Yet Naked Lunch, and all the great works of all the bad people above named [Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing, Anne Sexton, Derek Walcott, Oscar Wilde, Charlotte Brontë], are worthwhile not because they offer moral wisdom—very little great literature, aside from a few obvious exceptions (e.g., Middlemarch), does that—but because they provide irreplaceably intelligent or intricate or intense experiences of the world.
—John Pistelli, “Against Intellectual Biblioclasm” (13 January 2018; my emphasis)
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execrable frippery 