Dear Annie and Lindsay
I was earlier going through a 2016-17 Moleskine commonplace book I kept, and came across the following passages I transcribed from Harold Bloom’s book, How to Read and Why. I hope you may enjoy at…
Tag: Harold Bloom
Reading Jewish
In 1994, I purchased Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon, and would peruse it from time to time, and pick a book off of Bloom’s four lists. He got me back to Shakespeare and sparked…
Imagine: The Macbeths Coming over for Dinner
Shakespeare presents them as the happiest married couple in all his work. –Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, p. 518
A Healing Pleasure
Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or…
With Gratitude for Harold Bloom
In 1994 I purchased Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon after I had taken a leave of absence from my doctoral program in Religion and Society at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. Bloom offered…
What I Love about the US of America: Overture to an Unfinishable List
Martin Luther King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech, Riverside Church, NYC, April 1967; Route 50 in Nevada; Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass; Duke Ellington, “Take the ‘A’ Train”; Joey Neilsen, resister of Catholic high school homophobia; massive…
Endings/Continuings
The end of Yiddish, except as an academic pursuit or as a final nostalgia, is not at all Kafkaesque. Jewish history has many ironies and countless sorrows, as well as a panoply of cultural achievements…
Remembering Shammai
Shabes morning I fix a period for reading My three “rabbis” recently deceased— Harold Bloom, whose extended family on both sides perished in Europe Every boy but one in George Steiner’s lycée lived after the…
Dedication
Nathalie Vanderlinden takes a passion for Proust to a new, public level! Though Proust had a Jewish mother, he seems to me neither Christian nor Jewish. His wisdom is his own, and though it has…
What Is Vaster
In the early 1980s Harold Bloom noted about his experience of decades at Yale University that “[t]here is a profound falling away from what I would call ‘text-centeredness” among the current generation of American undergraduates,…