― matthew james (matthew james), Friday, 18 July 2003 15:45 (twenty years ago) link
― Leni, Thursday, 28 August 2003 20:56 (twenty years ago) link
― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Tuesday, 13 December 2005 02:37 (eighteen years ago) link
― youn, Tuesday, 13 December 2005 02:56 (eighteen years ago) link
― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Tuesday, 13 December 2005 03:02 (eighteen years ago) link
― youn, Tuesday, 13 December 2005 03:05 (eighteen years ago) link
― 26%, Tuesday, 13 December 2005 03:12 (eighteen years ago) link
― ryan (ryan), Tuesday, 13 December 2005 03:13 (eighteen years ago) link
― youn, Tuesday, 13 December 2005 03:14 (eighteen years ago) link
― 26%, Tuesday, 13 December 2005 03:15 (eighteen years ago) link
― 635%, Tuesday, 13 December 2005 03:16 (eighteen years ago) link
― 7864%, Tuesday, 13 December 2005 03:19 (eighteen years ago) link
This makes me so happy. Thank you. I would like to give harold bloom every inch of my love, my dear.
I am surprised that he nowhere praises yahweh's incomparable congnitive originality.
― stewart downes (sdownes), Tuesday, 13 December 2005 03:36 (eighteen years ago) link
― ryan (ryan), Tuesday, 13 December 2005 03:46 (eighteen years ago) link
"ex-plain."
― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Tuesday, 13 December 2005 09:17 (eighteen years ago) link
― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Tuesday, 13 December 2005 09:21 (eighteen years ago) link
"we have a little problem here."
― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Tuesday, 13 December 2005 09:23 (eighteen years ago) link
― youn, Wednesday, 14 December 2005 02:29 (eighteen years ago) link
― Alfred Soto (Alfred Soto), Wednesday, 14 December 2005 15:01 (eighteen years ago) link
WHAT THE
http://ragb.ag/post/2857517474/bestriding-literary-boundaries-in-1979-harold
― Ned Raggett, Friday, 21 January 2011 15:49 (thirteen years ago) link
From John Leonard's NYT review:
There are no munchkins or hobbits, because Lucifer, like Earth, is a serious place, created by a Demiurge that calls himself a god but who is actually the result of the overweening pride and the lack of antiseptic precautions of his luckless mother, the so-called "dark intention" whose playing with herself has brought about the corrupt cosmos, the material worlds. Where, before, there had been pure being, unpolluted Light, transcendent fullness, the ghostly plemora, the tiresome Gnosis--now there is excrement. The Archons in the hire of the Demiurge do battle with the Aeons loyal to the true god, who is redisappointed. A few men--invariably, they are men--have the divine "spark" and seek Gnosis, but the sneaky Archons get in their way.
― Ned Raggett, Friday, 21 January 2011 15:50 (thirteen years ago) link
Apparently a sequel to David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus. Uh.
― Ned Raggett, Friday, 21 January 2011 15:52 (thirteen years ago) link
I think my friend has a copy of voyage to arcturus, for the very reason that bloom wrote a sequel to it
― dayo, Friday, 21 January 2011 16:14 (thirteen years ago) link
I worry about your friend.
― Ned Raggett, Friday, 21 January 2011 16:22 (thirteen years ago) link
He mentioned it in a Paris Review interview given in '90 or '91. He said it was "dreadful."
― Rich Lolwry (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 21 January 2011 16:24 (thirteen years ago) link
The legendary mark s has indicated on Twitter that having learned about it he's just ordered it and will give a full report in a couple of weeks.
― Ned Raggett, Friday, 21 January 2011 16:27 (thirteen years ago) link
haaaa, that cover art is great.
― tylerw, Friday, 21 January 2011 16:27 (thirteen years ago) link
harold bloom is a good example that the best way to critical legitimacy is to be armscrossed.gif about your opinions all the time
― dayo, Friday, 21 January 2011 16:28 (thirteen years ago) link
i certainly don't worship at his feet, but he can be pretty entertaining -- there's a wallace stevens doc w/ footage of him going off that I thought was both inspiring and crazy in college.
― tylerw, Friday, 21 January 2011 16:30 (thirteen years ago) link
He recited – no, intoned – Tennyson's "Ulysses" in a beautifully melodic baritone when promoting his 2000 book. I asked him to name his favorite Stevens verse when he autographed my copy of The Western Canon. He sighed, closed his heavy-lidded toad eyes, and whispered, "DOWNWARD TO DARKNESS, ON EXTENDED WINGS."
― Rich Lolwry (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 21 January 2011 16:33 (thirteen years ago) link
haha, yeah, how can you not love that?
― tylerw, Friday, 21 January 2011 16:34 (thirteen years ago) link
Total goth.
― Ned Raggett, Friday, 21 January 2011 16:35 (thirteen years ago) link
my friend took his class and would just report back on how endearingly and harmlessly sexist he was. like if you were a girl yo got an A-, boy a B+, end story.
― dayo, Friday, 21 January 2011 16:37 (thirteen years ago) link
i keep reading this as "the penis of our climate"
― progressive cuts (Tracer Hand), Friday, 21 January 2011 16:56 (thirteen years ago) link
RIP Harold Bloom. People of my generation don't really like him. Also, he was pretty seriously disliked by all but one of my professors in college, so maybe it's not even a generation thing. Regardless, I want to commemorate him. He is often maligned as a right wing reactionary, but I don't think that was really a fair description. Politically, he aligned himself with "the left," but I never got a sense that he understood politics very well.
Ultimately Harold Bloom was a guy who loved poetry and thought it was important, and reading him, you got the sense that he was someone who thought his work was meaningful, even urgent, and something about that is infectious. Reading him, I wanted to believe that great poetry is as transformative as he found it to be. The big claim he made about Shakespeare--that he "invented consciousness"--is completely absurd, but also kind of charming. He wanted to believe in artistic originality, which for him was synonymous with human freedom.
I don't agree with Bloom that the Western Canon is an objective record of "the best that has been thought." I think things are messier and less inspiring than that. Also, I *strongly* disagree with his notion that Sylvia Plath was a derivative writer. Clearly, his idea that most of the best writers were white and male was preposterous, and probably at some level purposefully designed to irritate people.
However, I agree with him that there is something to be said for the classics, for looking across the centuries to understand how people thought about themselves and their place in the world. I also basically agree with his idea of "influence," that people struggle mightily against the people, places and ideas that formed them, and that this struggle for autonomy--even though it always fails, in one way or another--is where we find meaning. At least in the individualist West.
― treeship., Monday, 14 October 2019 23:06 (four years ago) link
I agree with him that there is something to be said for the classics
Everything comes from something. The classics have been an important influence on everyone, directly or indirectly, even if you think they have been a negative influence, because so many powerful and influential people were educated upon them and formed their ideas of the world in converse with them. They remain important, even if only in the sense of "know your enemy". But once you start to get acquainted with them, you come to understand how far from monolithic "the classics" are, and what a breadth of ideas and stories they encompass, and eventually you understand that taken as a whole, they represent expressions of much, perhaps most, of what humanity is and can be.
NB: The "classics" should be understood to include texts from every age and every part of the world, created by men and women, high and low, so long as they are highly valued by their readers, who pay them the compliment of incorporating their spirit into themselves.
Also, I *strongly* disagree with his notion that Sylvia Plath was a derivative writer.
Among the critical considerations which may be applied to a writer's work, whether or not they should be labeled as "derivative" is too trivial to matter and nothing a reader ought to give a damn about. Critics can be pretty stupid about stuff like that, but the great majority of lit crit is hopelessly mediocre and often pointless.
― A is for (Aimless), Monday, 14 October 2019 23:34 (four years ago) link
Bloom took originality extremely seriously. He thought it was impossible but authentic writers are the ones whofight to achieve it nonetheless.
I think there is something to this—i wouldn’t be this dramatic about it—but every person should aspire to find their own voice
― treeship., Monday, 14 October 2019 23:38 (four years ago) link
― dayo, Friday, January 21, 2011 4:37 PM (eight years ago)
ha, i just saw this exact anecdote related by somebody on twitter, absent the "endearingly and harmlessly" angle
― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Monday, 14 October 2019 23:53 (four years ago) link
My ambivalent obit.
― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 14 October 2019 23:56 (four years ago) link
I choose to remember him as a toad who loved poetry and was instrumental in my loving it.
― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 14 October 2019 23:57 (four years ago) link
i enjoyed that. it was ambivalent but not disinterested. i haven't read bloom since college and that reminded me of what it was like to read him.
― treeship., Tuesday, 15 October 2019 00:07 (four years ago) link
Well done.
― Beware of Mr. Blecch, er...what? (James Redd and the Blecchs), Tuesday, 15 October 2019 01:20 (four years ago) link