hanns Groessel

Sie steigen auf, die Schmetterlinge des Planeten, 
wie Farbenstaub vom warmen Körper der Erde, 
Zinnober, Ocker, Gold und Phosphorgelb, 
ein Schwarm von chemischem Grundstoff hochgehoben.

Closing with the lines,

„Es ist der Tod, der dich mit eigenen Augen / vom Schmetterlingsflügel aus anblickt."  Death looks out at you with its own eyes from butterfly wings.

It, reviewed by Milton L. Welch at The Believer

Fibonacci- and alphabet-based Alphabet, trans. Susanna Neid, reviewed at the Complete Review

cicadas exist; chicory, chromium, 
citrus trees; cicadas exist; 
cicadas, cedars, cypresses, the cerebellum

and

bracken exists; and blackberries, blackberries; 

bromine exists; and hydrogen, hydrogen

Reviews of "Das Schmetterlingstal" CD read by Inger and Hanna Schygulla

"Wie selten ist ein perfekter Tag! Aber noch geringer ist die Anzahl der perfekten Lyrik-Hörbücher.... „Das Schmetterlingstal” von Inger Christensen aber ist ein perfektes Hörbuch."

Review of 2 CDs: "Alfabet" and "Das Schmetterlingstal" 

Ljus av Ljus - Light from Light - early work with religious themes.

„Stehe ich / alleine im schnee / wird klar / daß ich eine uhr bin // wie sollte die ewigkeit sich / sonst zurechtfinden”

„Ich öffne das fenster meiner liebe / und atme den geruch von erde ein / der qualm und vergängliche hoffnung ist / Dennoch hoffen wir.”

At Die Zeit: "Ich hab immer geglaubt"

I have always believed reality / to be something that one becomes / when one grows up.

200 Years of Poe

This month, Edgar Allan Poe turns 200. What does academia have to say about that?

Algis Valiunas, "No to Poe"

The esteem in which Poe is commonly held these days has to do partly with his ruinous life, which epitomizes the misery of poetic genius in crass America—a theme beloved of the cognoscenti; partly with the fashionable elevation of popular literary forms like horror tales, detective stories, and science fiction to an equality with high art; and partly with the no less fashionable elevation of mental disturbance into a superior form of insight. 

Matthew Taylor, "Edgar Allan Poe’s (Meta)physics: A Pre-History of the Post-Human"

Rather than optimistically assuming, as Mayo and others did, that identifying a universal force is equivalent to mastering it for the betterment of humanity, Poe concluded that an allencompassing cosmic energy inevitably troubles human-being by suspending the autonomy and interiority of individual humans; the disorientation of normal, corporeal functioning and the literal loss of self-possession attending mesmeric practice illustrated for Poe the fact that people are little more than occasions for the demonstration of an impersonal power.

Peter Coviello, "Poe In Love: Pedophilia, Morbidity, and the Logic of Slavery"

An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.  —Henry James

That Poe had a powerful intellect is undeniable: but it seems to me the intellect of a highly gifted young person before puberty.  —T. S. Eliot

Above all else, though, the story of the dysfunctions of intimacy in Poe is important to tell because it allows us a way to find real rapport between the now divided critical tendencies around Poe, between those attending, with largely psychoanalytic tools, to the works' sexual suggestions, and those attending, with largely historicist tools, to the works' racial significances.

David Blake, "The Man That Was Used Up": Edgar Allan Poe and the Ends of Captivity

The General's status as a cyborg also makes him an important antecedent to the many robotic warriors that have surfaced in twentieth-century fiction and film. Poe's cyborg differs from these figures in that he is less the ideal combatant than the ideal captive, a figure endowed with charm, handsome features, and hegemonic significance. Poe's story leads us to question whether the ultimate mission of redeemed captives is not so much to defeat an alien society as it is to conquer their own.

Also Kevin J. Hayes, Poe and the Printed Word and The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe

AP: "Why 2009 Will Be Rich With Celebrations"

Kinsey on Lovell on Copley

From a review of Art in a Season of Revolution:

In the case of several portraits by John Singleton Copley that depict different women in identical poses and gowns, for example, Lovell convincingly demonstrates that the striking visual similarities in these paintings were hardly the simple result of the painter's use of stock models and costumes, nor were their analogies the result of expedient short cuts that relied on the sitters' ignorance of the other, nearly identical images for acceptance. Instead Lovell offers painstaking evidence ranging from aesthetic theories and practices of the time and familial relationships of the sitters to the intricacies of dressmaking in the period, that demonstrates not only that the sitters knew each other well, but also that they were fully aware and even desirous that their portraits would resemble one another. The visual analogies ultimately were a conscious emulation designed to strengthen bonds among those portrayed and reinforce social and class hierarchies in a very visible way.

Strange Bedfellows: Green on Deresiewicz on Wood

Unlikely allies, at The Reading Experience:

I'm astonished to be saying so, but William Deresiewicz's review of James Wood's How Fiction Works provokes me to come to Wood's defense. Although Deresiewicz correctly points out the narrowness of Wood's conception of realism, ultimately he is less concerned with Wood's near-dogmatism on this subject than with what he considers the narrowness of Wood's approach to criticism.

The complicated constellation of realism, formalism, politicalism...