I'm one who has to listen to Shakespeare to "get it" properly. This is true 80% of the time with any poetry, and about 40% of the time where prose involves complex sentence structures.

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

Or, to make the connections at all. Reagan's speech about "being a city upon a hill"? It was one kind of speech if you didn't know that phrase came from the Puritans, and another if you did.

Same again, Dante's defensive cry in the Inferno: "I am not Aeneas; I am not Paul!" If you don't know that Aeneas and Paul both had a nice long anthropological look at Hell, then you are less in the way of understanding what the narrator in the Inferno is about to do. In fact, the narrator is visiting Hell because Aeneas and Paul have come before him -- he is their spiritual child in his crisis. (And guided by a parent-like Virgil.)

(Actually, Dante was such an incredible Western Canon name-dropper that he's really incomprehensible today without lots and lots of footnotes, and a passing knowledge of Greek and Roman mythology.)

Which is kinda helpful though in that you can read The Divine Comedy with all it's footnotes and have kind of a cliffs notes version of all the stuff that came before him.

Or, to make the connections at all.

Right! Like in The Simpsons, and I'm not even remotely kidding this time. It can be a fucking BRILLIANT show.

Two words that drove me away from Melville forever: Moby. Dick. I understand intellectually what he was doing with it, style-wise and theme-wise, but DAMN.

A couple friends of mine once had a website that let bookworms confess which classics they'd never been able to make it though, and why. Moby Dick was easily the most common book on that list, with the reason generally being something like "The catalogue of whales...the fucking catalogue of whales!"

I still flee screaming into the night from Faulkner,

Which is longer, a sentence or a page?

Try again, Mr. Faulkner.

Like in The Simpsons, and I'm not even remotely kidding this time. It can be a fucking BRILLIANT show.

They talk about that on the commentary tracks a lot -- how odd it is that their core audience (i.e., teenagers) is probably missing out on 90% of the jokes, and their core audience's parents (who would get the references) aren't watching because it's still percieved as a kids' show.

Hell, I consider myself decently educated, and I'll bet *I* miss about 50% of the cultural references that Groening et al. slip in.

Actually, Dante was such an incredible Western Canon name-dropper that he's really incomprehensible today without lots and lots of footnotes, and a passing knowledge of Greek and Roman mythology.

I love footnotes. Except in Shakespeare, because it muddles the flow for me. Okay, that's true of most poetry. Which is why I have both the annotated and the "clean" versions of The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid. As does Zach. Our poetry shelf looks like a repetitive Greco-Roman orgy of poetry.

But for prose? I love footnotes.

I hate them, now. Cause I'm reading IJ for the fourth fricking time. And I'm a little clever. That guy's rep must be...beyond reproach. Beyond beyond. Because if I showed anybody anything like that, they'd be like "You wanna do what? Have you been drinking? bwah ha ha.Good one."

The version of Ivanhoe I'm reading has only the notes of Scott himself -- 2 versions. (First as "Laurence Templeton", from the 1/e, and 2nd from when he re-published an edition in 1830.) I do wish it had more notes, because a lot of the medieval terms are unfamiliar, and I have only the vaguest, most conspiracy-theory-laden idea of what the Knights Templar actually were.