Tut tut bitches! Obama goes to Martha’s Vineyard! Leni Zumas tells The Rumpus about the last good book she read. Leni Zumas rules. Atlas Sound covering Fleetwood Mac maybe the biggest thing since Atlas Sound teamed up with Panda Bear. Three Guys One Book talk a little Updike. I like 3G1B (can I do that, or does it look like a code for the cousin of Swine Flu?), and I love Updike. I’ve never read Nicholas Mosely, but HTMLGIANT makes […]
The Coen Brothers and the Return of the Middle-Aged Jewish Man
By Jason Diamond Using names like Woody Allen, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Leonard Michaels, a case could be made that there is an entire genre focusing solely on the neurosis of middle-aged Jewish men. John Updike must have thought so, take his character Henry Bech for proof. But while Bellow, Michaels, and the WASP king Updike are all dead, Roth is still good (a bit depressing maybe, but in a good way) and Allen is more content on using […]
Slack Motherfucker #2
.Dirty Work. I am, admittedly and proudly, the go-to music nerd among my friends. Whether I am glowing over Billy Joel’s foray into heavy metal in the early 1970’s via his band Attila (or Billy Joel’s entire catalog for that matter) or my collection off 60’s bubblegum pop, I have always been able to make a case for music that my peers might otherwise find annoying, silly, or just plain bad. However, I am led to believe there might be […]
Bites: Nabokov with naked women, Tao Lin selling bumper stickers, Sufjan Stevens, and the zombie train adds an extra passenger
Well, some of us are actually gonna have to buy Playboy for the writing it seems, because they are giving us a 5,000 word glimpse at Vladimir Nabokov’s final, unfinished novella, The Original of Laura in their December issue (which comes out Nov. 10th) a week before it ships for sale. An all string reworking of Sufjan Stevens 2001 album Enjoy Your Rabbit will be out in November. I’m happy about this. The title of the album is Run Rabbit […]
Death in Tennis by John Stephens
If such things can be declared (they can, though needn’t be agreed upon), I declare John Updike’s 1960 New Yorker essay on Ted Williams last at bat to be the most illuminative moment in the history of sports journalism. The mind of the reader cannot help but being left imprinted by the light of such images as the Kid standing on third base like Donatello’s David, and that of rounding the bases, after exploding the crowd with his last-at-bat home […]
Bites: Salman Rushdie as a tiny dancer, pictures of Berlin, John Updike maybe turning in his grave, and the party album of the summer?
“She had heels on, so he only came up to her breasts,” laughs our source. “With her low-cut dress and his bald head, when he’s dancing with her he looks like her third boob.” The above quote was about Salman Rushdie; acclaimed writer, Fatwa dodger, and a man who is not afraid to dance with a taller woman Berlin photo essay @ Impose “Updike was the consummate stylist with a blogger mentality” according to Slate. Is this an insult? Chuck […]