Author Archives: Emdashes

John Updike at Rest

Benjamin Chambers writes:
I’ve been on vacation, and so missed the momentous news, yesterday, of John Updike’s passing. His fiction was never my cup of tea, but I mourn his loss just the same. Universally admired for the smooth, sparkling facility of his sentences, he was what most writers wish they could be: able to laugh at himself, but deadly serious about his work; supernaturally and steadily productive in multiple genres; critically admired and at the same time a household name; a thoughtful and perceptive critic who read widely; and (though he has never been given much credit for this by readers of his fiction) omnivorous in his interests.
If that list is a bit jumbled, it merely reflects the breadth of Updike’s wide range. And for those with fixed ideas of Updike, based perhaps on his recent stories, I urge them to go back and read “Friends from Philadelphia,” the first story he published in The New Yorker, back in 1954. I read it for the first time last year; though I didn’t comment on this at the time, I was pleasantly surprised by its multiple subtexts, and a piquancy that age has not dimmed.
Years ago, a friend of mine, a New Yorker, passed on a quote she swore was from Updike, something to do with “… the secret sense that anyone not from New York had to be, in some sense, kidding.” Nonetheless, that was how I felt when I heard the news about his death: that someone, somewhere, has got to be kidding. I feel it still.

Making Our Lives Suck Less: 2/25 Event With Avenue Q and [Title of Show] Stars

Here’s a press release we can believe in: what promises to be a scintillating and hilarious conversation with some of the creators of Emily’s favorite show, Avenue Q, and the acclaimed and wittily titled [Title of Show]. Here are the details:

**P.S. 107 Continues 5th Annual “Readings on the 4th Floor” Series With Focus on “Broadway Unbound”: The creators of Avenue Q and Title of Show along with the artistic director of the Vineyard Theatre talk about redefining the Broadway musical**

Brooklyn, January 26, 2009 – How do you convince a producer that a show featuring puppets for an adult audience and one about writing a Broadway musical will ever succeed in a theater world focused on risk aversion? On **Wednesday, February 25 at 7:30 p.m. on the 4th Floor of PS 107 in Park Slope, Brooklyn**, **Framji Minwalla**, visiting professor of drama at Fordham University, will moderate a panel that includes some of the most successful off-off Broadway talents to ever make it to The Great White Way.

**Jeff Bowen** and **Hunter Bell**, creators and stars in the Obie-award winning musical Title of Show, will be joined by their female lead, **Susan Blackwell**. **Jeff Whitty**, Tony Award-winning playwright (Best Musical 2004) of Avenue Q and Tales of the City will be joined by **Bobby Lopez**, Tony-award winning composer and lyricist for Avenue Q. **Doug Aibel**, artistic director of the Vineyard Theater, which took both of these shows to Broadway, will round out the panel. Anecdotes, spontaneous song and the trials and tribulations of creating musical theater that goes beyond the norm will be center stage in this evening of theatrical insight.

Broadway Unbound will be held on the 4th Floor of PS 107, which is located at 13th Street and 8th Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Tickets are $15 online at www.ps107.org or at the door.

This esteemed topical literary series continues to raise funds for the newly renovated fourth floor library/art/performance space of P.S. 107. It has featured everyone from Pulitzer prize-winning author Jumpha Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies, to leading journalists including George Packer of The New Yorker.

Best of the 02.02.09 Issue: Al Roosten and Army Cats

Martin Schneider writes:
This issue had Adrian Tomine’s cover wryly commenting on the region’s tough winter. (I’d like to say that this cover took me a while to get, because I wasted precious seconds looking for the Obama connection.) Candidates include Larissa MacFarquhar on Caroline Kennedy, Laura Secor on Mohammed Tabibian, and Kelefa Sanneh on Booker T. Washington. You guessed it—this post is not yet complete!
Martin Schneider adds: Having now looked at the issue more carefully, I’m going to single out Nancy Franklin’s evocative roundup of the cable news coverage of the inauguration. It was funny (any sentence referencing Chris Matthews) and the ending had a nice jolt of earned profundity. Brava!

Best of the 01.26.09 Issue: Of Montreal and Drunken Mice

Martin Schneider writes:
This issue had Drew Friedman’s cover combining the visages of Barack Obama and George Washington. Candidates include Atul Gawande on health care reform, Calvin Tompkins on Walton Ford, and Ben McGrath on pessimists. We’ll be expanding this post in due course!
Jonathan Taylor writes:
Ben McGrath’s “The Dystopians” cheered me up infinitely, making me think at least for a while that a lot of things worrying me won’t matter at all soon. The piece gamely absorbs the all-embracing view of its subjects; at every corner, there’s yet another novelistic image of the future as envisioned by James Howard Kunstler, like the aspiring hedge-fund managers who are “going to end up supervisors of rutabaga pickers.”

The Wavy Rule, a Daily Comic by Pollux: Brave New World Book Encyclopedia

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Read Ben McGrath’s fascinating article “The Dystopians” “here.”:http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/01/26/090126fa_fact_mcgrath And yes, I get to draw a “thylacine”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thylacine at last, which ties in with Calvin Tomkin’s profile on “Walton Ford,”:http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/ford/index.html which is “here.”:http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/01/26/090126fa_fact_tomkins
Click on the cartoon to enlarge it!
Read “The Wavy Rule” archive.

John Updike, 1932-2009

Alfred A. Knopf has announced that John Updike died of lung cancer today at age 76. More words to come (including yours in the comments).

  • The Times obit by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt.
  • Updike’s 855 author search results on the New Yorker website, as well as reminiscinces and other posts on the newyorker.com blogs Book Bench and Goings On. (This comment thread is open for readers’ memories of the author.)
  • An archive of Emdashes posts on Updike.
  • The New York Review of Books‘ Updike archive (unfortunately, almost all subscription-only)
  • From Vanity Fair, James Wolcott—noted here just the other day for his all-embracing take on The Widows of Eastwick—with a tribute and a recommendation of a “book that captures Updike’s writerly public persona best.”
  • The London Review of Books‘ homepage showcases 21 essays on Updike from its archives—by 17 men, I might add, including Frank Kermode, the Woods James and Michael, and the Jameses Atlas and Wolcott aforementioned. The Times Literary Supplement unsheaths its 1996 review by Gore Vidal of In the Beauty of the Lilies (and “the failings of its author”), which at 10,000 words is “the longest review ever printed in the TLS.”

Shanahan, Weyant Top Voice’s Year-End Chortle Standings

Martin Schneider writes:
Dramatist (and friend of Emily) Brian Parks has unveiled the Village Voice’s 2008 New Yorker Cartoonist Final Standings, and the winner is… Danny Shanahan, who managed to elicit a chuckle from Parks 15 out of 23 tries, for a whopping .652 amusement percentage. The Top 5 (and the only ones to crack .500) are Shanahan, Christopher Weyant, Zachary Kanin, Farley Katz, and Paul Noth. Congrats to that quintet for pleasing a tough judge!
Parks selected Bruce Eric Kaplan’s September 8 effort as Cartoon of the Year. (I preferred Parks’s 5th-place finisher, by Kanin.)
The standings feature all cartoonists who had 10 or more cartoons during 2008. You could some interesting things with a list like that: calculate how many have unambiguously female names (3) or how many have names that feature a Z (5). The possibilities are endless!

Denby on Snark: Both Live and Memorex

Martin Schneider writes:
Just a quick note to alert our readers that David Denby will be reading from his new book Snark tonight at the Barnes and Noble on the Upper West Side (82nd and Broadway) at 7pm. I hope I can attend (not sure yet).
If you’ll be there, or even if you won’t, you can get in the mood with this meaty interview with the Columbia Journalism Review.