Speaking of Ë× and ÑÅ, I read an interesting article in Time Magazine entitled "Long Live The King."

National Book Foundation gives Stephen King its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters this year. "News of King's crowning met with predictable sneers from the literary snobs, along with a few weak and equally predictable cheers from the reverse snobs. But both sides are kind of missing the point, which is that we--that is, we readers--have an odd and deeply ingrained habit of dividing books into two mutually exclusive heaps, one high and literary and one low and trashy, and we should stop it. Books aren't high or low. They're just good or bad. "

"As recently as the mid--19th century, historians of the novel tell us, there was only one heap. Dickens wrote best-selling novels, but they weren't considered "commercial" or "popular" or "your-euphemism-here." They were just novels. ... But by the time modernism kicked in, in the early part of the 20th century, things had changed. The year 1922 saw the publication of both T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and James Joyce's Ulysses, two of the greatest literary works in Western history, but also two of the first that are impossible to understand without (and, arguably, with) compendious footnotes and critical apparatuses. All of a sudden you knew something was literary because it was difficult. You either got it or you didn't, and if you didn't, you didn't admit it. As much as Americans like to be democratic in our politics, we have become aristocratic in our aesthetics. "

"This was something strange and new. Reading literature and having a damn good time had become quietly but decidedly uncoupled. ... We have a high tolerance for boredom and difficulty. We praise rich, complex, lyrical prose, but we don't really appreciate the pleasures of a well-paced, gracefully structured plot. Or, worse, we appreciate them, but we are embarrassed about it. ..."

Agreed. Let's stop this Ë× and ÑÅ scenario, and have a dame good time, in reading, in writing, in CND, in your life, in ...