A few things.
1. My new matchflick column is out: http://www.matchflick.com/column/1862 I order you to see 11 fabulous performance (stand-up) films.
2. Obama is doing well so far. I think his interview with the Arab channel went well, even though the networks here seemed jealous. Thrilled that Guantanamo is closing. I’ve never understood how we still have that place (or why Cheney thinks it’s not under U.S. dominion when it totally is). Finally, Obama has rescinded the global gag rule. For those who don’t know, the gag rule keeps us from giving aid (including by paying part of our U.N. dues) to any health agency that might mention abortion. I understand people’s feelings about abortion, but refusing to give aid is, to use a cliche, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It doesn’t assure that any one abortion will be stopped, but it does insure that those children who are born will get less aid, less medication, etc. And yes, you might not like your tax dollars going to a humanitarian organization that might use the “a” word, but I pay taxes for shit that you like and I think is offensive and abysmal.
3. John Updike died yesterday. I haven’t read as much of his work as I should, so I don’t have any brilliant analysis to give you here, but we’ll miss him.
And did I mention that Updike was on The Simpsons?
Karma, I will not shame you for not reading much Updike, but to recommend Jesus is Magic and not Swimming to Cambodia seems kinda crazy to me. I will check out Leguizamo, so you have had an impact on my netflix, even as you problematized my bobulation by excluding Spalding Gray (awesome) and including Sara Silverman (really predictable). I suppose I should bother you about this on Matchflick, but I like trafficking here.
I’ve always wanted to read Couples, because although it’s billed as fiction, folks in Ipswich (where Updike lived, and whose residents didn’t treat him too well) say it’s a thinly disguised account of what really went on in one particular social set. When I had the misfortune to live in Ipswich, I knew people who claimed they knew precisely who each character was in real life. Small-town version of an urban legend? Maybe, but it makes a good story.
I don’t think you need to have read much of Updike’s work. It’s incredibly solipsistic and similar. I was thinking about the irony of David Foster Wallace’s death before Updike’s and I just had to go back and reread his essay “Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think” (In Consider the Lobster) which is a review of Updike’s “Toward the End of Time” which is a musing on his mortality disguised as a distopia or perhaps a flimsy speculative fiction. What I really like about Wallace’s essay is how critical he is of that triage of self-absorbed and misogynistic writers: Mailer, Roth and Updike, whose navel (or rather penile) gazing so epitomized the 80’s “me” generation. He calls them the Great Male Narcissists (GMN) of postwar American fiction. I’ll bring a copy for you to bookclub this week.