James Wolcott’s review of Updike’s The Widows of Eastwick summed up in one piece of advice: skip the first third of the book. Unlike Hemingway, Plath, Wolfe, et al., Updike refuses to put the pen down, and now “younger novelists have voiced disgruntlement with the solipsism and literary penis-wagging of Updike’s generation of privileged males.” Nothing I hate more than old men scooping up bylines and then penis-wagging at me.
Optimism! From The Elegant Variation: “When Good Things Happen to Good Presses.”
Art Spiegelman Is Not Arrogant.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novella The Yellow Wallpaper, written in 1890 (and later becoming a part of the feminist literary canon), is being reissued. Luckily, “unlike the narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman did not become a creeping lunatic, hidden away from the world in a top-floor bedroom.” And I can’t help but wonder: why are so many women in literature hidden away in top-floor bedrooms?
Dante’s Divine Comedy has gone interactive. Technology is the gateway to free will in Dante’s World, where you choose your own afterlife by clicking on “circles of Hell, terraces of Purgatory, spheres of Paradise.” This “integrated multimedia journey” combines “artistic images, textual commentary, and audio recordings” to guide you through your posthumous options. Like e-Virgil.
