Unhinged

[Eco] uses Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Curtiz’s Casablanca to show that cult classics are cults “precisely because they are basically ramshackle, or ‘unhinged,’ so to speak.” It’s their imperfectness, the disjointed parts, that gives fans something to attach to, something to remember, something to cite.

Donna Haraway via Robin Sloan via (who else) Alan Jacobs

I sense this same quality in The Faerie Queene, which is why, when it gets its hooks in you, it doesn’t let go. As C. S. Lewis once said, “I’ve never met a man who used to like the Faerie Queene.”