taxology of crap, part 1

I could just take the easy road and say, 'crap is whatever I say it is' - Lord knows, I've read a helluva lot more of it than any of you have, so I am an expert. But that kind of approach wouldn't get either of us any further toward our goals, would it (yours, to better your reading, mine, to control your every thought)?
So let's star in our best Jesuitical manner by defining the scope our our inquiry, shall we? Our first step should be to clarify what crap is NOT:
1. Crap, for the purposes of this blog, is not anything but literary. If you people want crap-counselling on your personal relationships, your parental relationships, your school-woes, your work-woes, your taste in art or music or TV or movies, you'll have to look elsewhere. After all, I'm only one (albeit superior) person; not only do people more important than you regularly need my guidance, but also yelling at my basset hound takes up a lot of my time.
2. Crap is not a matter of individual taste. I can't stress that enough: crap is not a matter of individual taste. The art of writing is highly artificial, highly mannered, and highly difficult; it's just simple common sense that not everybody who tries it does it equally well. Here at Bookrant we'll brook none of the mystical nonsense that allows a bad book to be good if only, ala the Great Pumpkin, some laptop-wielding Cantabridgian believes it is. The minute you say all quality is in the eye of the beholder, you invalidate the idea of literary greatness and allow morons to run the show.
3. That having been said, we should hurry and add: crap is not necessarily bad. Certainly not in and of itself - there are crappy books that merrily ignore their crappiness and sweep us along, and I wouldn't have it any other way. My heart still thrills to the epic sword fights of the first three John Carter of Mars novels; I'm still page-turningly gripped by the brutal hand-to-hand combat between Spock and Omne at the climax of 'The Price of the Phoenix;' who among us (including a certain former Supreme Court Chief Justice who was in all other respects no slouch in the brains department) doesn't enjoy a good whodunnit? There is and always has been a thriving and necessary under-culture that caters only to our most visceral yearing for what-happens-next, and there's nothing wrong with that. What bugs me is this: minorly, when people capable of more read only that kind of crap, and majorly, when crap tries to pass itself off as something more.
The latter will probably be the subject of tomorrow's rant ...