Drama is better than tv drama

Because human life ends; tv series don't

Art can always be made

Don't you believe that it can't.  It always can be.  The moment is renewed and you're standing there gawking--yes it was true all along.

hard to fathom it but

you have to be celebrated for what you uniquely have become.  owing to the world, sure, but not a copy of others owed.

one of the tedious qualities

of Updike is this sense of a recipe, chunks of narrative all filled with their elements, above all rich descriptive passages that sometimes wag the dog.  Perhaps like Joyce Carol Oates it's too much reliant on knowing the ending first and writing backward, so that the writing of the novel may be a kind of coloring book finishing out for the author.  More alive and stronger might be not knowing where things are going in some real sense, surrendering to instinct and the enormity of the project and letting it release something wonderful.  A kind of breakthrough like that achieved by Bellow after Dangling Man and the other one until he hit stride with the infinite possibilities of Augie March.  It may be Updike arrived too in this way, I'll have to read more.

First Updike

After a few months of listening to the audiobook of "Rabbit, Run" while washing dishes, finally finished tonight.  About halfway through I started to understand the accomplishment.  Very good.  And such an influence I see so many other places, "The Graduate", all the work of Tom Perotta (sub-par in comparison) etc.  So Updike was good after all, not just prolific.  I will now read more of the rest, I'm sure.  Too bad I waited for his death to get me over the strange resistance I always had to him.  To be fair the distaste came from that feverish week when I bought the cassette tapes of "Rabbit at Rest" (I believe it was) thinking I could fast forward and get Updike, but unfortunately a 104+ temperature had me delirious and drenching the sheets day after night after day, and I always stuck that nauseating audiobook with its interminable suburban set pieces and characters glowering over my illness with a grudge joined to that nightmarish week.  That was early in the time of Jane living with me at 215 Garfield, so must have been 90 or 91.  So, a setback, but there you have it.

on news of an old friend having kids

she thought of some obscene growth he let happen and left to pollute the world...that's what kids were to her, offspring of old lovers she felt only anger toward anymore

Apple Map of Brooklyn

View Apple Trees in Brooklyn in a larger map