what do you think about Harold Bloom
>>24958576Fat jewish dead faggot
>>24958576He never had the makings of a varsity athlete. I had a good laugh reading one of his books where he talked about playing chess against Vladimir Nabokov, because Nabokov recognized which game by which famous player Bloom had gotten his moves fromNabokov sure was an autist
I don't
>>24958576Complete charlatan. He published all his Bloom's Interpretations in his own imprint, Chelsea House (which means self publishing), and he didn't even write half the shit under his name. It was mainly RAs and PhD students who sent to his anthologies, because they needed to be published, but he wasn't doing any other work other than introductions and prefaces which were barely over 4000 words.He lied about reading 1000 pages in an hour. That is impossible.
>>24958603isn't this just called 'knowing how to play chess'?
>>24958632But saying you know how to play chess isn't pretentious enough
>>24958576Not worth reading.(He has some sensible opinions, some sensible opinions pushed too far, and some silly opinions. His "Western Canon" is worse than useless because people think it's definitive and it's not even very good.)
>>24958836>it's not even very goodWhich one is good?
>>24958576As much shit as he gets for pivoting to a kind of pop great books mentality he was right about the values of canon-formation. But ultimately his own literary criticism was not very insightful, he could be fun to read but if you actually stopped and considered his analysis it usually was either shallow or misguided according to his own idiosyncrasies. The only decent bit of scholarship he ever wrote was that book on Wallace Stevens and that isn’t even all that good.
>>24958603>>24958632>When I was a Cornell freshman, I walked out of Vladimir Nabokov’s initial lecture in a course on the European novel. At that time, I had read only “The Real Life of Sebastian Knight” (1941) and “Bend Sinister” (1947), which had just come out in English. My adviser M. H. Abrams, a permanent influence on my life and work, was a friend of Nabokov and urged me to take the course. I recall that Nabokov began by unfavorably comparing Gogol and Jane Austen. He added that women just could not write. At seventeen, I was brash enough to walk out. This was observed by Nabokov and by his wife, Véra. That evening, I received a phone call from Mrs. Nabokov, inviting me to tea at their house at 957 East State Street, Ithaca, the next afternoon and gently telling me that her husband was displeased and intended to destroy me in a chess match after tea. I was only an amateur chess player and knew Nabokov’s reputation as a composer of chess problems. In some terror, I went over to the Cornell library and took out José Capablanca’s “Chess Fundamentals.” Relying on memory, I ingested five or six sample games. After tea the next afternoon, which was outdoors on a balmy September day, during which Nabokov did not speak at all, Mrs. Nabokov cleared everything away and the novelist led me over to a very ornate and large chessboard, placed in the shade of a tree. I had never seen such beautiful chessmen, and I was awed. Silently, Nabokov graciously indicated I had the first move, and I commenced one of Capablanca’s favorite games. I held my host off for about eight moves, during which he looked perplexed. Suddenly his face cleared and he cried out, ‘You young rascal, you have memorized Capablanca!’ With great relish he said, ‘Now I will destroy you in just four moves.’ He did exactly that. Without a word, he walked back into his house. I walked home.Probably fake, but hilarious.
>>24958576
