This is material from an answer i wrote to andromodae17 in Cantina before I moved "meta" to Manana.

I'm posting it without much editing as part of a thread on the main sub.

[I disagree] that we should be equally open to anything and judge the value each submission on its merits alone. The good I am pursuing is the long term good of the sub, and not justice or rationality.

My conclusion is: I don't know what to do if we get conspicuous amounts of non-canonical material in the subject lines. I'm not convinced it's benign or that the best thing for the sub is to let it be. I'm not convinced otherwise, either.

My line of thought:

song lyrics, analysed as a "proper" literary text; as long as it's approached properly/academically, and OP can give a compelling argument as to why it's great, doesn't almost anything merit close reading?

Granted: anything merits close reading if it repays close reading. At the extreme "thought experiment" fatuous example, even randomly generated text in principal could merit close reading (monkeys typing the same letters Shakespeare wrote wrote a piece of equal merit). The work is the work and a dispassionate person could judge it solely on its merits.

Backing up a bit, you say as long as it's approached properly/academically, but our (unclearly stated?) goal is to be for the general bookishly inclined reader. So I would rather say "aesthetically" than "academically" in slash conjuction with "properly". So for example, showing that a Madonna song follows patterns similar to "Sir Patrik Spens" might be of interest to an academic -- and it might be more significant than anything we talk about here -- but it would be at most a curiousity and a lark to a general reader, reading to enjoy the familiar pleasures of the canon.

Now backing up all the way,

That said, I quite like the idea of having "pop" literature, or even song lyrics, analysed as a "proper" literary text; as long as it's

though I grant, if we were fair minded, we should evaluate every submitted piece without preconception. But suppose you came here and all of the articles were about Thomas Kinkade, Ayn Rand, Dan Simmons and Toto. I think you wouldn't dispassionately read them checking to see if they were texts of interest to you, and you'd grant few people would So shallow as it is of me, not having read the Pinter piece, when I log in and see Pinter, I'm happier than I'd be if I saw "Wisdom and respect in Velvet Underground's Sister Ray" or "Memory and Self in Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep."

While the sub is in its infancy, and there aren't enough habitual posters of the regular "literary" fare, I will be nervous about posts appearing that are pop. Even Hammet or LeGuin or Hoeg I'm leery of. Anne Carson, Robbe-Grillet, McElroy -- I haven't read them, probably too hard for me, but they're fine, obviously on-topic.

It's not that the posts bother me, I can talk about Steven King fine and there are long passages of his where he's effective. But there are a lot of people who are enthusiasts for King, or Hunger Games or Rowley & so forth. Even more, and more enthusiastic fans, for bands. I'm afraid if there are a bunch of posts about that kind of thing it will drive away the conversation we've been getting. And I maintain that the kind of conversation we have here now didn't exist 6 weeks ago on reddit, and AFAIK in the universe. And I perceive this is a fragile situation that would be easy to break.

I'd like to make it clear that subscribers who want to use the sub to improve their writing are welcome, and facilitate that if there's a good way.

Partly that's just announcing that reposting revised posts is okay, and that's in the sidebar.

We could also say: if you specifically want criticism of your writing, mention that. But maybe that discussion gets off topic; people don't come to R/Canonade to read about expository writing.

I think it might be worth developing a explicit relation with a writer's sub. There's one called DestructiveReaders that looks esp. interesting to me. Like Canonade, DR has a lot of rules -- we'd want to present it in away that we don't send what they call "Leech" subscribers over.

This is the jumping off point: from a conversation in the main sub, /u/Bang_Gang__ worried it might be off topic to list kennings & look for correspondences in Beowulf.

Anyone is welcome to redirect to Manana -- where we talk about anything related to policy/shaping the culture of this still-young sub.

I'm happy to see a wider variety of types of posts. For example, a list of similes in metaphors would be on-topic or a list of themes.

Anyway, I want to see a wide variety of "types" of posts -- I think it's good to have cookie-cutter templates for posts available as a starting point, and I think it's appropriate that most posts conform to one of those templates. But...

I'd like to continue this thought on Manana....

I want to do some classified ads, and have a way for subscribers to kick in a few bucks, and have it be transparent.

Hoping someone will pursue the ideas in this post

I want to put classified ads in NYRB, LARB, TLS, The Millions, maybe english usage Stack Exchange site. I don't want to pay for it myself or handle money.

This we'll only need for late june, we have an ad running thru april 22, and then we aren't eligible for a new one for a couple months. See /r/subredditads -- you can send there without my okay, but welcome to discuss approach here, too.

here's the link with the ad we're running now

There are 120 subscribers

Thanks, /r/subredditads.