Sherry Chandler

Over the last several years, I’ve enjoyed the moral outrage of Jesse Kornbluth’s writing at the beliefnet blog swami uptown. Yesterday, Jesse wrote his final post, Quittin Time, and he had, as always, one more tidbit of wisdom:

I showed up, hoping to explore what committed Buddhism would look like in the millennium–but once I saw what was happening to my country, I had to change focus. You can’t have a spiritual conversation in a language that’s debased. Ideas and words must match.

But the White House and the Religious Right have declared war against language and ideas…

Here’s hoping we all make it through, safe and healthy and sane. And loved, loved more than we know, by a God we can dimly perceive. That, yes, most of all. Hugs. Amen.

one paragraph at a time. Following a link trail from Sour Duck, I found this commentary on John Updike by A White Bear:

Why does The New Yorker force me to read John Updike? Everyone is aware that he is a complete tool, right? That his prose has always been flaccid, misogynistic, and cliché…

Hating Updike is such an obvious thing for a young, smart woman to do that DF Wallace recently devoted a long essay to discovering why intelligent, under-50 (especially female) readers hate him so much. It’s not just that we dislike his writing. I happen not to like Steinbeck or Rushdie, and I think Marquez is overrated. No big whoop. I can’t hate Marquez because at least he does some things that are innovative. … Unlike other misogynistic writers, who don’t even seem to realize how clueless and patronizing they are, Updike seems to say, “I’m a douchebag! I just admitted that I am a douchebag, so even if you were to call me a douchebag, I would say, ‘I just said I’m a douchebag,’ so don’t even bother! Isn’t my self-awareness cute?”

I am so relieved to have found this piece. Not being under 50 and having been educated at a time when the white male canon was all that could be called English literature, I’ve always felt slightly apologetic about not liking Updike. So now I’ve found that I was just ahead of the curve.

I’m not big on Steinbeck, either, though I admire the passage in The Grapes of Wrath about the turtle crossing the road. It’s a big novel and that passage is a few paragraphs. And I haven’t managed to read Rushdie, though I admire his courage.

Feminist feeling isn’t really behind my distaste (maybe subliminally). The writing just bores me. I can’t last more than a page and a half.

Though I will add in my own defense that even the NYer has never managed to force me to read Updike.