So what? Do we split off a Great Books thread or a book club thread?

I think the book club suggestion was born of but not a solution to today's discussion.

It's clearly a preference for the easy and familiar over the difficult and challenging, and it's a negation of the whole point of having Great Books in the first place. I call that anti-intellectualism.

I don't see it as anti-intellectualism. There's a common denominator in thread for lighter reads, because they're more likely to be read by more people. We don't all spend all our free time reading the Great Novels.

I think my structural point stands, Hayden. The tone of the thread has a lot less to do with anti-intellectualism than it does with the focus of the community. This is pop culture community, not a literary criticism community. We may use some or many of those tools to dissect Buffy and Angel, but not everyone has access or inclination to do the same with the same novels at the same time. A common love of Melville, or even a willingness to spend a lot of time with 19th C American lit, isn't what draws us together.

And, frankly, the fact that some residents of the thread don't like Joyce or Melville, and said so, doesn't mean you can tar everyone with the same brush. What do you say to me, when I say I read Moby Dick and while I didn't much like it, I respect its place in the canon?

I'm hoping you're not trying to be patronizing and offensive to people you know are articulate, thoughtful, and incisive. But accusations of anti-intellectualism to this crowd, in particular, strike me as way off base.

Coming painfully late to all this, but it seems like there are two things going on: a lot of thoughtful discussion, and a lot of riding hobby horses around and around in tight little circles. FWIW, I don't think even Hec and hayden at their wildest are advocating the kind of lit crit Deb loathes and fears; I haven't seen anyone advocating dissection and dismemberment of the texts or submitting their authors to postmortem psychoanalysis. Most of the critical thinking people have talked about wanting is the kind that springs from that visceral place; it just goes beyond the love of the work itself to wanting to eat the author's spicy brain and explain to everyone else exactly why s/he is such a nummy treat and why nonreaders are missing out on the fourteen-course banquet of a lifetime.

I'd have to go back and dig through the stacks of my college books now sitting in my dad's back bedroom closet to give exact cites, but I know I'm not pulling this out of my ass; I know there are writers and critics out there who critique and explain and diagram out of love and enthusiasm. The school of criticism Deb describes is indeed murderous and blasphemous and intellectually masturbatory, but it's a new little thing. There are centuries of critical thought that's wildly alive.

I can't even count the number of writers I'd never have known about if I hadn't come across critical essays on them by writers I respected (and sometimes by them on writers I respected). CS Lewis introduced me to Chesterton and Charles Williams and George Macdonald; Auden's loving introduction to one of Macdonald's fantasy novels led me to his poetry. Chesterton made me pick up Robert Louis Stevenson. Elizabeth Gaskell's writing on the author of my private wildly unobjective flinty woobie Jane Eyre made me pounce on her own novels when they were assigned me in college with a cry not of, "Novels of social justice!" but of "Hey, a friend of a friend!" Dorothy Sayers gave me Dante; Flannery O'Connor gave me Walker Percy; Elizabeth Bishop gave me Robert Lowell and Marianne Moore. Thomas Merton has convinced me that I need to read Boris Pasternak before I die (and God, how I've tried--four passes at Zhivago so far, none successful, but I live in hope).

t /mememe wankery

FWIW, I'm in Heather's corner, and not far down the hall from hayden, on this: to me it seems that there's a lot of literary love in this thread, but not often a lot of serious discussion about that love. And I really kind of groove on that discussion. I miss school, miss college and even high school, something fierce. I miss being able to not just read something, but spend hours talking about it. Maybe I was just freakishly lucky, but I don't remember it ever diminishing my experience of the books. Even the ones I loved, even the ones I loved in the face of someone else's hatred or contempt--I was slow and dull enough that often I didn't know exactly what it was that I loved until I had to defend it, and that defense never killed my love, just clarified and deepened it. Sometimes I didn't even know what the fuck I thought about a book at all until I'd sat locked in the library tower with fourteen other people hashing it out over three exhausting hours. And that utterly rocked. And I miss it and want it back, and it stings a little when that experience is conflated with the truly contemptible dismissive pseudo-Freudian autopsy school of criticism.

Ah, fuck, I don't even know what I'm saying anymore.

Wolfram, that's interesting. Although I think having some commonalities in reference are important, no single canon should be, well, canonized.

There is no one canon, and whatever books are considered important today should be reconsidered tomorrow.

I rarely identify with specifically with a character. I'll admit I'm not rational about Little Women or the Lord Peter Wimsey books, because I am Jo and I am Harriet Vane and none of you people can have them. I have had the occasional crush on a character. I have one friend whom I suspect of remaining single because no man has ever measured up to Francis Crawford of Lymond and another who's still looking for Travis McGee. Hell, I may still be looking for Travis McGee. Generally speaking, though, I love books for the language, or believable characters, or for speaking what seems to be some essential truth, although sometimes I just love them for the whiz-bang action.

How can JZ be so awesome? I do not understand it.

I have not read Moby Dick, I have no opinion on it except. "Oooh! Big fish!"

A whale is a mammal, dear.

runs to dinner

If you come in here and say "I just re-read Moby Dick, and I forgot how much I loved the encyclopedic attention to detail," and then I said "Yuccch! I read M-D, and I didn't like it at all!" -- how is that opting for the easy and familiar over the difficult and challenging? After all, I *read* the book. How is that taking the easy way out?

It's not, Steph. You didn't like it, fine. You said why. In fact, if things had gone down like up above, I'd have followed up with the same question I started with, which is "What's not to love?"

Honestly, hayden, I went back and looked at the start of the M-D discussion, and it pretty much DID go down like up above. Only I mentioned that I don't like M-D before you mentioned that you liked it. That's it. I didn't say that I disliked M-D and therefore anyone who likes it is a fool and it should never be in the canon and young minds are being ruined by it.

All I said was that I don't like it. Where you derive anti-intellectual from that -- and it was in the same post that you pointed out what you love about M-D that you also said this thread tends toward anti-intellectua -- is beyond me.

I thought the discussion was good, and interesting, and lively.

Sometimes I didn't even know what the fuck I thought about a book at all until I'd sat locked in the library tower with fourteen other people hashing it out over three exhausting hours. And that utterly rocked.

How interesting. I seem to be JZ.

Dear P-C's Mom,

P-C married a white Buddhist chick who makes hamburgers three times a day. He was afeared to tell you that she is having a baby and he's flunked out of school.

Merry Christmas!

Aimee

I wonder if part of the reason I get so emotional whenever this discussion comes up is I somehow managed to make it well into my late 20's before I ever realized there were people out there who dismissed whole genres and the people who read them. Since I'm only in my early 30's, I haven't quite gotten past my, "What? How can you say such a thing? And don't you dare doubt the spiciness of my brains!" reaction.