Try some bitterness with your listings! From a spirited roundup of this week's highlights in The Pitch:

Wednesday, September 28

New Yorker readers know David Denby as one of the magazine's film critics. We, however, like to think of him as the grinch who stole college. See, when we were at Columbia University, experiencing what the school calls the "Core Curriculum," Denby had just published Great Books, his account of retaking the core's signature classes—30 years later. Denby enrolled in Literature Humanities (which starts with Homer and ends with Virginia Woolf) and Contemporary Civilization (which includes all the philosophy and theory biggies). He attended classes, did all the reading and even wrote a few papers. Our feelings about this experience, which he romanticizes—while mocking his younger classmates—can be summarized as follows: Of course you had time to savor all these books, Mr. Film Critic. The rest of us? We were busy taking the classes for the first time, reading the books for the first time and—oh, yeah—juggling a full course load. So we felt some schadenfreude when Denby published American Sucker, an account of his attempt to make money during the booming '90s. Denby writes about making $900,000 and losing it all—along with, we think, his dignity, by admitting to an obsession with online porn and ownership of an Audi A6. What, working at the New Yorker isn't enough? Denby signs books at the University of Kansas' Oread Bookstore at 4:30 p.m. and speaks on "Reading Great Books in a Modern World" at 7 p.m. in Woodruff Auditorium, both in the Kansas Union (1301 Jayhawk Boulevard in Lawrence), for KU's Sixty Years of Western Civ celebration. We'll be the ones with the "Great Books Suck" signs.

Aw, they've got a bit of a point about the savoring, though I half-wish now that I could take more of the Columbia Core (I was across the street, reading at large and being nurtured) just for the Hegel of it. Luckily, from the warp-speed mind of Johanna Drucker—who taught Art Hum in those days—I got a whole keg o' knowledge that I'm still tipsy on.

For more on required reading and the problems of canonization and decanonization, take a look at my friend Michael Broder's thoughtful post about lyric poetry, a mini-review of Helen Vendler's Poets Thinking:

In the intro, Vendler points out that "Great Books" courses generally pass lyric poetry over in silence, preferring to talk about epic, dramatic, and other narrative forms of poetry (and of course prose) that are more amenable to discussion in terms of "thought" as commonly conceived. Consequently, the average well educated student who takes Literature Humanities (or whatever they're calling it now) as an undergraduate freshman at Columbia University or Core Studies 1 (Classical Origins of Western Culture, the course I'm teaching now) at Brooklyn College has a satisfactory conception of how thoughts and ideas are conveyed in epic and dramatic poetry (like the Iliad, Odyssey, Greek tragedy and comedy, Shakespeare's plays) and of course of how thoughts and ideas are conveyed in philosophical works (Plato's Republic or Symposium, essays of Montaigne, etc) and novels (Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment, perhaps)...

...BUT MAY HAVE LITTLE OR NO CONCEPTION OF HOW THOUGHTS AND IDEAS ARE CONVEYED IN LYRIC POETRY, OR EVEN OF WHAT LYRIC POETRY IS. And of course, while many of us (poets) include narrative elements in our work, to a very great extent the contemporary practice of poetry is a practice of lyric poetry--in some form or other. As Vendler notes, this omission tends to result in a situation where intelligent readers from a variety of disciplines tend to read lyric poetry with a view towards abstracting its paraphrasable meaning, and then evaluating the work based on the perceived truth, validity, or value of this paraphrase.

Needless to say, I think she has a very good point here.... More Mike.