You are involved in theater aren't you juliana? Most people I know who love Camino have either seen it or have staged-or thought about staging- it.

Precisely. I don't think I would enjoy it as much if I couldn't see it in my head. Same with Arthur Miller's After The Fall.

What canon can often do is give you the cultural context in which a work was created.

I do like knowing context, but I confess I've never thought of canon as providing same. Perhaps because that's not how it was taught to me.

erika, how far are you into Infinite Jest? Like I said, Z's been bugging me to give it another try, but I finally gave up. Of course, now that I'm halfway through Gravity's Rainbow and enjoying myself (if utterly confused at times), I may have to try it again.

I do like knowing context, but I confess I've never thought of canon as providing same.

Here's an example I am hip-deep into: Jane Austen read sir Walter Scott. We know that. She also had some things to say about the reading and believeing in romances in Sense and Sensibility, when the younger sister was all swooping emotions and drama, and NSM with the hardheadedness. So, until this week, I'd never read any Walter Scott and was only about 80% sure of what Austen meant when she referred to him in S&S.

It turns out that Scott was the template for eleven billion crap adventures in the medieval style, but knowing that he was a template was worthwhile.

Another example: Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre is in some ways a prototype for the hero of romance novels to this day. Except that Mr. Rochester also sang, was goofy, and said lots of mushy endearments, attributes that have since deserted your standard romance hero.

Aww, I wrote a whole paragraph on cultural literacy, and closed it out when I thought I heard my boss coming. I really don't feel like re-writing it, so I'll just say that a general context is useful.

But, and this is that crazy kid reader coming out of me, for many of my very favorite books, I don't need it. I'll use 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn' as an example, as it is my most favoritest book on the face of the planet. I don't need to know the political conditions of early 20th century Brooklyn to enjoy it (and indeed, I didn't when I read it at 12 years old). All I need to know is that there's a girl named Francie, and I'm going to learn all about her world. The author does all that work for me, and as Deb would say, all I've got to do is sit back and be told a story.

I always figured that canon existed largely to give the College-Educated Among Us a common frame of reference beyond Archie Bunker and Jim Carrey.

Yes, that's simplistic and somewhat flippant, but I also mean it.

I dream about it, or find myself wondering what the characters do ten years down the line.

I'll tell you -- there are some novels that are, by and large, accepted as mediocre writing that nonetheless make me wonder what the characters do 10 years down the line (Gone with the Wind, for instance). When the story rises above the mediocre writing, I have to admit that I'm impressed.

What canon can often do is give you the cultural context in which a work was created. Knowing that Pound edited Eliot's "The Wasteland" and reading Pound you can see his influence on that work, and how it was shaped.

In other words (and yes, I'm being partially flippant again), canon exists to make the nerds giddy when they make those connections.

No, really. I remember freshman year of college, taking an intro to music class, where we listened to the biggies from different eras (all the way back to Gregorian Chant, which was the grunge rock of its time, I imagine) and then reading Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

I was so excited that I got the bitter humor behind the reference in the play to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring that I ran into my friend's room, all excited about it. Then I had to explain it to her, but I didn't care. I had a great big nerd jones for more connections like that.

'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn' as an example, as it is my most favoritest book on the face of the planet.

t beams at Lilty

We truly are each other! It's one of my favorites, too. I have too many favorites to have a one true favorite, but I loves me some Betty Smith.

Except that Mr. Rochester also sang, was goofy, and said lots of mushy endearments, attributes that have since deserted your standard romance hero.

Also his penchant for chaining his first wife in the attic.

Hec, did you actually enjoy any of those writers? Did they tickle something, anything, other than the cerebral? Was there a kick in the soul for you, with one single book by any of those people?

Well, what's wrong with a cerebral tickle?

Aside from that notion, that's not all I get from my reading. It's not an exercise in mental masturbation, or lining up allegorical symbols into neat orderly rows.

eta: or getting Teppy's nerd joy of making connections.

I think that reading a good novel is the closest you can get to being inside somebody else's head. So it's not all about the narrative to me, but rather encountering an entirely different sensibility. It's seeing the world differently, and understanding people's motives differently, and noticing things that I wouldn't normally notice, and processing it all in a completely different way and coming to new conclusions.

If a writer is very intimately concerned with creating a character's interior landscape, and can take me there, that is very valuable to me, aside from the story being told. So yes, all of the writers I alluded to give me something more than a puzzle to cogitate on. And the more critically I can read them, the more I understand their intent, and their context (see, Nutty's point re: Walter Scott and Austen) the more closely I can follow the subtle turns of their prose.

Shakespeare's sonnets are another example where context is key. He was actively pissing on and destroying the rather dopey romantic cliches of his day. He was taking a very formulaic medium - something as rigid as a Harlequin romance - and investing it with almost perverse glee, self laceration, layered psychological insight and incredible language. That's exactly the context that generates a line like "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day."

And, Aimee, it's completely fine with me that you don't enjoy Shakespeare, but I will note that his nearest contemporary in spirit would probably be Eddie Izzard. Shakespeare can be difficult to penetrate because so much of his language is rooted in the folklore and politics and history and faux-science of his era. But that's not much different than Izzard's quick, witty allusions to our culture today. And Shakespeare, like Eddie, is bawdy, playful, light-footed, sexy, transgressive, polymorphously perverse.

Also Shakespeare's theater didn't really use sets. So much of Shakespeare's language is really storytelling to set the scene. And instead of dry exposition, he allows each character a particular sort of metaphoric schema that both defines that character and fills the language with imagery. Iago being one of the classic examples, where all of his references are bestial and debased.

I had a great big nerd jones for more connections like that.

I've gotta admit, I love moments like that. But I also like canon because it has made me go back and retry things that didn't work for me the first time. If professors who I happened to like hadn't kept telling me that F. Scott Fitzgerald was the best thing since bottled gin, I wouldn't have given The Great Gatsby a second try. And I'm very glad I did.

We truly are each other! It's one of my favorites, too. I have too many favorites to have a one true favorite, but I loves me some Betty Smith.

And, correct me if I'm wrong on this, but I believe Nilly commented that I must talk to you after I said I got trapped on my only day off this month because PBS had an Anne of Green Gables marathon on?

Frolics in field with Aimee.

eta: or getting Teppy's nerd joy of making connections.

Nerd joy rules.

But I also like canon because it has made me go back and retry things that didn't work for me the first time.

Really? I still flee screaming into the night from Faulkner, Melville (Bartelby excepted), and Willa Cather.