Horner's Corner

Archive for June 7th, 2009

Talking Heads – ‘Psycho Killer’ 1978

by on Jun.07, 2009, under music, Uncategorized


Fast Tube by Casper">Psycho Killer

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Pallas Athena – Klimt

by on Jun.07, 2009, under art

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‘My Father’s Tears – And Other Stories,’ by John Updike – Review

by on Jun.07, 2009, under literature

By T. CORAGHESSAN BOYLE

Published: June 5, 2009

Twenty years ago, John Updike published a memoir, “Self-­Consciousness,” which opens with an extended reminiscence of his hometown. The author has been stranded for the evening while his mother and daughter are at the movies, and he walks the streets of Shillington, Pa., in a light rain, reliving the past in the incantatory detail with which he informed and illuminated his fiction, summoning up the names of departed local merchants, of his teachers and elementary school classmates, recalling the material texture of his childhood right on down to the candies, magazines and coloring books offered for sale at the variety store, recording the essence of his time amongst us. “The street,” he writes, “the house where I had lived, seemed blunt, modest in scale, simple; this deceptive simplicity composed their precious, mystical secret, the conviction of whose existence I had parlayed into a career, a message to sustain a writer book after book.” That message, that testimony of an individual and recollective consciousness as it relives and reviews the matter of a lifetime and grapples with the effects of aging, disease, decline and death, is the focus of Updike’s final collection of new fiction.

Of these 18 stories, all but one (an odd travelogue called “Morocco,” dating from 1979) were published in the last decade, and their themes and situations hark back to the author’s earliest autobiographical fiction, especially the stories set in Olinger, Updike’s fictionalized version of Shillington. The difference here is that the protagonists in this collection are, for the most part, at the end of their lives, and so the news of familial drama and divorce and the cocktail parties, barbecues and casual wooings of quotidian life in suburbia is given retrospectively, wistfully, presented in the larger context as memories of lost moments and lost opportunities. Updike once described himself as “a literary spy within average, public-school, supermarket America.” So he was. And these are his last smuggled dispatches, made all the more poignant for their finality.

Read more via Book Review – ‘My Father’s Tears – And Other Stories,’ by John Updike – Review – NYTimes.com.

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