>This summer esteemed literary critic Harold Bloom will celebrate his 86th birthday.
He'll be fine right... right?
>>7726953
Don't do this to us!!!
>>7726975
>>7726975
Get the fuck out
>>7726953
>>This summer esteemed literary critic Harold Bloom will celebrate his 86th birthday.
let's put it this way: no, no he won't
Hell be fine
>>7726953
Harold Bloom is just a time displaced Steve Buschemi.
>>7726953
Is he the guy in charge of Bloom literary databases?
>>7726953
I can't handle the fact that I'll live to see him die.
>>7726953
>hbwdiylt
y even live?
My professor used to go to bohemian intellectual orgies with him.
...rumor is he has a bleached asshole.
>>7726953
What's happening is part of a phenomenon I wrote about a couple of years ago when I was asked to comment on Rowling. I went to the Yale University bookstore and bought and read a copy of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." I suffered a great deal in the process. The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character "stretched his legs." I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling's mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.
But when I wrote that in a newspaper, I was denounced. I was told that children would now read only J.K. Rowling, and I was asked whether that wasn't, after all, better than reading nothing at all? If Rowling was what it took to make them pick up a book, wasn't that a good thing?
It is not. "Harry Potter" will not lead our children on to Kipling's "Just So Stories" or his "Jungle Book." It will not lead them to Thurber's "Thirteen Clocks" or Kenneth Grahame's "Wind in the Willows" or Lewis Carroll's "Alice."
Later I read a lavish, loving review of Harry Potter by the same Stephen King. He wrote something to the effect of, "If these kids are reading Harry Potter at 11 or 12, then when they get older they will go on to read Stephen King." And he was quite right. He was not being ironic. When you read "Harry Potter" you are, in fact, trained to read Stephen King.
Our society and our literature and our culture are being dumbed down, and the causes are very complex. I'm 73 years old. In a lifetime of teaching English, I've seen the study of literature debased. There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn't even good nonsense. It's insufferable.
>>7727500
>Harold Bloom
>A bohemian orgier
good one my friend
>>7727508
I could read this over and over again, I could read it to my friends like somebody reciting Whitman, I fucking love it. This'll be in anthologies one day, mark my words anons.
>>7727508
Muh Cannonigga
>>7727508
beautiful
>>7727508
But I like Harry Potter. I know it's shit, but I like it
>I lie awake at night, after a first sleep, and murmur Crane, Whitman and Shakespeare to myself, seeking comfort through continuity, as grand voices somehow hold off the permanent darkness that gathers though it does not fall.
>>7727471
Come on, cheer up; maybe you won't.
>>7727500
Nah he just got it on his t-shirt one time and felt like one.
>>7728281
Damn.
do you guys actually believe he (tried to) fuck his students?
do you mind?
(not b8, I'm a fan of his, and I'm wondering more whether it flavors your perception of him than anything else)
>>7731876
He seems like he could have done it. It doesn't bother me; who wouldn't want to fuck women for the sublime of it?
it's sad when people die isn't it
even the hack writers
>>7727471
Far better than to be born after. That this is not the place to tell how much better, is telling in itself.
He's the last sane, rational mind in literature, let alone literary criticism. If he dies... I don't know what will happen ;(
>>7727438
yah
>>7732452
Here's a really scary thought. If smart literary criticism can be extinguished what else could we lose in the future? At the moment it's just humanities slowly dying, imagine if STEM gets infected? Surely if anything can lose steam one day it will.
>>7732452
The last smart mind within the commentariat and "education" system, as those have all gone to shit. Intelligent literary analysts still, and will always, exist.
>>7726953
As long as you use the apostrophe in "he'll"
What do you think about what he said about dfw? It sounds like he was unreasonably harsh. Especially when he said King was better.
>Asked about novelist David Foster Wallace, who took his own life in 2008, but who has a new book out, “The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel,” put together from manuscript chapters and files found in his computer, Bloom says, “You know, I don’t want to be offensive. But ‘Infinite Jest’ [regarded by many as Wallace’s masterpiece] is just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it. He can’t think, he can’t write. There’s no discernible talent.”
It’s all a clear indication, Bloom notes, of the decline of literary standards. He was upset in 2003 when the National Book Award gave a special award to Stephen King. “But Stephen King is Cervantes compared with David Foster Wallace. We have no standards left. [Wallace] seems to have been a very sincere and troubled person, but that doesn’t mean I have to endure reading him. I even resented the use of the term from Shakespeare, when Hamlet calls the king’s jester Yorick, ‘a fellow of infinite jest.’
>>7726953
Why do you guys care about him too much anyway? His literary views are nothing beyond Wilde.
>>7733013
He also used it, along with Franzen's Freedom, as an example of modern novels not living up to their ambitions, which I agree with, but I stilll won't go to far to say he has no discernible talent.
I don't think Bloom would just say something stupid like that to get attention. I wish he went into more detail about why he doesn't like him, although he probably doesn't want to because he probably just thinks of DFW as being a minor writer (which he is, desu) and it's not really worth talking about a period piece like Infinite Jest (which it is, desu). Another theory everyone talks about is that Bloom's just angry DFW made a joke about him in the book. That also might be true.
Also, I can only assume DFW's shots at Bloom's anxiety of influence theory in IJ was done defensively because it obviously seems like DFW's suffering some severe anxiety of influence himself. He resents "le quirky ironic post-modernists" because of his misreading of them, but he obviously loves them and knows he's indebted to them in many ways. He only kind of gets out of this ambivalence through sheer giftedness, but he's never going to be thought of as a true original for generations later because of this. He's too concerned with "the problems of our era" (or something) for that.
