/lit/ - Literature

Why is he so fat and sad looking?

you don't read a book to prove god

the proof is in your heart

Bloom is my favorite gay writer.

>>5775287
Can /lit into /fit?

Reading make you miserable?

It make you look like an egg, and a bitch?

10 years ago
>"Oh boy, I can't wait to spend all day reading!"
>do just that
>endless delight from the things you've learned and from story twists and getting to know and love characters

Now
>"Oh boy, I can't wait to spend all day reading!"
>have to go to work, boss doesn't let you read during down-time
>go home, post on 4chan for the rest of the evening
>read 5 pages of a book before you get too sleepy and have to go to bed
>tfw your love of reading has vanished over the years

>tfw all the other boys at school make fun of you and call you a nerd because you like reading books

This dopey nostaligafag is the hero literature deserves.

>>5543879
Here is a list of books Harold Bloom thinks the kids should read: http://www.mrbauld.com/bloomjr.html

>HomeArts: Why should children read? And why should children read good books?
>Bloom: To be coldly pragmatic about it, reading good books will make them more interesting both to themselves and to others. And it is by becoming more interesting--and this sounds callous, but it's true, I think--that by becoming more interesting both to oneself and to others, one develops a sense of one's separate and distinct self. So if children are to individuate themselves, they will not do it by watching television, or by playing video games, or by listening to rock, or by watching rock videos. They will individuate themselves by being alone with a book, by being alone with the poetry of William Blake or A. E. Housman, or being alone with Norse mythology or The Wind in the Willows.

>You know, I don’t want to be offensive. But ‘Infinite Jest’ is just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it. He can’t think, he can’t write. There’s no discernible talent.

>Be interested in Marcel Proust
>Decide to read some literary criticism about him
>Look on my bookshelf, nothing about Proust
>See Harold Bloom's "Genius"
>Decide to give Bloom a chance, even after deciding to never read the fuck again
>Open on the chapter about Prost
>Read that Prost is one of the supreme novelists of the world
>Read that Prost is a great creator of character
>Read that neither Balzac nor Flaubert really influenced Proust
>Read that Shakespeare was the one who influenced Proust
>Hamlet, Othello, Iago, Lear, Falstaff, Cleopatra are the sources for Porust
>Proust is the greatest writer of tragicomedy, only losing for Shakespeare
>Bloom proceeds on talking about Shakespeare's carrear for the hundred time
>Talks more about Shakespeare than about Proust on Proust's own chapter in the book

Seriously, this guy has serious mental problems. Nobody has ever lived and work on this Earth without being influenced by Shakespeare, as if Shakespeare was some kind of God.

There really is no way of reading Bloom: he is empty. He doesn't speak one word about a writer's style or technique, is just the same shit about agon, and influence, and school of resentment, and "muh youth as a teacher", and "muh Shakespeare", and "muh Falstaff".

I really hope this fucker will be completely forgotten after he dies.

"He can’t think, he can’t write. There’s no discernible talent."

"Literature overall is a very flabby and slouchy art form in general, you need to sit on your ass like a useless piece of shit most of the time in order to do it. It's an artform of rest rather than war. Literature as an art or aesthetic experience is the province of the crippled, honestly to be fair. If you seriously prefer the most artfully and sophisticated description in the world about sex, eating, climbing a mountain, over actually doing any of those things you are probably crippled in the first place. Nothing wrong with that, and that's why literature is good for these people, but not all of us are like that." - deep & edgy

tfw you read something that describes your own thoughts on something with such likeness and totality that you feel the author has robbed you of your intellectual identity. Why is this experience so unsettling?

Now I'm remembering Harold Bloom explaining what the "anxiety of influence" is:

"The loss comes from the fact that you are haunted. The loss comes from the fear, the deep fear, that there's no room for you. That the time and space you ought to occupy has been usurped or appropriated. That you have no ground upon which to stand, no word of your own to speak."

>>3442864
Bloom actually wears an adult diaper due to a car crash that left him incontinent. That expression on his face is usually either him shitting himself, or smelling the consequence.

>implying I need to write in order to become a literary critic

Why does Harold Bloom always look like he just caught wind of an IBS fart?

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1530857
>those comments

>

>>2989001

I hate captcha.

>>1901323
I wholeheartedly approve.

We're a dying breed, D&E.

Not on my watch.

They call me chunks for a reason.


amirite?