“All Trees Are Oak Trees. .”
1 First delivered in 2003 at my alma mater, this talk was published the following year in Poets & Writers Magazine.
2 Already quoted in the preceding essay, “The Relevance of Irrelevance.”
The Inkstained Thumb
1 Cincinnati: Writers Digest Press, 2006.
I.
1 Ed. Molly McQuade (Louisville, KY: Sarabande Books, 2009).
2 “We are the stories that we tell ourselves and others about who we are,” declares Dennett in his treatise Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1991).
“In the Beginning, Once Upon a Time, It Was a Dark and Stormy Night”
1 More on Ms. Scheherazade in the following essay, “The Morning After.”
2 For more on Genesis, see “‘In The Beginning,’” supra.
3 And for more on this famous dictum of Horace’s, see “Incremental Perturbation,” also supra.
The Morning After
1 See the essay “Don’t Count On It: A Note on the Number of The 1001 Nights,” in The Friday Book.
It Can Be Arranged
1 Some decades later, when I returned to Hopkins as a professor and checked my old library-stack haunts, I was relieved to find that some scoundrel had stolen that thesis: Its title refers to the poisoned garment that killed Heracles.
2 Boston: Little, Brown & Co, 1995.
Introduction to Not-Knowing
1 The first, “The Thinking Man’s Minimalist: Honoring Barthelme,” appeared in The New York Times Book Review of September 3, 1989, just a few weeks after his death; the latest—“By Barthelme Beguiled,” introducing two previously unpublished DB stories — in the October 2007 inaugural issue of the new Hopkins Review.
2 Not-Knowing, ed. Kim Herzinger (New York: Random House, 1997).
3 Some other Usual Suspects were Robert Coover, William Gaddis, William H. Gass, John Hawkes, and Thomas Pynchon.
4 For my own take on this subject, see the essay “Historical Fiction, Fictitious History, and Chesapeake Bay Blue Crabs, or, About Aboutness,” in The Friday Book.
The Passion Artist
1 NYTBR, June 21, 1998.
2 New York: New Directions, 1984.
3 From MacLeish’s poem “Not Marble Nor the Gilded Monuments”:
. . men shall remember your name as long
As lips move or breath is spent or the iron of English
Rings from a tongue. .
The Accidental Mentor
1 Leslie Fiedler and American Culture, ed. Kellman & Malin (U. Delaware Press, 2003).
2 True at the time: Fiedler died in Buffalo, NY, on January 29, 2003.
3 Cited earlier in this volume, in “The State of the Art,” and happily still an overstatement. See my essay “Inconclusion: The Novel in the Next Century,” in Further Fridays.
4 Subtitled Class Culture and Mass Society (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982).
“As Sinuous and Tough as Ivy”
1 First published in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 2004.
The Last Introduction
1 As of 10/04/88, when this introduction was first delivered. Two more volumes were to come: the novel Closing Time in 1994 and the memoir Now and Then in 1998.
The Judge’s Jokes
1 First published in The American Scholar 76:2, Spring 2007.
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Not really ‘final’ after alclass="underline" In 2011 we were delighted to receive a just-published copy of Updike’s essay-collection called Higher Gossip—not least of its pleasures the sprightly cover photo of the author by Irving Penn.