01-27-2009, 02:03 PM | #1 |
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Author John Updike has passed away
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01-27-2009, 02:34 PM | #2 |
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Jesus Christ, this is bad news.
I very much enjoy his work, and was hoping he would win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Don |
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01-27-2009, 02:37 PM | #3 |
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01-27-2009, 03:30 PM | #4 |
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No, unfortunately.
Don |
01-27-2009, 03:48 PM | #5 |
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01-27-2009, 04:03 PM | #6 |
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It is a sad day indeed.
Never awarding him a Nobel prize for literature will be their loss, not his. |
01-27-2009, 04:08 PM | #7 |
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Yes, it is sad news. Here is more from the Boston Globe.
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01-28-2009, 02:30 AM | #8 |
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He won two Pulitzer prizes - that's pretty good going!
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01-28-2009, 09:32 AM | #9 |
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A barn, in a day, is a small night. The splinters of light between the dry shingles pierce the high roof like stars, and the rafters and crossbeams and built-in ladders seem, until your eyes adjust, as mysterious as the branches of a haunted forest. David entered silently, the gun in one hand.... The smell of old straw scratched his sinuses.... the mouths of empty bins gaped like caves. Rusty oddments of farming — coils of baling wire, some spare tines for a harrow, a handleless shovel — hung on nails driven here and there in the thick wood. He stood stock-still a minute; it took a while to separate the cooing of the pigeons from the rustling in his ears. When he had focused on the cooing, it flooded the vast interior with its throaty, bubbling outpour: there seemed no other sound. They were up behind the beams. What light there was leaked through the shingles and the dirty glass windows at the far end and the small round holes, about as big as basketballs, high on the opposite stone side walls, under the ridge of the roof.
From the story “Pigeon Feathers.” |
01-28-2009, 09:57 AM | #10 | |
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Quote:
Yes, exactly like that. Don |
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01-29-2009, 04:34 AM | #11 |
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Some Reflections on the Passing of John Updike
UPDIKE
John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy chronicles reflectively the decades since I first had contact with the Baha’i Faith back in 1953. With the help of a Guggenheim Fellowship Updike was working on the first of these four books, Rabbit, Run, when I became a Baha’i in October 1959. The book was published a few months later in 1960 and is the story of a young man, one Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, from a small town in the USA. The book concerns Harry’s attempts to escape the constraints of life. In my teens I, too, lived in a small town and, although I could see the attractiveness of escaping from social constraints, I also left the need for a set of limits. I was only too well aware of just how easily I could go beyond the appropriate limits. By the late fifties I could see what happened to those who did escape from life’s, from society’s, constraints. I knew from personal experience by my early teens, by 1957, what it was like to be caught stealing, breaking and entering, going too far sexually, misbehaving around the family home, at school or with my play-mates and pushing the envelope of life. Had I read Updike’s book, Rabbit, Run I think I would have had my need, my desire, for limits reinforced. The Baha’i Faith provided that framework, those limits, at a critical stage in my life, my mid-teens. This Faith also provided that sense of the sacredness of life which is at the centre of Updike’s work. When I was preparing to leave North America for Australia in 1970/1 people were watching the movie Rabbit, Run. It had opened just as I began planning to leave Canada in 1970. Rabbit Redux, Updike’s sequel to Rabbit, Run came out four months after I arrived in Sydney for what became my life in Australia. Harry Angstrom took to the road in 1971 in Rabbit Redux as I took to a different road in the southern hemisphere. Updike’s final two Rabbit books took Harry Angstrom into the 1990s and his rather bleak retirement and old age. The following prose-poem compares and contrasts my life with Harry’s. –Ron Price with thanks to “Articles on John Updike’s Works,” in The New York Times on the Web. You didn’t think much about politics back then in the ‘50s, did you John? Private destiny was your concern, then and now--not that partisan game. And your then theories about how to write are now forgotten, eh John? When Rabbit is Rich was set in ’79, I was living in Tasmania fighting another bi-polar episode; Harry was fighting his many losses in life or was it life’s pleasures--sex, booze, marital infidelity and having fun? Then Harry got old--at just 55-- in 1990 in Rabbit At Rest, a decade before I headed into quieter pastures where death and age awaited--- inevitably long down life’s road, but not with fear, emptiness and Harry’s downward slide with its world inhabited by ghosts and demons of his past. Ron Price |
01-29-2009, 05:15 AM | #12 |
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I am also sad.
I have read almost all of his books and enjoyed them very much. RIP Rabbit... bozon42 |
01-29-2009, 06:34 AM | #13 |
Martin Kristiansen
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Oh no. loved his work. Sad
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01-31-2009, 12:05 AM | #14 |
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Rip, john. He sure was prolific. I 've read just small part of his work, there seemed to be a lot of breadth to it, but, allow me to say, I found little depth to it really. A man's writer for sure, an in no way a writer's writer. At least he was way way better than vapid twunts like Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie. I am sure he will be missed by a lot of readers.
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