La literature

When I was at work yesterday, I saw on one of the TVs that John Updike had died. Even though it was interesting to listen to his interview on the radio today, I was beginning to feel so depressed or oppressed or something because everything he talked about was all about these old white guy writers. Of course, I like a lot of old white guy writers. But my liking them has thus far not cured me of being sensitive to that. And I remembered how in another class I T.A.ed for, the majority of the class complained that they hated the book The Song of The Water Saints, as opposed to, say, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, which everyone said the professor had been just great at teaching the semester before. The other T.A.s didn't seem to like it much, either. One guy (they were all guys) admitted to me that it made him feel "emotionally stressed out." As for the students, the character in Water Saints that they seemed to dislike the least was the most Americanized, modern character, so in my sections, I brought in other stories, like "How to..." from Drown, and the section about the girl writing a speech about Walt Whitman from How the Garcia Girls... and showed a segment from the (then more recently released) movie In the Time of the Butterflies. And I thought that was fun, but in some ways, it didn't change much. One student disliked Water Saints so much that he flat out refused to write a paper about it, even though it hurt his grade. (He also disliked Graciela for being "messy and unkempt" and also felt the need to tell me, apropos of nothing, that he "had" to hate Palestinians because he was Jewish. A girl from the D.R. wrote her paper on how Graciela got sick as punishment for not accepting Jesus as her savior. Poor Graciela got quite a beating.) Anyways, I knew I couldn't let those still-existent patriarchal canon norms make me feel too much like the title of a chick-lit book one of my friends is reading. And that I had to get out of that feeling. That's when, in response to the interviewer asking him if it was hard to write sex scenes, because he'd described himself as a "priggish, shy" young man, John Updike replied that it wasn't, because it's precisely what a "priggish, shy" person would do. I felt relief; I laughed; that was funny.