I remember reading a journal, thinking, “If I read the word ‘tendril’ one more time, I’m going to jump out of this window.” Luckily, I was outside. …more

The eternal struggle between a man and his plumbing.

Sometimes I like to make myself depressed by reading other writers named Jonathan who are better than me. Lately it’s been a lot of fun/shame, what with Lethem and Franzen on the scene, not to mention the immortal Swift. But Jonathan Ames is different. He’s better than me in a way that doesn’t paralyze me. …more

For a filmmaker, the loss of an eye can be…well, an opportunity. At least that’s how this guy sees it, with his one working eye. As for the other, he’s having it replaced with a prosthetic, in which will be housed a tiny, battery-operated video camera. It’ll be on all the time, and everything it sees will be recorded.

So here we are again on that frontier between really cool and really creepy, with all sorts of journalistic, cinematic, legal and philosophical implications. …more

The hero of Rodes Fishburne’s first novel, Going to See the Elephant, comes to San Francisco with only a trunk full of first-edition19^th-century novels and an equally heavy load of gumption. …more

Mark Oppenheimer’s essay, “Why Everyone Used to Read Updike,” from five years ago, in which it occurs to him that “those frequent short stories that grab New Yorker space from younger, fresher voices, and those novels appearing at regular intervals, are not read by anyone I know.”

A much older appreciation from Joyce Carol Oates: Updike’s genius, she begins, “is best excited by the lyric possibilities of tragic events that, failing to justify themselves as tragedy, turn unaccountably into comedies.”

Updike’s rules for reviewing, discussed and debated on the blog of the National Book Critics Circle.

And don’t miss the UK Guardian’s John Updike: A Life in Pictures.

With, attached, a remembrance from Martin Amis, who calls Updike “congenitally unembarrassable,” but figures it’s in a good way.

The New Yorker gathers and posts remembrances.

And Todd Gitlin takes on his failures of nerve: “Something went still and cold in him in the face of big tragedy, and it was this, I think, that keeps him out of the company of the American indispensables.”