Harold Bloom is dead

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Idly browsing through some Bloom quotes, I think even the communist resentnick Luka might be in sympathy with these ones:

“We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are. Yet the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading…is the search for a difficult pleasure.”
― Harold Bloom

“Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones ... successful literary works are achieved anxieties, not releases from anxieties.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
 

craner

Beast of Burden
I think I'd have done pretty well as an English professor, but I just couldn't be bothered.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Just cos I'm reading it I googled to see what Bloom thought of the Recognitions... didn't get the full thing but found this

You may have heard—as I frequently have—that The
Recognitions is "like James Joyce" or stands out as "the
American Ulysses" or (in the words of Harold Bloom): "The
Recognitions parodies Joyce's Ulysses.” This could hardly
be true, if only because Gaddis hadn't read Ulysses at the time
he wrote his debut novel. "My Joyce is limited to Dubliners and
some of his letters," he admitted to John Seelye in 1962.
 

version

Well-known member
Yeah, I'd heard he later read Penelope and that's it. Although writers always seem to deride or feign ignorance of some canonical work, so he could have been lying.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
But interesting that Bloom compares the books which - apart from being long and having moments of stream-of-consciousness - are not similar at all.
 

version

Well-known member
Sounds like Bloom was full of it.

😂

I just heard of Bely's Petersburg the other day. Now that sounds like Ulysses. It was published well before too.

Taking place over a short, turbulent period in 1905, 'Petersburg' is a colourful evocation of Russia's capital—a kaleidoscope of images and impressions, an eastern window on the west, a symbol of the ambiguities and paradoxes of the Russian character. History, culture, and politics are blended and juxtaposed; weather reports, current news, fashions and psychology jostle together with people from Petersburg society in an exhilarating search for the identity of a city and, ultimately, Russia itself.
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich
I been googling it, sounds interesting... but I got Lanark today, still have three hundred pages of Recognitions to go... when am I gonna read that realistically.
 

version

Well-known member
I found a good pic of Gaddis with Gass, Vonnegut, Barth, Barthelme, Coover and a few others recently. Apparently they had some "postmodernists dinner'. Supposedly they invited Pynchon too, but he didn't turn up.

1fa8c7cbf8dc977653f7750905725da4.jpg
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
Liza is suggesting that there is a character in The Master And Margarita who has a pseudonym which is intended and as a dig at that affectation (which was popular at the time) in general, and at Bely/Biely in particular.
 
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