Having been force-fed Beowulf in my college days, I can go along with those members of Oxford University's English department who want it scrapped it from the syllabus.
Certainly Anglo-Saxon was a turn-off for some of us who chose English Language and Literature in UCD in the late Sixties. Thrilled at the prospect of studying everything from Shakespeare to Beckett, we were dismayed to find, not just that modern literature ended with Yeats and Eliot, but also that, ye Gods, fifty per cent of the course was devoted to Old and Middle English.
Yes, I know we should have read the fine print before signing up and thus saved ourselves the hard slog of learning a foreign language that seemed to be as irrelevant as it was difficult, but such is the impetuosity of youth.
And now, in a bid to attract more students, some Oxford dons are arguing that Anglo-Saxon is a deterrent for prospective literature students and should be abandoned as a compulsory subject - they point out that whereas there were 1,207 applications for the English course in 1990, numbers fell to 879 last year.
Anglo-Saxon, though, has its eminent defenders, and in the current debate its cause has been taken up by both Fay Weldon and Penelope Fitzgerald. The latter, who feels that too many students opt for an English degree because it seems an "easy option," says that "if Anglo-Saxon helps bring down the numbers, that's fine. I would like to see Latin compulsory as well, and anyone who couldn't face those things shouldn't be on the course."
And writing in last week's Sunday Times, Seamus Heaney, whose new modern-English version of Beowulf will be published by Faber next year, said that the current Oxford debate made him question the value of his own project.
His conclusion? "My own view is that students graduating with a degree in English from a distinguished university should have some sense of the foundations of the language and the cornerstones of the literature.
"Forcing everybody to confront the whole text of Beowulf in the original is probably counter-productive (as was compulsory Irish within the Irish educational system), but some exposure to the brunt of the Old English tongue and some knowledge of its workings, its literary genres and its poetic metre is bound to illuminate every beginner's sense of the subject."
But, he continues, we recognise English now "as a confabulation of Englishes, and in current post-colonial conditions, in a developing Britain, in an evolving Europe, the more people realise that their language and their culture are historically amassed possessions the better . . .
"It seems to me, in other words, that the study of Anglo-Saxon no longer identifies one with the cult of Englishness but rather fosters something that Osip Mandelstam called `nostalgia for world culture,' a nostalgia which is paradoxically future-seeking and creative in all kinds of political and psychological ways."
That's undoubtedly right, but I found it a dreadful penance all the same.
I see that Frank and Malachy McCourt are among the writers fighting to preserve Eamonn Doran's Manhattan bar from demolition.
I was in this Second Avenue establishment a couple of times in the Eighties and found it mainly populated by Irish tourism and airline executives boasting or bitching about the size of their expense accounts. However, it also housed the First Friday Club, where the McCourts, Thomas Kenneally and Richard Harris were among the eminences who would regularly gather for intellectual sustenance.
Indeed, it was in Doran's that Frank McCourt told writer Mary Breasted about the memoir he was writing, whereupon she asked to see the work-in-progress and then excitedly told her agent about it. The rest, as they say, is history.
Now, along with the buildings around it, it's due for the chop by leading New York property developer Harry Macklowe. If he gets his way (and it seems certain he will), Doran's will be the second famous Manhattan Irish bar to closed within weeks - the building housing Tommy Makem's Irish Pavilion was recently bought by a business corporation and is now no more.
"This sort of thing happens," Tommy Makem shrugs stoically. "It's New York."
Next Thursday night Irish poet Noelle Vial will be reading in the Winding Stair Bookshop, Lower Ormond Quay, along with two American poets.
Both of the Americans are also editors - Laura Boss is the founder-editor of the poetry magazine Lips, while Maria Maziotti Gillan edits the Paterson Literary Review. The reading begins at 8pm.
It's Francis MacManus Radio Short Story Competition time again, with this year's prize fund standing at £3,000.
In the thirteen years since the competition began, hundreds of stories have been broadcast by new and emerging Irish writers, many of whom have gone on to further publication and recognition.
The closing date for this year's competition is October 2nd, and you can get entry forms by sending a stamped addressed envelope to Francis MacManus Awards, RTE Radio Centre, Dublin 4.