The canon is big. Very big. Nobody, even Harold Bloom, loves all of it.

Many of us, me included, grew up with Great Books, which you had to read, and Good Books, which you wanted to read.

Then we became free agents and started to read anything we wanted. And we discovered that some of the Great Books were actually Good Books, and we said "Wow! Look at that Dickens! What a page-turner!" And some of us said "Good heavens, James Joyce speaks to my innter soul!" And others of us said "what IS with this Madame Bovary person, and can I have five minutes with her and a tire iron?"

That's not anti-intellectual. That's exploring the canon, and it's a good thing.

I can't imagine that I'll ever read Pilgrim's Progress again. It's part of the Canon. It doesn't speak to my condition. I'm off to find something that does. That hardly makes me a non-reader or a non-intellectual.

But it's not an intellectual failure to read all of Moby Dick and not like it. It's personal taste.

I read MD, and I didn't like it. The digressions annoyed me no end -- which is also my problem with Dostoevsky.

I may try reading it again to see if there's a fine novella lurking in there. I suspect there is.

And the further back you're going, the more I disagree.

Right, and on two axes. #1, the older stuff is, the more stuff has been lost. The Iliad might be the pissant twiddlings of an adolescent twerp next to Amazing Poem of Epicness And Beauty, but the Iliad is extant and APEB is not.

#2, canon does change. A lot. Writers slide into the oblivion of history's dustbin, and then, sometiems championed by a fellow writer (even possibly a critic!), leap back to life when the socio-cultural circumstances permit.

There's an excellent essay called "A Voice From The Attic" by Robertson Davies in the collection of the same name. He talks about the literary canon as a toybox. Authors are played with awhile, put into the toybox, dragged out of the toybox, and put in again. That doesn't change the quality of the work. Jane Austen is still Jane Austen whether she's a forgotten girly novelist or the Great Author Of Our Times. Waverly used to be an obligatory novel; now it's read only by people who are writing papers on Scott.

What matters is whether Kipling speaks to my condition (he does, he does, how he does), not whether he's currently considered Great.

I've never read "Moby DicK"...honestly, I'm not sure I would care for it. But maybe I'm missing something. Aimee, maybe you would like the comedies more? I do....in terms of pleasure and enjoyment. I have a massive soft spot for comedy and humor in general, though.

I recently read a version of Beauty and the Beast, and suddenly recognized that I was reading a story of Stockholm Syndrome.

See, I love that. But I did it the opposite way around - when I first heard the term Stockholm Syndrome, I thought, huh, why is this reminding me of something, and what is it reminding me of? And Beauty and the Beast popped into my head.

Because I'd read the story years earlier (and for some reason, it's inextricably knotted up in my head with Aubrey Beardsley), the realisation that whoa, that's what was going on there along with the fairytale aspectt fo the thing, didn't ruin the story for me. It just illustrated the syndrome.

Back to pass pages. I'm freaking, slightly - they arrived today and they need them back Tuesday and Monday is a federal holiday. GAH.

Aimee, maybe you would like the comedies more? I do....in terms of pleasure and enjoyment. I have a massive soft spot for comedy and humor in general, though.

I have to say that I did enjoy seeing "Much Ado..." more than reading it. And "The Taming of the Shrew" is fun, as long as it's Cybil Shepard and Bruce Willis.

Back to pass pages. I'm freaking, slightly - they arrived today and they need them back Tuesday and Monday is a federal holiday. GAH.

tell 'em that they'll get them Wednesday and like it. They've likely forgotten that Monday is a holiday.

I recently read a version of Beauty and the Beast, and suddenly recognized that I was reading a story of Stockholm Syndrome.

See, I love that. But I did it the opposite way around - when I first heard the term Stockholm Syndrome, I thought, huh, why is this reminding me of something, and what is it reminding me of? And Beauty and the Beast popped into my head.

And this could get me going in a whole new Anne Sexton-ish tangent about fairy tales, and how they encode rules of behavior for little girls.

But I won't.

And "The Taming of the Shrew" is fun, as long as it's Cybil Shepard and Bruce Willis.

I actually liked it with Julia Stiles and hottie hot man Heath Ledger, too.