a poor beginning

Terrible questions lead to...
So I realize as I begin to write that my question was not as well formed as it ought to have been. If you found yourself wondering exactly what I was looking for... I am right there with you.

The first thought that comes to mind is that I learned to appreciate Faulkner while writing my thesis and so my love for writing considered "artful" increased due to work I did in school, but I also still love reading books like "Infected" that I don't think is very artful. So what does that mean that school taught me?

I look back on most of what I studied in many English classes with very little emotion. In fact, I rarely look or even glance back at it, much of the experience was not necessarily meaningful, particularly in a lasting way.

If anything, I graduated with a Bachelors Degree in English Literature with an overly developed sense of cynicism for English criticism and the very idea of "literature" that probably led me to disregard some of the actually valuable criticism I read in my career at Haverford College.

I try to think back on high school English and I don't remember too much. I do remember thinking I was smarter than my teachers and wasting a lot of time and emotion objecting to all the enormously demanding assignments that took up so much of my clearly very valuable time.

I remember Ryan MacPherson and the project we did together on existentialism and using Monty Python, a noose, and a stale-mated chess game to demonstrate what we were talking about. I remember thinking how much smarter than me he was back then and how he probably thought the project was terrible because I brought him down and missed the point. Luckily he humored me.

But I don't remember much about the books we read, which books we read, or any feelings abotu the books and what we did in class regarding them.

I remember being enthralled by Tom Clancy but shying away from some of his books that didn't have enough action in them. I remember reading all of Louis L'Amour's novels in the shiny brown leather covers from the Brentwood Library and I remember spending hours imagining the Middle Earth I read in Tolkein, an imagined Middle Earth now lost forever thanks to the movies.

High School may not have had much of an effect on me as a reader. My habits and feelings about reading were so well established, perhaps even entrenched that Ms. M---- and Ms. B---- and Ms. Whatshername and the older Ms. Whatshername that gave me bad grades because my writing was too small couldn't actually change how I felt about books.

If anything, I've emerged from my schooling about literature even more over-confident in my own personal value system regarding literature in any definition.

I think books are great. I like big books and small books and funny books and sad books and low-brow books and high-brow books. I appreciate good writing though I still have difficulty defining it. "Light in August" overflows with really cool writing, "Infected" is completely devoid of it. Dan Simmons' "Ilium" mixes increibly fascinating ideas into a great story, as does Neal Stephonson's "Snow Crash." I enjoy Shakespeare but I rarely pick up "Julius Caesar" on a whim. (In fact, I think I've never picked it up despite being told to read it as an assignment in a college class)

Everything has to have its opposite, we learned this in nature or maybe in Coach Pauley's Physical Science Class in 9th grade. But for every tottering old cranky woman saying that Shakespeare is the epitome of genius, there are at least 23,571 8-yr olds that will argue that "like, no way, JK Rowling is totally WAAAYYY better. For serious."

They can't both be right. Can they?

Could it perhaps be true that beauty and art are really in the eyes of the beholder, irrespective of the beholder's qualifications?

I will be the first to argue that some books are inherently "better" than others but at least 80% of my students would disagree with my choices for