/lit/ - Literature

>>13311380

>tfw he doesn't have a lot of time left

Anyone read his newest books? The Shakespeare ones are basically just the whole play with his half-assed commentary taking up 2 sentences a page, and his Possessed by Memory "memoir" is a bunch of poems by friends of his who are dead now and him talking about missing them.

>says Harry Potter is just a period piece which will be forgotten in a generation
>50 years later
>still considered to be a modern classic by common readers and the academia

Will he ever admit he's wrong

>I had not reread On the Road during the near half-century since its first publication, and I am not happy at encountering it again. The book has many admirers, including Thomas Pynchon, but I hardly understand what he, and others, discover in this rather drab narrative. And yet I remain fascinated by the phenomenon of Period Pieces, and by the sad truth that literary Period Pieces, unlike visual ones, in time become rubbish. Like the Harry Potter volumes, On the Road will be rubbed down and out.
>Kerouac’s vagrants are literate, self-pitying, afraid of women, and condescending towards Mexicans and African-Americans. No one will confuse them with Steinbeck’s displaced Okies, and no grapes of wrath are trampled out by them. Nor are they doom-eager dreamers like Gatsby, or monomaniac questers like Ahab, or benign wanderers like Huckleberry Finn. Comparing On the Road to the masterpieces of Classic American fiction is most unkind to Kerouac.
>I can locate no literary value whatsoever in On the Road, but I must admit the same blindness (if it is that) afflicts me when trying to reread the verse of Allen Ginsberg, a good acquaintance whom I miss personally. Howl, rather like On the Road, strikes me as an Oedipal lament, weeping in the wilderness for a mother’s consolation. What both works lack sorely is the delicately nuanced artistry of our father, Walt Whitman, whose greatest poems may look easy, but actually are superbly difficult. On the Road and Howl look easy, and are easy, self-indulgent evasions of the American quest for identity.

>>10708311

another pic of me and mr bloom

>>10265025

>tfw old
>tfw in constant pain
>tfw SJWs took over your profession
>tfw no one cares about reading the classics
>tfw all your /lit/ friends like John Ashbery and Frank Kermode are dead
>tfw students don't want to fuck you anymore

>>9520480

He felt better the next day though

>Third day. The spring sun at Yale contrasts with the previous two days, rainy and cold. It augurs well, though, as Shakespeareans as we live our existence "we defy the augury" and we have no hope in the sun. We arrive and Jeanne receives us this time that will accompany him in the interview. We arrange everything in the shortest possible time and in the most confidential way possible. Any disorder of his surroundings puzzles him. It's old. His habits and his surroundings have been too long with him. They limit it while clearly giving it security. He's in a good mood. When I ask him how he feels he repeats to me, like every day, "I do not feel very well, I'm very old, but I'm going to replace myself."
>We started the interview. I decide to go back on each of the responses of the previous day. The question, without order, without annotations. Pure adrenaline. I know he left a lot to say. And, in the hand, we talk about Borges, Shakespeare, madness, fate, women in Shakespeare: "they marry less intelligent types than them, to silence them, to subdue them."
>Harold Bloom is a dinosaur, he is extinct as he says himself. A word for tragedy, I ask. "Death," he answers. The role of the boy who goes to school, that of the young man in love and the role of the warrior, the judicious adult are curled in his chest wanting to leave and, every time they succeed, Bloom recites with a histrionic gesture, imposing his voice, long Paragraphs of Shakespeare that allow him to exemplify his answers. I'm crying the whole time the interview lasts. I do not know where they come from. Or if. The cameraman filming me cries with me.