This is how I feel too. I'm not going to read a book because other people say I should, or to prove my intelligence to anyone. I'll read a book because I love it, it entertains, or it's the right time for me. If a book doesn't speak to me, "great work of literature" or not, I most likely won't be reading it anytime soon.
This is why I was the most-argued-with English Lit major of my college. I'd read 'em, because I had to, but I wouldn't bow down to them because they were 'canon'. I actually hated the idea of any canon at all, and I wanted to write a thesis on how, in the right hands,
Valley of the Dolls
could be as valuable a piece of literature as
Heart of Darkness.
Edited because I still can't spell. Maybe those professors were on to something. Dang.
I read Ulysses in graduate school in a modern Irish literature course. I enjoyed it, but it's hard to know if I would have read it on my own. It did leave me with one of my philosophies of life: "Sufficient onto the day is the newspaper thereof." The course mainly made me a huge fan of Yeats and John Millington Synge.
The course mainly made me a huge fan of Yeats and John Millington Synge.
For me, J.M. Synge, NSM, but Yeats, hell yes.
Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart.
How can you not love that? Okay, it's one line out of a 900 page book, but it's not the only great one. Honest.
It did leave me with one of my philosophies of life: "Sufficient onto the day is the newspaper thereof."
Would that be the newspaper Bloom wipes himself with?
Quietly he read, restraining himself, the first column and, yielding but resisting, began the second. Midway, his last resistance yielding, he allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading still patiently, that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone. Hope it's not too big bring on piles again. No, just right. So. Ah! Costive. One tabloid of cascara sagrada. Life might be so. It did not move or touch him but it was something quick and neat. Print anything now. Silly season. He read on, seated calm above his own rising smell. Neat certainly. Matcham often thinks of the masterstroke by which he won the laughing witch who now. Begins and ends morally. Hand in hand. Smart. He glanced back through what he had read and, while feeling his water flow quietly, he envied kindly Mr Beaufoy who had written it and received payment of three pounds, thirteen and six... He tore away half the prize story sharply and wiped himself with it. Then he girded up his trousers, braced and buttoned himself. He pulled back the jerky shaky door of the jakes and came forth from the gloom into the air.
Again I ask, how can you not love that?
If something's read,
and I don't know it,
Chances are,
it was by a poet.
Pretty easily, all told.
Oh come on, that's got to be the greatest literary poop of all time. The only contenders are Pantagruel wiping his ass with a live goose, Barth's
The Floating Opera
and the opening of Brecht's
Baal.
Though I must also note the scatalogical genius of the comic
Ed, The Happy Clown
