URLs du Updike

  • Numerous bloggers are pointing out John Updike's marvelous 1960 essay on Ted Williams, Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu".
    Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man's Euclidean determinations and Nature's beguiling irregularities.
    A must for Red Sox fans. Or baseball fans. Or writing fans.

  • Also worth reading for historical interest is Updike's 1989 Commentary essay "On Not Being a Dove", where he recounts his political out-of-stepitude with other inhabitants of his literary milieu.

  • Joel Achenbach has a nice essay on Updike. My only quibble is with this:
    How good was he? Well, no one as prolific wrote better, and no one better was as prolific.
    Seems clever, actually redundant. I know this because he used the same locution in talking about George Will back in 2005, which I analyzed here.