In-Crowd On The Golf Course
5-17-06 The New Yorker Wonks: God, Golf, & Updike's Sex Life
Picture this scenario. Long time New Yorker in-staffer John Updike who is noted for his novels dealing with marital sexual infidelity & a kind of blase Protestant Christianity oozing over everything & blessing the sexual promiscuities that add up over 120 novels or so is out on the golf course in a foursome with Jorie Graham, Joyce Carol Oates & David Denham. Denham & Oates take up the cudgels against Updike & Graham. Miss Graham herself is somewhat stooped from her attempted & failed prayer bouts with The Deity over the past dozen years that she has religiously documented in her poems. Updike sees a real challenge to his enormous sexual appetites here---a relatively young lady in her early 50's with reasonable good looks & quite a bit of local prestige. A Harvard girl & darling of Helen Vendler's and someone devoted to the pursuit of God and she 'doesn't care who knows it' in the immortal words of Raymond Chandler. It just turns Updike into a tiny little melting meat ball on that roaring green golf course-----with of course Editor in Chief Denham & his sidekick Oates pounding the links from the other direction. This is Classic for Updike whose verbiage is almost like Bible Commentaries-----Endless, innocuous and finally, tedious. Not to worry. Joyce C. Oates has been sending off emails to friends of friends of friends of friends of current Members of The Nobel Prize Committee for several years now and she is screaming inside for that final Ultimate Recognition so she can spend the rest of her years scribbling her Memoirs which she hopes will exceed the Fourteen Labors of Hercules. She added a couple just to give herself incentive to do something Ambitious, Homeric, and to make us forever bury the the swollen memories we have of James Joyce & Marcel Proust. Mr. Denham of course is merely watching this whole serenade of intellectual & esthetic & theological violence while he tees up or lines up his putts. He promises to publish all three reports of these stalwarts separately & unexpurgatedly in successive issues of The New Yorker come autumn or come Hell or high water. I don't read The New Yorker any more so I won't be writing the reviews on the golf course dilemmas of The New Yorker Magazine.
RLG copyright 2006
Picture this scenario. Long time New Yorker in-staffer John Updike who is noted for his novels dealing with marital sexual infidelity & a kind of blase Protestant Christianity oozing over everything & blessing the sexual promiscuities that add up over 120 novels or so is out on the golf course in a foursome with Jorie Graham, Joyce Carol Oates & David Denham. Denham & Oates take up the cudgels against Updike & Graham. Miss Graham herself is somewhat stooped from her attempted & failed prayer bouts with The Deity over the past dozen years that she has religiously documented in her poems. Updike sees a real challenge to his enormous sexual appetites here---a relatively young lady in her early 50's with reasonable good looks & quite a bit of local prestige. A Harvard girl & darling of Helen Vendler's and someone devoted to the pursuit of God and she 'doesn't care who knows it' in the immortal words of Raymond Chandler. It just turns Updike into a tiny little melting meat ball on that roaring green golf course-----with of course Editor in Chief Denham & his sidekick Oates pounding the links from the other direction. This is Classic for Updike whose verbiage is almost like Bible Commentaries-----Endless, innocuous and finally, tedious. Not to worry. Joyce C. Oates has been sending off emails to friends of friends of friends of friends of current Members of The Nobel Prize Committee for several years now and she is screaming inside for that final Ultimate Recognition so she can spend the rest of her years scribbling her Memoirs which she hopes will exceed the Fourteen Labors of Hercules. She added a couple just to give herself incentive to do something Ambitious, Homeric, and to make us forever bury the the swollen memories we have of James Joyce & Marcel Proust. Mr. Denham of course is merely watching this whole serenade of intellectual & esthetic & theological violence while he tees up or lines up his putts. He promises to publish all three reports of these stalwarts separately & unexpurgatedly in successive issues of The New Yorker come autumn or come Hell or high water. I don't read The New Yorker any more so I won't be writing the reviews on the golf course dilemmas of The New Yorker Magazine.
RLG copyright 2006
posted by rlg at 12:44 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home