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/lit/ - Literature

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22050140 No.22050140 [Reply] [Original]

Harold Bloom was absolutely right about this faux-melancholic costermonger, peddling his rotten harvest, all fashioned with an inauthentic air of precociousness; chief among his fruits - of all things - "authenticity", topped off with that nervous, twitching, bemused looking up and searching for an answer then feigning embarrassment to mask your smug sense of self-satisfaction aesthetic. I shit on his grave.

>> No.22050176

His books are just kind of dull, really.

>> No.22050178

>>22050140
I have committed to crossing my legs I hope carefully, ankle on knee, hands together in the lap of my slacks. My fingers are mated into a mirrored series of what manifests, to me, as the letter X. The interview room's other personnel include: the University's Director of Composition, its varsity tennis coach, and Academy prorector Mr. A. deLint. C.T. is beside me; the others sit, stand and stand, respectively, at the periphery of my focus. The tennis coach jingles pocket-change. There is something vaguely digestive about the room's odor. The high-traction sole of my complimentary Nike sneaker runs parallel to the wobbling loafer of my mother's half-brother, here in his capacity as Headmaster, sitting in the chair to what I hope is my immediate right, also facing Deans.
>respectively: a superfluous indication.
>periphery of my focus: who else's focus then? Periphery alone would have been sufficient.
>vaguely digestive: can anyone tell me what digestion smells like? Let alone how an apparently barely detectable smell of digestion would sit in my nostrils?
>Nike sneaker: Warning, this novel contains paid advertisements.
Honestly his writing is so bad. Dan Brown writes more logical metaphors than Saint DFW.

>> No.22050186

I think bloom just got mad cause Infinite Jest had more success than his novel in the same year

>> No.22050189

What's happening is part of a phenomenon I wrote about a couple of years ago when I was asked to comment on Wallace. I went to the Yale University bookstore and bought and read a copy of "Infinite Jest." I suffered a great deal in the process. The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed the incessant verbal tic "and but so." I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Wallace's mind is so governed by quirks and forced mannerisms that he has no other style of writing.

But when I wrote that in a newspaper, I was denounced. I was told that college freshmen would now read only David Foster Wallace, and I was asked whether that wasn't, after all, better than reading nothing at all? If Wallace was what it took to make them pick up a book, wasn't that a good thing?

It is not. "Infinite Jest" will not lead our children on to Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" or his "Crying of Lot 49." It will not lead them to DeLillo’s "White Noise" or John Barth's "The Sot-Weed Factor" or William Gaddis's "Recognitions."

Later I read a lavish, loving review of Infinite Jest by the same David Eggers. He wrote something to the effect of, "If these kids are reading Infinite Jest at 21 or 22, then when they get older they will go on to read David Eggers." And he was quite right. He was not being ironic. When you read "Infinite Jest" you are, in fact, trained to read David Eggers.

Our memes and our literature and our board culture are being dumbed down, and the causes are very complex. I'm 33 years old. In a lifetime of shitposting in English, I've seen the discussion of literature debased. There's very little authentic memery of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a thread in which the OP spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a soiboi. This isn't even good nonsense.

>> No.22050192

Harold Bloom was right about everything and only gets memed on (rightfully) because he seems like such a clown personally

>> No.22050212

Dfw has a special place in my heart. I only read a 200 pages of his book, didn't understand anything, it didn't pack me, but it did inspire me to drop out of school when I was a teenager.

>> No.22050213

Are there any critics like Harold Bloom today? Defending good literature against woke and the theorists? Not necessarily someone who agrees with Bloom on everything.

>> No.22050230

>>22050213
Me.

>> No.22050290

I wish he was still alive. Having an actual 160 iq genius debate Jordan Peterson would be hilarious

>> No.22050308

>>22050290
The risk is that they'd just sit and agree with each other on their common ground for an hour. Beterson making some freshman-tier comment on Shakespeare and getting a patronizing smile and a schooling from Harry would be extremely entertaining.

>> No.22050350

>>22050230
OK, tell me the best authors since 1991.

>> No.22050355

>>22050350
Me.

>> No.22050362

>>22050308
JBP seems like the kind of person that thinks the classics provide moral instruction. I'd bet they'd have a lively debate on that. I'd also like to see them debate whether Shakespeare invented psychoanalysis.

>> No.22050391

>>22050350
Józef Przezewski
Francesco Tagliapietra
Istvan Cs. Bartos

>> No.22050398

>>22050362
>Jordan refers to Poe thinking he's gonna get approval for referencing a classic

>> No.22050405

4chan, name a good book by Harold Bloom.

>> No.22050410

>He was raised as an Orthodox Jew in a Yiddish-speaking household, where he learned literary Hebrew
nevermind

>> No.22050417

>>22050405
I liked How to Read and Why. Not the polemics as much as his comments on the books.

>> No.22051688

>>22050410
>2011+12
>not knowing who Harold Bloom is
lurk more or go back

>> No.22051982

>>22050140
>Harold "if you can't do, give up on your dreams at the slightest adversity and teach" Bloom was right
ok.

>> No.22052000
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22052000

I know he wrote a shitload, basically a book about every canonical author, but where do I start with Bloom? What are the greatest hits? I feel like without his guidance I'm condemned to be a pseud.

>> No.22052027

>>22052000
>What are the greatest hits?
Anxiety of Influence and The Western Canon, going by reputation.

>> No.22052038

>>22051982
What was his dream?

>> No.22052062

>>22050140
Harold Bloom was right, but Stoop Kid was also right in predicting that New Sincerity would follow in Post-Modernism's wake, after man becomes exhausted by the incessant irony.
He wasn't so bad, poor guy. Had a lot of problems, none of them could have been solved by literature, and but so, we should forgive the lad. He was not quite genius but close to it. Imagine the crushing revelation that you're only two or three steps away from being a monumental genius, a titan of an era. The fate of the subgenius is quite tragic. Dumb enough to be left behind, bright enough to recognize the one who is without peer. He was Salieri. Who was his Mozart?

>> No.22052087

>>22050178
my thought is the faint scent of bile. dried vomit, something like that. Or even something that suggests that being in the room, one might be broken down into one's most elementary parts, which is appropriate, given that it's an interview room.

>> No.22052092

>>22050405
his poem anthology is comfy.

>> No.22052106

>>22050189
So much pointless waste and superfluity. The verbal tics are part and parcel of the novel's tone, atmosphere, and jutting-out; they give off the world's stuttering, teetering state. We don't need to be elitist here and place Pynchon and Gaddis in a pantheon that's hierarchically above and removed from Wallace.
>>22050192
He was wrong about Infinite Jest.

>> No.22052108

>>22050189
Underrated pasta

>> No.22052113
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22052113

>>22052038
He wanted to be a fiction writer, it is one of the worst books I have read and there is no competition.

>> No.22052114

>>22052106
>We don't need to be elitist here and place Pynchon and Gaddis in a pantheon that's hierarchically above and removed from Wallace.
It’s not elitist. It’s fact. Even if we remove Gaddis, Wallace isn’t anywhere close to Pynchon.

>> No.22052127

>>22052113
He’d already been teaching for over 20 years when he wrote that

>> No.22052148

>>22052127
And? It is still what he wanted to be and still horrendous.

>> No.22052159

The day Harold Bloom died, I saw his reflection in the mirror of my car door. A brief flash of his face smiling out at me. Later, when I got home, I saw the thread declaring his death. Thinking it the typical /lit/ hoax, I checked google. I was dismayed, until I remembered seeing his face. He had said goodbye to me. Why me? What was I to him, that he might use the last of his spirit to send me such a message? It was true that in some ways we had a natural kinship, that our respect for the canon had its many parallels, and that I had even been unintentionally working on a solution to his problem of the anxiety of influence. Perhaps in his gnostic madness, he was able to ask one last thing of the world before he crossed to the other side. To see the next poet in the canon. The man who would brandish that sputtering weak match, once a flame, once a weariless inferno. I knew in that instant, without hubris, without fear, that I was the man who would house his poor energies, the last urges of his heart before death's sting tormented him, forced him out evermore from his wrinkled flesh. I was Harold Bloom's chosen man. Me, the unknown, the unnamed, the untaught, the fool in the rural wasteland, the forgotten slave of the burdensome word. I still think of his face there, in the mirror. He smiled at me, that soft smile of condescension mingled with affection. I never knew him, never met him, never wrote him a letter, but he knew me. He sniffed out my smoke from the smolder.

>> No.22052199

>>22050189
> "Infinite Jest" will not lead our children on to Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" or his "Crying of Lot 49." It will not lead them to DeLillo’s "White Noise" or John Barth's "The Sot-Weed Factor" or William Gaddis's "Recognitions."

Except it literally did for me. And I was reading fucking Game of Thrones before it.

>> No.22052272

>>22052114
I'd rather read Wallace than Pynchon. I don't give a fuck. I've read Joyce and Gaddis in their entirety; I've read the most difficult literature ever written in several languages. Don't fuck with me on elitism, dude.

>> No.22052281

Harold Bloom. A guy who made a career off defending literature which doesn’t need defended, and saying nothing at all about it as he did it

Didn’t read what you wrote. Way too overwritten to be of value

>> No.22052285

>>22052087
Uh oh this guy is able to read what are we going to do anti-dfwsisters......
Did you know there's a woman who's angry about her relationship with him, and has come out about it years later now that hes unable to defend himself which is very brave of her? How about that, chud!?

>> No.22052304

>>22052199
It's pasta retard-anon

>> No.22052331

>>22052285
wasn't there some sort of metaphor that described the school as being a body, or having particular regions which were organs? Maybe this particular room is part of the stomach? I read very little of Infinite Jest, I didn't care for his depiction of the mental hospital's psychiatrist. the guy was way too attentive. Psychs working in those positions are so massively overworked you're lucky if they recall your name at the end of an abridged 14 minute session. Also, the ebonic sections were too much for me to bear. I'm too sensitive to language, and if I spend too much time in one, it rubs off on me. The faux futuristic ebonics and the 'and but so' stuff was just not worth my attention. Maybe someday, but the guy wasn't even the best of his period. Far better pomo works out there to be explored. Anyway, I can't read so I don't know what you're talking about.

>> No.22052335

>>22052281
>doesn’t need defended

>> No.22052337

>>22052148
He wanted to be Johnson.

>> No.22053051

>>22050140
he is aging badly, especially IJ. There's a lot of sociological discourse that was good and is now getting kind of superficial. Also, completely unable to write women, and to write meaningfully about them. He remains kind of a manchild until Oblivion, which is the only book where he was starting to get in touch with something deeper. Possibly also the Pale King. But for the rest, he's a fun, smart hipster who sounds really afraid to engage seriously with philosophical (metaphysical) insights, and you can really see the damage of sustained TV fruition in how stereotyped lots of his characters are.

>> No.22053088

>>22052272
based.

>> No.22053092

>>22053051
I get Pale King, but what depth does he start to approach in Oblivion? He definitely is just one of those chronic diagnosticians that hipsters like him tend to be. They'll tell you what's wrong with the world until the cows come home, but scoff at ancient solutions to these problems. Which is funny considering all he had to say about the dormant power of cliches.

>> No.22053097

>>22050140
>faux-melancholic
He killed himself.

>> No.22053242

>>22050178
You are legitimately retarded

>> No.22053370

>>22050140
turgid

>> No.22053413

>>22050178
>>respectively: a superfluous indication.
No, respectively is gramatically essential in that sentence
>>periphery of my focus: who else's focus then? Periphery alone would have been sufficient.
"Periphery" alone could also mean standing at the corner of the room. "Periphery of my focus" gives us an idea of the direction of his gaze.
>>vaguely digestive: can anyone tell me what digestion smells like? Let alone how an apparently barely detectable smell of digestion would sit in my nostrils?
"Vaguely" itself means it cannot be perfectly described, so your demand of an accurate smell is moot. At best I would say the room smelled like everyone had recently had food.
>>Nike sneaker: Warning, this novel contains paid advertisements.
Holy shit, it's almost as if the shallow nature of corporate consumption of goods and services is a central theme of Infinite Jest!

>> No.22053415

>>22050140
his journalism/essays are fantastic and if you dont think so yr just a complete fucking fag

>> No.22053448

>>22053413
!

>> No.22053467

>>22050140
Wow I never even thought of that. I should never read his books anymore. Bloom was right about him.

>> No.22054311

DFW essays and nonfiction > short stories >>> novels