Revisiting the Past

Ten days after I checked it out of the library, I finally inserted disc 1 of Rabbit Redux into the Matrix's CD player. Guess I'll have to listen to the book while cleaning windows and doing other household chores if I expect to finish it in 2 1/2 weeks.

Didn't take me long to be dazzled again. On the first page, Updike distills 10 years of urban renewal in 55 words.

The city, attempting to revive its dying downtown, has torn away blocks of buildings to create parking lots, so that a desolate openness, weedy and rubbled, spills through the once-packed streets, exposing church facades never seen from a distance and generating new perspectives of rear entryways and half-alleys and intensifying the cruel breadth of the light.

My Favorite Updike Sentence

Rabbit Angstrom and Charlie Stavros share a rambling conversation on a slow afternoon at Springer Motors.

"It's like wood," Harry says, groping back through history, which is a tinted fog to him, marked off in centuries like a football field, with a few dates -- 1066, 1776 -- pinpointed and a few faces -- George Washington, Hitler -- hanging along the sidelines, not cheering. [Rabbit is Rich, p. 12]

John Updike, 1932-2009

The Great American Novel X 4

And I can't even give him a proper sendoff.

I had planned to listen to Wolfman Kadinsky's excellent reading of these 4 books -- consider it, in this case, the world's longest homily -- but his voice is heard only on the cassette tape version.

Then I checked LINKcat and discovered, to my great horror, that the Meadowridge branch of the Madison Public Library has the only copy on CD. Worse, it's on order, and, worst, someone else is ahead of me on the holds list. There's more. The CD version has a different reader: Arthur Morey. (Wasn't he a dancer?) ;-)

What just became a sad day has now devolved into a sadder day.