A Canon Junkie Rebuts

Posted on August 2, 2003 in Crosstalk

I’m what Robert Brady calls “a canon flunkie” and I make no apologies for my taste in literature. I read Melville and Hawthorne. I like old poems by the likes of Donne. I was fascinated when my literature professor showed us the intricate metrics of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. And I don’t mind one bit that Robert likes Raymond Chandler.

I do mind his playing off his love of Raymond Chandler against my love of other books by the use of the term “canon flunkie”. He can read Chandler and if people are still reading Chandler in a hundred years, that’s fine. One group of readers is just as much allowed to be mystified by Chandler’s popularity as another is mystified by the place and the purpose of the whaling chapters in Melville’s Moby Dick. So why the epithets? Why the patronizing attitude? I’m not slapping Robert’s hand saying “don’t read that”, but I’m reading him as insisting that I can’t possibly like the canon stuff!

Robert, respect diversity. I like Melville. Stop speaking of my fondness for Moby Dick as if it were a disease that should be purged from the body politic.