When I was a child, I was absolutely stupefied by my father’s ability to complete the New York Times Sunday crossword. Mind you, he was not a competitive puzzler, one of those types today who now bundle themselves off every end of February to the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, which, after 30 years at the Marriott Stamford in Connecticut, was held for the first time ever at the Brooklyn Bridge Marriott.

Puzzling as a sport was not a feature of my father’s love of the crossword. He enjoyed them thoroughly, but there was no fanaticism in his play, and thus neither stopwatches nor blasts of indignation at seemingly disingenuous clues or specious puns. He was a cruciverbalist—the technical moniker for the habitual crossword solver—in the most traditional of senses, at his leisure or on a lunch break. Moreover, he liked doing them in ink and all caps—both no-no’s according to Stanley Newman in his Cruciverbalism: A Crossword Fanatic’s Guide to Life in the Grid, a lovely little hardcover I picked up while combing the shelves of the Goodwill on Dixwell Avenue in Hamden.

Stanley Newman is the puzzle editor for New York Newsday and this short paean to the crossword, co-authored with Mark Lasswell, is a fascinating little contribution to puzzle lore that at an easily perused 160 pages is entirely worth reading by anyone who enjoys crosswords. Take me, for example. I like crossword puzzles, and even though I’m not nearly as capable as my father, I relish the qualities of its particular type of challenge: the puns and the trivia, the small victories and epiphanies in lateral thinking that spring from that part of your unconscious where facts you thought lost still roost .

Newman covers several topics in his little tome: how he went from bond businessman to crossword puzzle guru; the history of the crossword (which is how publishing giant Simon & Schuster made its first real money); the ways in which puzzle editors and constructors go about the daily grind of producing their wares; some general principles for solving puzzles; and sundry other matters. But what caught my interest were the very first pages, where he holds forth on his outright distaste for New York Times puzzle editor Eugene T. Maleska and reviews the war he started with him and the New York Times over the state of the crossword.

This is no doubt where his co-author came in, suggesting, “Look, if we’re going to hook general readers first and fans second, let’s begin with a pie fight, because everyone loves a pie fight.” And I must admit, I do like pie fights, especially when they take on bathetic proportions, making mountains of molehills, the truest sign of passion.

When Newman was a bond trader, he started a newsletter about the crossword business in which, among other things, he regularly took to task Maleska’s penchant for publishing puzzles that depended on overly obscure geographical locations, an unhealthy interest in opera, an utter distaste for popular culture, and a schoolmarmish predilection for Latin phrases (Maleska had been a Latin teacher before replacing the much-beloved Will Weng as the crossword puzzle editor for the New York Times). Newman was convinced that Maleska’s role doubly damaged the state of the crossword: for puzzle solvers, his stiffness dampened the interest of the next generation, while for constructors his perch at the Gray Lady overshadowed the innovativeness of their work at other papers. In brief, Maleska was giving cruciverbalism a bad name.

And yet whatever pleasures pie fights may present, what most endeared this reader to Newman’s tale is his belief—and demonstration by personal example—that old dogs can learn new tricks. Unlike many crossword enthusiasts, who tend to start young, either around high school or college, Newman himself became a crossword champion in his 30s! Before then he was not much better than your occasional cruciverbalist. But, as he suggests, with a little dedication and some zeal, it is possible for anyone—and he is emphatic about that anyone!—to become good at doing crosswords, regardless of age. And, that, in itself, sheds some light on the beauty of a book that illustrates how the ability to excel at some cerebral or artistic passion does not necessarily diminish with time. Think Grandma Moses with a paintbrush or Immanuel Kant publishing his first book at the age of 50!

I was in Washington, D.C., over the weekend, and I went into Bridge Street Books, located nowhere near Bridge Street, from what I could tell. It was on Pennsylvania Ave., off M Street, the main thoroughfare of Georgetown. The proprietor, who sat to the left, immediately upon the entrance, sitting between a two-sided counter, a wall of books, and the front window facing the street, was not particularly friendly (that seems to be a species of booksellers, deeply in love with books but not much for customers—it seems a unique form of vocational torture). When I asked him what was upstairs, for I had noticed a staircase, he said, “More books.” When I asked him what particular sections were kept upstairs, he impatiently ran off a list for me (“fiction, psychology, sports” — something like that), but clearly wasn’t keen to do it. I had hoped he might enjoy telling me about the vast selection in his store; he clearly hoped I’d have the decency to leave him be and go look for myself.

When I did go look, I discovered that his was one of the best-curated selections of any bookstore I’d ever seen. Put another way: he’s a splendid buyer. There were a dozen books I’d seen reviewed over the past six months but had never seen in a store; there were even more books, including some by famous or prestigious authors, that I had not seen reviewed, but which he had ordered from publishers’ catalogues. He (or his buyer) quite simply had a terrific eye. The store was very, very well stocked, with reasonable quantity but unmatched quality.

It wasn’t just that he had good taste, but also variegated and eccentric taste. This clearly was not a scholarly bookstore, although there were many fine books from scholarly presses. Nor did it suffer from the book-clubby quality of so many independent bookstores, the proprietors of which seem to buy books, primarily “literary fiction,” with the predictable tastes of local book-clubbers in mind. (This tic results in shelf after shelf of Barbara Kingsolver.) And he was not a snob: there was no shortage of beach reads or what in Washington might be called Metro reads.

I ended up buying from his Architecture section a book I had never seen before, even as my current interests mean that I always look in a store’s Architecture section. It’s called Blubberland: The Dangers of Happiness, and it’s by an Australian critic named Elizabeth Farrelly. I’m nearly done with the book now, and while in some ways it is familiar—her impatience with suburban sprawl will be familiar to readers of Philip Langdon, Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Bill McKibben, David Owen, and many others—she has a deeply philosophical bent; her references range from Milan Kundera (on kitsch) to Richard Sennett (on the modern tension between our interior and exterior selves) to Aristotle, happiness psychologist Martin Seligman, and weirdo supremo Alvin Toffler. She misspells Nietzsche, but we all do sometimes; less forgivable is her misspelling of Lemony Snicket. The book is spellbinding, and I am grateful that I went browsing in a store that had it.

In other news, my friend Jonathan now has a Kindle; he is the first of my friends whose literary flame has been Kindled. He loves it, so far. From the public domain he has downloaded Hume and Freud; from the private domain, Gladwell and Michael Lewis. Jonathan said it even came with a little beach tent to keep sand out. Party on, my dear friend, party on.

Farrah Fawcett is dead. Let those of us who were young in the seventies observe a moment of silence. And noting this journal’s preoccupation with hair (vide Oppenheimer posting, “We Partied Like It’s 2009,” May 18, 2009) and my own hair being of “urban legend” (ibid), I could not let this occasion pass without paying personal tribute to the “Farrah-do.”

Growing up in Hamden during the seventies, I sported the Farrah-do, first at Sleeping Giant Junior High (now a condominium complex) and then at Hamden High School. I’m convinced that it was this hairstyle that saved me from social suicide, helped bridge the internal “town versus gown” issues I had as a Yale faculty brat at my school, and finally, paved the way for my college years at Harvard.

A lot from a single hairdo, I know. But what a ‘do. Tousled, cascading layers. A sexy, casual, windswept, just-got-out-of-bed look. Farrah smiled down at us from that poster with that mane. And every girl worth her salt had to have that ‘do. For me, a Chinese girl with hair and parents as straight as a grove of bamboo stalks, achieving that look was no easy feat.

First, I first had to convince my mother — who ascribed to the general zero-sum notion that any attention I paid to my looks took away from my attention to my studies — to let me have a perm. She only relented on Rave, a home perm that gave soft loose curls. Then, we found an inexpensive hair cutter in to give me the actual layered haircut, which I had to style to perfection each day. With my own allowance, I bought a hairdryer, a curling iron and a set of hot rollers. After trial, error and much practice, I learned the hot rollers worked best on me. So, every day before leaving at 7:20 a.m. to catch the school bus, I plugged in hot rollers and did my hair: three medium-sized rollers for the fluffy top and two wings, and three large rollers for the back. If I had time, I added the flip with a small-barrelled curling iron.

The only other Asian girl in my class, Elly Tanaka, also a Yale faculty brat, kept her hair straight. She liked to flip it around a bit. Shiny and black, it looked okay, but having the Farrah-do was a universal ice-breaker, an automatic “I’m-okay-you’re-okay-because-we-share-a-hairstyle” with the non-faculty brat set at my school. Janet Gallo, the most popular girl in our junior high, also sported the Farrah-do, which she achieved each morning by using a blow-dryer and round hairbrush (we discussed this one day).

There was no mirror for Asian women yet in the public media. No Gong Li, no Sandra Oh, no Ziyi Zhang. The only person I saw who looked remotely like me on television was Mrs. Livingston from “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father.” So, for me to emulate Farrah Fawcett was just as far-fetched as any other role model.

At first my parents fought me, preferring that I try to get in a half hour of piano practice before the school bus. But eventually, they gave up, and instead began to take notice of my dedication and perseverance with my hair-do. I knew they finally understood who I was when my mother asked me the summer after senior year, why don’t you learn haircutting so that you can earn pocket money at Harvard?

This is how I ended up studying at the Gal-Mar Academy of Hairdressing, Nails and Beauty in North Haven alongside aspiring hair technicians and beauticians. I’ll always remember the morning, Miss Julie, who owned the place with her sister, Miss Gail, had us gather around a willing student guinea pig, to teach us the Farrah Fawcett cut, or as it’s known in the trade, the long-layered feathered shag. We learned how important it was to section the hair carefully, to keep the hair hold perfectly elevated and to shift the cutting line. Then to cross-check each side of the head against a spot in the center to make sure all the lengths were even. Finally, to use the point-cutting technique to feather the hair ends and give it a softer look. Voila, Farrah.

I walked out of Gal-Mar with a certificate for haircutting only – no color, no perm – but I set up shop out of my dorm-room bathroom a couple afternoons a week, and ran a pretty lucrative business of haircuts at $7 a piece, often $10 with tip. Guys from the rugby team would come, and some daring girls for their version of the Farrah-cut. Other people stopped by and stayed a bit, and often the whole occasion became quite social.

Today, one of Charlie’s Angels is Lucy Liu, a Chinese girl who wears her long black hair straight down her back proudly. I have two daughters with beautiful straight hair in its natural state. That is how I wear mine too, now. But I will always have a soft spot for my Farrah-do of youth.

Today, my Yahoo home page informed me of the news that Farah Fawcett “passes away.” No thank you— she DIED. Euphemisms be gone. What next: “Farah Fawcett goes to Jesus”? Or, in weird John Edward (the psychic) New-Age-speak, “Farah Fawcett passes”? It’s sad, people, very sad. I miss her. But that’s no excuse for tawdry euphemism. She died.

For years, working in bookstores here, I wished there was a decent guide to the restaurants in New Haven. I knew I wasn’t really qualified to put one together myself, but it was so obvious to me that New Haven deserved better than the Zagat guide to Connecticut, which in my opinion is totally worthless.

Then Robin Goldstein and Clare Murumba came to the rescue and published The Menu, which was about 95% dead on. I was an instant fan and bought many copies to give as gifts; when I worked at Atticus I sold literally hundreds of copies to grateful eaters.

The authors moved away, and I felt bad that the odds of a third edition seemed slim. It was, I suspected, just one of those things: person comes to Yale, does something really cool in New Haven, and then leaves. We’ve all seen it happen.

So imagine my joy when a few days ago I was poking around online looking for reviews of a downtown restaurant and I came across a website that was called Fearless Critic. One look and I knew it was Robin Goldstein at work. Further investigation indicated that a new guide to New Haven restaurants was out there — how had I not known about this? (Well: this is what I get for leaving the bookstore game.) Completely thrilled, I sent Robin a message telling him how excited I was to discover this, and I now have my paws on a copy of the Fearless Critic guide.

And let me tell you it is a blast.

Please: if you’re someone who likes to eat, and you spend any amount of time in New Haven, get a copy of this thing. It’s in bookstores downtown, it can be (ahem) ordered online. I’m not going to get all uppity about where you buy it; just buy it.

As I write this, the hour is late, and I’ve just seen Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. I prefer to call it TROTF, because that sounds funny when you say it aloud. In print it doesn’t look so funny. It looks more like the abbreviation for one of those anxiety-inducing, soul-destroying, opportunity-preventing standardized tests. By comparison to which, the movie is quite enjoyable.

Otherwise, though, it’s exhausting. So if I seem a little punchy, you’ll understand why. The summer’s second loudest movie about giant robots to date, TROTF does at least have the advantage over Terminator Salvation, and everything else, of being the first stupidest. To make it, the dubiously distinguished Wesleyan University alumnus Michael Bay pointed many restless cameras at Megan Fox, Shia LaBeouf and the computer-rendered shapes of several confusingly configured machines, then blew a bunch of stuff up.

Does saying these things make me seem old and spiteful? I’ll have you know I’m squarely within the TROTF target demographic. For I, like many of my kind, was a child of Hasbro. In fact, without Transformers toys, I don’t know what my middle-class Clinton boyhood would have been like.

Probably better socialized, for starters. During the transition from grade school to middle school, the Transformers became a wedge issue when a friend who’d outgrown me — or maybe just wanted to seem to have put away childish things himself — let it be known with derision that I still played with them. Well, it hadn’t occurred to me to stop. Anyway, I can’t remember if the stigma took (uh, it’s not like I’d been cool to begin with), but I know the betrayal stung.

And so to him I now say: Yeah, well, the joke’s on you, dude, because now Transformers is an enormously lucrative motion-picture franchise and a worldwide sensation — and plenty of people our age are still playing with them.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to say again to a certain young woman, wherever she is, that it was indeed rubber cement she found on my desk that one day in fifth grade — not, as she so reprovingly suggested, boogers. That false accusation still incenses me. For what does a man have if not (his memories of Transformers and) his reputation? To think that I’d have left my own boogers just lying right there on my desk. No. I’d have eaten them. Duh.

But I digress. It’s late. I’m punchy. Back to TROTF, and the joke being on my former friend.

No, OK, you’re right: The joke still is on me, because for all my emotionally retarded proto-adolescent fixations, I somehow lacked the presence of mind back then to imagine a future in which emotionally retarded proto-adolescent fixations would sustain 144 minutes of moviegoers’ attention, plus a few more minutes of mine, too long into the evening thereafter.

Had I known better, and played my cards right, maybe I could have met Michael Bay while he studied at Wesleyan and my father taught there, then written my own loud, long, stupid Transformers scripts and sold him those. Then I’d have the last laugh, and I dare say it would be an even more satisfying laugh than the one I get by saying “TROTF!” aloud to myself at the kitchen table in the middle of the night.

By Nick Antosca (Word Riot Press, 2009)

Bram pulls into the parking lot half asleep and the crunch of gravel under his tires becomes the crunch of bone. Something screams.

The old deerhound that lives at the bar—it’s pouring tonight and he didn’t even see her.

That crunch.

He gets out of his dented Pontiac, hunches against the downpour. He doesn’t want to look. It’s 3:30 A.M. and the bar is dark. No light to see by except the Pontiac’s headlights, ghostly cones of white slashed by rain.

He kneels to look under the car.

Nothing.

“Baby!” he yells, getting up. “Where are you?”

Movement off in the darkness, on the other side of the car. The deerhound, dragging herself away. She looks less like a dog than a man in a dog suit, huge, crawling across the gravel. He goes to her side.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,”—his voice splintering—”Hold on, let me look.”

The damage is catastrophic; the dog will die.

Not quickly, though.

These are the opening paragraphs to Nick Antosca’s Midnight Picnic, a short and terrifying book that I read a few months ago now and just can’t get out of my head. The plot follows Bram, an aimless young man living in West Virginia who finds the bones of a murdered child. Hours later, the dead child finds Bram and asks him to help avenge his death. What follows would be, in the outline of the plot, part ghost story, part revenge story, except that the experience of reading it is less like either narrative and more like having a waking nightmare.

I don’t use the word terrifying lightly. As anyone who’s been to a bad horror movie knows, scaring people is not easy. Do it wrong and it’s boring, or maybe just kind of disgusting, or worse, unintentionally funny. (That the line between horror and comedy is so thin and blurry is one of the reasons, I think, that the comedic horror movie has blossomed into such a delightful genre.) Do it right, though, and you tap into the fear that early humans must have felt when the sun went down and it began to rain, and they were huddled in a group under a tree that did not provide shelter, and they knew that predators were coming for them. For me, the first two-thirds of The Shining do that (though not the final third, which becomes boring); perhaps all of 28 Days Later and much of Clive Barker’s stuff does, too.

But Midnight Picnic’s particular brand of scare reminds me most of David Lynch, who, at his best, pulls horror from simple elements—lighting, sound, costume, a good line, clever camera work—capturing with eerie effectiveness the experience of having a very bad and extremely compelling dream. Antosca’s own use of such dream logic is the best I’ve come across in a long time. There are a few missteps—at one point, about halfway through the book, Bram interrogates the dead child in a way that very nearly breaks the spell—but here I’m just quibbling. I could give you passage after passage of the images and conversations that engrossed and frightened me, but I don’t want to ruin them.

Also, and most impressively, Antosca manages to give his story what many horror tales never even reach for: heart. Yes, Midnight Picnic is scary. But it’s also, keenly and unexpectedly, touching and tragic; for underneath the ghosts and revenge is another story about a boy looking for his father, but not being quite ready for what he finds.

My friend Molly and I were strolling through East Rock Park last Saturday morning. Not unlike the joggers and the church picnickers, we were thinking about life and what it felt like to live it on that sunny morning. We were happily yammering away when in the middle of the path, in broad daylight, unmoving and prone was a four-foot long iguana.

There was a man standing next to it and looking down at it sadly. Closer, we realized the iguana was really hurt. I mean really hurt; as in, he reared his head when he was prodded, and opened his big mouth to hiss a silent hiss of dying. His guts were in his mouth. The poor thing was busted up near dead.

The man on the Blackberry was Justin of Friends of East Rock. He had already phoned the police and was on hold with animal control. Molly and I took turns getting closer looks at the lizard, at once morbidly curious and frightened.

Justin looked at us and said earnestly, “I have to go to a meeting. I’ve called the police…” And with that, we were charged with responsibility, immediacy, and yes, citizenship. He left us and there we stood guarding the dying iguana. Thus began a Saturday morning taste of real community.

A man walked up with a baby boy, came and checked out the iguana, told us it was supposed to be green, not the jaundice it was. We wondered together if it had been dumped, already hit by a car, or if a Parks and Rec. truck had run it over. The cynic in me thought it had been hit then put in the middle of the park to be found and buried. The half-full woman in me believed it had been living happily in the park for months, and upon reaching for a far-off branch, had fallen from the tall oaks above us.

The man with the baby offered to stay with the iguana while Molly gathered sticks to weigh down a make-shift trash bag shroud for the thing. I went to houses around the park knocking on doors, asking if anyone was missing a pet iguana. I interrupted a woman mowing her lawn, explained the story, and she told me that she was certain none of her neighbors to the right of her had a pet iguana. But the people two houses down, who knew? She didn’t really know them. At another house, a man came to the door while on hold with the telephone. “I hope you aren’t missing an iguana,” I greeted him. He was happy to report he wasn’t and was so kind to then ask the operator to hold while I filled him in on what was going on in the park.

And what was going on in the park, as I now looked back to see Molly amid a small and curious crowd, was in the business of community. Some sixth graders came with their bikes and their father. Turns out they were from my school, Foote School. Turns out they were coming from an alderman’s party. Turns out the man with the baby wants to run for alderman. Turns out the local poet Alice Mattison and her husband Ed came to see what was going on. Her husband is a former alderman.

Then, the policeman arrived and declared, “The Green Iguana is not native to this park.” At first I thought no shit, and as he talked it was clear he was familiar with reptiles; he’s got a few snakes as pets. He reckoned the iguana was kept by some ignoramuses who dropped it in the park and that then a truck came by and squashed the thing. He went to check on the iguana under the glad bag and when he poked it, nothing happened.

It didn’t move. It was dead. It had died just there. It was alive and then it was dead.

He picked up the body, and folded the thing in, and the thing arced at the bottom of the trash bag.

People’s faces were all sad. We were all sad for this poor alien, this poor orphan, and this poor untold story of a living thing.

And that was it. We used the bathroom, and kept walking down Orange street feeling like we belonged to something bigger than ourselves. And that the charge of respecting a helpless living thing, no matter how random and bazaar, brought people out of their own lives, and brought us together. Iguana community like that, don’t you?

One of my more interesting reading experiences last fall was provided by Frederick Seidel’s Ooga-Booga (2006). I don’t know much about Seidel except he’s rich, was born in 1936, published his first book of poems in 1962, and didn’t publish another book until 1979. His Collected Poems, 1959-2009 was released a few months ago. I’m hoping to dawdle through it this summer.

Whatever we expect a poet to show us, it’s rare that he shows us a lifestyle to which only that elusive 5% of the population with 37% of the wealth are accustomed. In Seidel’s case, as in “Barbados,” there is an outrageous tendency to be as rancid as anything he might witness. Poets with political axes to grind do, of course, give us glimpses of brutal acts and consequences to jar us out of our literary complacency. But Seidel somehow seems to suggest that all he’s grinding is his pencil, to make it sharper. Whatever the outcome of the chaos we live in, he seems to shrug, I was there.

But what makes his writing so hard to fathom is its childlike simplicity. Or, rather, its simplicity is so arch, so tongue-in-cheek, so craftily artless, that one always waits to be slapped or jabbed by the inevitable line that arrives with all the specific, precise density — drowning in acid — of Robert Lowell or T. S. Eliot when they suddenly drop the right phrase into its inevitable place.

Huntsman indeed is gone from Savile Row,
And Mr. Hall, the head cutter.
The red hunt coat Hall cut for me was utter
Red melton cloth thick as a carpet, cut just so.
One time I wore it riding my red Ducati racer — what a show! — 
Matched exotics like a pair of lovely red egrets.
London once seemed the epitome of no regrets
And the old excellence one used to know
Of the chased-down fox bleeding its stink across the snow.
 — “Kill Poem”

Yeah, and “a savage servility slides by on grease.” To me, the echoes of Lowell’s “Skunk Hour” dance through a poem that strikes me as a Charles Bukowski poem for an uncannily different demographic. But Bukowski came to mind while reading Seidel, not only for the “fuck you if you can’t take me” ethos that these poems exude, but for a sense of the poem as the only possible response to a life of this tenor. Once your lines become this spare, they spare nothing.

But look at how the diction does whatever it wants — the beautiful balance of line 3 ends with that hanging “utter” that is itself pretty damned utter. And then the “what a show!” interpolation in a flash makes speaker and poem as cartoonish as anything — or at least as any inconceivable commercial for Ducati racers(!) could be. Then the “matched exotics” of “egrets” and “regrets” so funny and so baldly bad, as we veer into “the old excellence” that ends with a line worthy of Lowell and an image that suddenly brings in the death and blood that lurks so smugly behind all our diversionary tactics. Gee.

What I like about Seidel is the way he plays our banalities back at us, but first subjects them to a sea-change that causes the acrid brine of his own peculiar vision to cling to them:

The young keep getting younger, but the old keep getting younger.
But this young woman is young. We kiss.
It’s almost incest when it gets to this.
This is the consensual, national, metrosexual hunger-for-younger.
 — “Climbing Everest”

What is said is what anyone commenting on how the rich old court the fresh young might say — but it would be said in a wagging finger way, or at least with mockery of the jaded, fading oldster trying to ignite himself via youth. But Seidel says it with a kind of rueful surprise at being the oldster accepted by youth in his “hunger-for-younger.” In other words, it’s not jaded at all, but almost charmingly surprised by the mores of “almost incest,” where the words “consensual, national” do the job of making both old and young part of a machine that operates simply because it operates. “My dynamite penis / Is totally into Venus” Seidel quips, the intonation of youth appropriated by age to make the sex act partake of “the moment” as, we tend to think, only youth can. The insinuation of the poem — that such sex acts, like that Ducati racer, are grandiose acts of death-courting — never stops asserting itself after that first verse of foreplay, and each joke gets a little edgier, stripped of any self-satisfaction, but gripped by the vanity of vanitas, which is to say that being vain is a vain endeavor, that the grave is grave, and that “the train wreck in the tent” is addicted to all the tender mercies he can get.

Judging by Ooga-Booga, Seidel is an acquired taste that I’m on my way to acquiring because his poems confront me in a way that the poets I end up living with for awhile do. Bring on those Collected Poems.

When I was in the midst of receiving my doctorate in American literature from the City University of New York Graduate Center, I made my obligatory pilgrimages to the annual convention of the Modern Language Association. My first was a doozy. I vividly remember a panel I attended on canonical and non-canonical works, where such well-regarded scholars as the incendiary Houston Baker and the all-too-conservative James Tuttleton duked it out over the Western canon and the validity of the “classic.”

Both trotted out their respective arguments and in the many years since I have come to take stock in the merits of the two sides. There is definitely room in the canon—whatever that is—for new work that need not labor in the shadow of Melville and Emerson or even the critical sensibility that placed them at the top. On the other hand, there is absolutely no way to regard all published works of literary fiction on par with one another in terms of quality or even critical interest. Charles Dickens is better than Stephen King, just like Stephen King is better than John Saul, who is really not much better than anyone. Now we can argue about what we mean by better, but if we take as one aspect of it my second criterion of “critical interest”—worthiness and worthwhile-ness for critical examination—then, yeah, Dickens is better than King. There is more to say about Dickens’ work than there is to say about King’s, and on multiple fronts, too: historical, economic, linguistic, sociopolitical.

So, in my mind, there are such things as classics, although I don’t much love the term and the baggage it carries. Classics presumably point to works of quality that support that much more critical interest than other works. And this raises, in turn, an issue I have become quite fascinated by: classics I hate.

The hated classic finds its antithesis in the guilty pleasure, which in today’s world is hardly a source of shame. Hell, my wife is more than happy to talk about her preferences for American Idol—even though she was less vested in this year’s selection of Kris Allen—and I can freely admit my penchant for old Kung Fu movies and Firefall’s “You Are the Woman” (please don’t hit me). There are many who happily boast a passion for various species of bad art. I have friends who love Z-movie vampire flicks. My sister thinks Dumb and Dumber is one of the greatest comedies ever made. I had a boss who watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer religiously. There is even circulating a much-talked-about documentary on the “best worst movie” ever. Need I go on?

However, we tend to be more circumspect about how much we dislike great art. True, it is easy enough to confide among friends our gut feeling that Giacometti’s sculptures seem childish or Verdi is a bore. But put us in a room of intellectual peers or, even worse, acknowledged superiors, and suddenly it becomes a more vexing matter. We still may not like Giacometti or Verdi, but try justifying your response without sounding entirely solipsistic (“What can I say? It doesn’t do a thing for me”), all of which seems to raise important questions about our response—and those of our peers. What do they know that I don’t? Is it a question of unacknowledged personal immaturity? Or is this classic just another example of mass hysterical bad judgment? (It’s been known to happen.) Or perhaps questions of taste really are relative and Stephen King can be as good as Charles Dicken—Heaven forfend!

With bad art, I suspect we’re allowed to indulge our innate solipsism. Why am I willing to overlook how crappy old Kung Fu movies are? The escapism, formulaic storytelling, acrobatic choreography are all psychological creature comforts of the circus and childish wish fulfillment. But why do I hate The Scarlet Letter? It’s dull, dull, dull, and I’ll take the The Blithedate Romance over it in a heartbeat. So what the hell am I missing?

This is not an insignificant question. As a former college teacher, I was constantly placed in the position of rebutting student charges of dullness, an eternal source of frustration that seemed little more than the response of the lazy mind. In my struggle to teach students how to appreciate works by Conrad, Austen, Poe, Blake, and innumerable others, this response surfaced again and again as an ever-elusive combatant whom I could never quite grasp and pin down.

So why do I hate The Scarlet Letter? Why is my memory of it hardly a pleasurable one? Why has this novel never moved me in any way whatsoever? These are all questions that deserve a better answer than “I’m sorry but it’s just a dull read.” After all, I am more than willing to tolerate the lengthy mood settings in Joseph Conrad or the fine needlepoint psychological excursions of Henry James. I know The Scarlet Letter is a classic; I can even sense it! But there is radical disconnect, one that flummoxes any attempt at quick explication.

So for now, I am without answers; someday I hope to offer better ones. Until then, let me turn it over to you: Which classics have you found to be an utter failure in your experience as a reader?