On Jun 1, 2011, at 10:07 AM, Michael Smith wrote:
> 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.
I haven't read any of Bloom's stuff since his Wallace Stevens book, which came out in 1977. He does seem to have turned into a grading machine of some sort. But I've heard a couple of interviews with him over the years that were pretty entertaining.
Two Bloom stories. One day he started delivering a lecture clad in old-fashioned galoshes and a jacket and pants both in navy blue, but of a non-matching shade. He looked like hell. In the middle of the lecture, visibly sweating, he took off the jacket and just dropped it on the floor next to him without a pause. And in the other, he told a seminar that a friend was taking that he'd had a dream the night before of walking down a long hallway lined with doors. He walked down the hall, opening the doors in sequence, and behind each was a hideous face, each uglier than the last. When he reached the last, he realized it was his own face, and he woke up screaming.
> Irrelevantly, it is extraordinary how the mailing-list form
> fosters quarrels. Doug and I started out *agreeing* about
> NPR, if memory serves.
Yes. Let's go back to that. I love bonding with NPR-haters.
Doug