"I feel so used...so unsatisfied"

Published in 1968, John Updike’s brilliant novel, Couples, was no doubt a shock to a country that was doing its best to keep sexual taboos under the table as much as possible, especially with the “swinging ‘60s” hitting their full stride. Updike’s brutally honest, sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking look at the sexual behaviour of a small town – that really could be Anytown, U.S.A. – spent nine months on the New York Times Bestseller List (a number that couldn’t be more fitting) and caused an uproar in the country.
The novel’s focus is on Piet Hanema, a thirty-something living with his wife and two daughters in the east-coast town of Tarbox. The pair is a part of a group of about a half-dozen couples who get together on a regular basis – being the town’s upper-class – and have their own little club running. Updike then takes the reader underneath the surface of theses facades, where the gossip about who is sleeping with who turns out to be true, more often than not, and where couples trade partners like square dancers.
The explicit descriptions of sex is probably what caused such criticism of the book, but never before – and rarely since – has a novel tackled American sexuality in such an honest way. Every base gets covered, from marital to extramarital sex, from sodomy to masturbation, and childbirth and abortion. Almost anything that sex touches on, so does the novel. It’s not all pretty – nor is it meant to be – but it’s honest, and is always the case with Updike, honesty – no matter how ugly – is of the utmost importance.
Fans of Updike’s famous “Rabbit” series will see a lot of Robert Angstrom in Piet Hanema, but the characters that he populates Tarbox with are both unique and familiar at the same time. In true Updike fashion, the action is all personal, with no big blowouts – on the external level – but instead quiet loss and desperation.
For a study of American sexuality – in fiction form, mind you – you’re not going to get a better window into the American viewpoint than Couples. It may make you feel a bit soiled at the end, but hell if that’s not the point.

Let Me Tell You What It Is To Write - An Introduction

"Let me tell you what a writer is. A writer takes comprehensive views, holds large convictions, makes wide generalizations. A writer's not English, Mexican, or American. A writer's not a woman nor a man. A writer's not Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Muslim, nor snake worshipper. To local standards of right and wrong a writer's civilly indifferent. In the virtues, a writer's concerned only with general expediency. A writer doesn't waste time focusing on fixed moral principles that aren't yet before the court of conscience. Happiness discloses itself to a writer as the end and purpose of life, and art and love are the only means to a writer's happiness. A writer is free of all doctrines, theories, etiquettes, and politics. To a writer, a continent doesn't seem long, nor a century wide. And a writer has ever present consciousness that this is a world of...fools and rogues, blind with superstition, tormented with envy, consumed with vanity, selfish, false, cruel, cursed with illusions, and frothing mad." – Ambrose Bierce

My name is Clarke Reader, and I am a writer. Or, at least, I want to be one.

I’ve wanted to be one for as long as I can remember; I can recall with the utmost clarity the joy I first took from books when my father read them to me as a young man. I have a particularly fond remembrance for the evenings he spent reading me J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Since then, Tolkien has become my favourite author - and a completely unappreciated one in most literary circles, which I’m bound to rail against at some point…repeatedly – for a myriad of reasons, one being that through him I fell in love with literature. As I grew up my tastes matured quicker than my body – I remember being in elementary school and slogging through London with Charles Dickens, in junior high gliding along with Jack London and cursing the phonies with J.D. Salinger. In high school, my literary ambitions reached – for the first time – their fullest outlet, as I dove into Hemingway, Rand, Goethe, Updike, Mongham, and Camus. Since high school – having just graduated college two weeks ago – I’ve delved into Russian, Spanish and African literature, with a venture or two into the Far East. I collect books with a passion, and to any who point out the existence of libraries – for which I am very grateful – I give John Updike’s essay, “A Case for Books” on why I still buy them.

I give this all as an introduction because, in large part, I define myself through what I’ve read, seen and listened to. More often than not, I can summarize a situation or feeling I have through someone else’s words than my own. For example, here would be a great place to quote John Cusack’s Rob Gordon in High Fidelity when he says, “…what really matters is what you like, not what you are like... Books, records, films -- these things matter. Call me shallow but it's the fuckin' truth.” And so it is. In this blog, I’ll be just as likely to write about literature, music and films as I will be to write about what’s going on in my life, or any small forays I make into fiction.

Quoting Tolkien – my literary hero – when he wrote that, “I don't tick. I am not a machine. (If I did tick, I should have no views on it, and you had better ask the winder)” is all I have to say on what made me the kind of person I am, or any one of those cliché, ridiculous questions that are often tried to clear up in any introduction. Any who read this will learn about me in the way that one really gets to know another person: through hints dropped in discussions about things they are passionate about, and through the occasional story from my life. Information I will give here and now – aside from my literary ambitions, my obsession with pop-culture and the fact that I just graduated college, which have already been mentioned – is that I live in the great state of Colorado and am engaged to a woman I am madly in love with. I’m being deliberately vague here for, in accordance with the quotation that began this entry, a writer is no one thing, but embraces everything. Read along to pick up any other details about me.

And at the end, as is so often the case, we return to the beginning. I want to be a writer, and it is to that end that I am beginning this blog. You have to love writing and do it every day to be any good at it, and that is my full intention. I end with a quote from Jorge Luis Borges on the writing lifestyle: “A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer - to be living a kind of double life.”

Thank you, and welcome…