> I kind of adore [Harold Bloom]. Reading the Anxiety
> of Influence as a sophomore is one of the things that
> led me out of the Party of the Right
It's amazing how quirky and sui-generis our pathways are.
If you had asked me to name a writer who could have knocked a kid off his right-wing hobbyhorse on the way to Damascus and put the fear of Marx in him, Bloom is not somebody I would have thought of. On the contrary: all that dreary ranking and canonizing and winnowing -- Shakespeare wrote 38 plays, and 24 of them are masterpieces -- seem quite Philistine and reactionary to me.
But really, there's no telling how a given text will jam itself into the unique N-dimensional jigsaw puzzle that constitutes an individual mind.
Chalk one up for Bloomie; our Doug was a brand for the burning, and the Great Manatee snatched him from the fire. Laus digno.
Irrelevantly, it is extraordinary how the mailing-list form fosters quarrels. Doug and I started out *agreeing* about NPR, if memory serves.
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Michael J. Smith mjs at smithbowen.net
http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org http://www.cars-suck.org http://fakesprogress.blogspot.com