'Tools from one of the oldest professions'

[AdamSmith]

Great ad title on craigslist.

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condition: excellent

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I have a bad hearing problem and avoid the phone as I don't do well. We will have to contact by Email. Don't bother responding with a phone , Craiglist relay does not work right with a phone app and either you won't reach my Email or I won't . Use a computer.

http://boston.craigslist.org/sob/atq/4584822081.html

[AdamSmith]

Speaking of non sequiturs...

"You know, I’ve learned something over the years, picking up copies of my books in secondhand bookstores and in libraries, off people’s shelves. I’ve written so much and have now looked at so many of these books that I’ve learned a great deal. You also learn this from reviews and from things that are cited in other people’s books and so on, or from what people say to you—what you pride yourself on, the things that you think are your insight and contribution . . . no one ever even notices them. It’s as though they’re just for you. What you say in passing or what you expound because you know it too well, because it really bores you, but you feel you have to get through this in order to make your grand point, that’s what people pick up on. That’s what they underline. That’s what they quote. That’s what they attack, or cite favorably. That’s what they can use. What you really think you’re doing may or may not be what you’re doing, but it certainly isn’t communicated to others. I’ve talked about this to other critics, to other writers; they haven’t had quite my extensive sense of this, but it strikes an answering chord in them. One’s grand ideas are indeed one’s grand ideas, but there are none that seem to be useful or even recognizable to anyone else. It’s a very strange phenomenon. It must have something to do with our capacity for not knowing ourselves." -- Harold Bloom

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2225/the-art-of-criticism-no-1-harold-bloom

[AdamSmith]

From the same...

...[With Bloom,] talk is punctuated by strange exclamatories: Zoombah, for one—Swahili for “libido”—is an all-purpose flavoring particle, with the accompanying, adjectival zoombinatious and the verb to zoombinate."

INTERVIEWER

Are you still watching the TV evangelists?

BLOOM

Oh yes, I love the TV evangelists, especially Jimmy Swaggart. I loved above all his grand confession starting “I have sinned . . .,” which he delivered to all of America with his family in the front row of the auditorium. One of the most marvelous moments in modern American culture! I enjoyed it immensely. It was his finest performance. And then the revelation by the lady, when she published her article, that he never touched her! And he was paying her these rather inconsiderable sums for her to zoombinate herself while he watched. Oh dear. It’s so sad. It’s so terribly sad.

[AdamSmith]

At this point we wander into the kitchen, where Mrs. Bloom is watching the evening news.

BLOOM

Now let’s wait for the news about this comeback for the wretched Yankees. I’ve been denouncing them. They haven’t won since 1979. That’s ten years and they’re not going to win this year. They’re terrible . . . What’s this?

[TV: The Yankees with their most dramatic win of the year this afternoon . . . And the Tigers lost again.]

BLOOM

Oh my God! That means we’re just four games out. How very up-cheering.

MRS. BLOOM

Jessica Hahn.

BLOOM

Jessica Hahn is back!

[TV: . . . hired on as an on-air personality at a Top 40 radio station in Phoenix.]

BLOOM

How marvelous!

[TV: Playboy magazine had counted on Hahn to come through. She appeared nude in a recent issue.]

BLOOM

Splendid . . . Let us start again, Antonio. What were we talking about?

We return to the living room.

[AdamSmith]

INTERVIEWER

Could you give us your opinion of some novelists? We could start with Norman Mailer.

BLOOM

Oh, I have written on Norman a lot. I reviewed Ancient Evenings at some length in The New York Review of Books and I came forth with a sentence that did not please Norman, which I’m still proud of. It was, “Subscribers to the Literary Guild will find in it more than enough humbuggery and bumbuggery to give them their money’s worth.” I had counted up the number of homosexual and heterosexual bumbuggeries; I was rather impressed by the total, including, unless I misremember, at one point the protagonist or perhaps it was the godking successfully bumbuggering the lion. But then Norman is immensely inventive in this regard. He told me the last time I saw him that he is completing a manuscript of several thousand pages on the CIA. That should be an amazing nightmare of a book since Norman’s natural grand paranoid vision is one of everything being a conspiracy. So I should think that might be very interesting indeed. What can one say? Mailer is an immense imaginative energy. One is not persuaded that in the sheer mode of the fantastic, he has found his proper mètier. Beyond a doubt his most impressive single book is The Executioner’s Song, and that is, of course, very close indeed to a transcript of what we want to call reality. So it’s rather ironic that Norman should be more effective in the mode of Theodore Dreiser, giving us a kind of contemporary American Tragedy or Sister Carrie in the Executioner’s Song than in the modes he himself has wanted to excel in. I would think that he is likely to impress future literary historians as having been a knowing continuator of Dreiser, which is not an inconsiderable achievement.

[AdamSmith]

INTERVIEWER

And Saul Bellow?

BLOOM

He’s an enormous pleasure but he does not make things difficult enough for himself or for us. Like many others, I would commend him for the almost Dickensian exuberance of his minor male characters who have carried every one of his books. The central protagonist, always being some version of himself, even in Henderson, is invariably an absurd failure, and the women, as we all know, are absurdities; they are third-rate pipe dreams. The narrative line is of no particular interest. His secular opinions are worthy of Allan Bloom, who seems to derive from them. And I’m not an admirer of the “other Bloom,” as is well known. In general, Bellow seems to me an immensely wasted talent though he certainly would not appreciate my saying so. I would oppose to him a most extraordinary talent—Philip Roth. It does seem to me that Philip Roth goes from strength to strength and is at the moment startlingly unappreciated. It seems strange to say Philip is unappreciated when he has so wide a readership and so great a notoriety, but Deception was not much remarked upon and it’s an extraordinary tour de force.

INTERVIEWER

It was seen as an experiment or a sort of a leftover from—

BLOOM

—from The Counterlife. Well, The Counterlife, of course, deserved the praise that it received. It’s an astonishing book, though I would put it a touch below the Zuckerman Bound trilogy with its marvelous Prague Orgy postlude or coda. I still think My Life as a Man as well as, of course, Portnoy’s Complaint are remarkable books. There’s the great episode of Kafka’s whore in The Professor of Desire. I’ve written a fair amount about Philip. After a rather unfortunate personal book called The Facts, which I had trouble getting through, he has written a book about his late father called Patrimony, which is both beautiful and immensely moving, a real achievement. The man is a prose artist of great accomplishment. He has immense narrative exuberance, and also—I would insist upon this—since it’s an extremely difficult thing, as we all know, to write successful humorous fiction and, though the laughter Philip evokes is very painful indeed, he is an authentic comic novelist. I’m not sure at the moment that we have any other authentic comic novelist of the first order.

[AdamSmith]

INTERVIEWER

Do you have any response to the essay Tom Wolfe wrote urging the big, Victor Hugo–like novel?

BLOOM

He is, of course, praising his own Bonfire of the Vanities, which is a wholly legitimate thing for an essayist-turned-novelist to do. But with all honor to Tom Wolfe, a most amiable fellow and a former classmate of mine at Yale, and as someone who enjoyed reading The Bonfire of the Vanities, I found very little difference between it and his book of essays. He has merely taken his verve and gift for writing the journalistic essay and moved it a little further over the edge; but the characters are names on the page—he does not try to make them more than that. The social pressure is extraordinarily and vividly conveyed. But he’s always been remarkable for that. He’s still part of that broad movement which has lifted a particular kind of high-pitched journalism into a realm that may very nearly be aesthetic. On the other hand, I must say I would rather reread The Bonfire of the Vanities than reread another Rabbit volume by Mr. Updike. But then Mr. Updike and I, we are not a mutual admiration society.

[AdamSmith]

INTERVIEWER

Have you had run-ins with friends or writers whose books you’ve reviewed?

BLOOM

I wouldn’t say run-ins exactly. Mr. Styron, who has, of course, his difficulties and I sympathize with them, once at Robert Penn Warren’s dinner table, when I dared to disagree with him on a question of literary judgment, spoke up and said, Your opinion doesn’t matter, you are only a schoolteacher, which still strikes me as perhaps the most memorable single thing that has been said to me by any contemporary novelist.

[AdamSmith]

INTERVIEWER

You teach Freud and Shakespeare.

BLOOM

Oh yes, increasingly. I keep telling my students that I’m not interested in a Freudian reading of Shakespeare but a kind of Shakespearean reading of Freud. In some sense Freud has to be a prose version of Shakespeare, the Freudian map of the mind being in fact Shakespearean. There’s a lot of resentment on Freud’s part because I think he recognizes this. What we think of as Freudian psychology is really a Shakespearean invention and, for the most part, Freud is merely codifying it. This shouldn’t be too surprising. Freud himself says “the poets were there before me,” and the poet in particular is necessarily Shakespeare. But you know, I think it runs deeper than that. Western psychology is much more a Shakespearean invention than a Biblical invention, let alone, obviously, a Homeric, or Sophoclean, or even Platonic, never mind a Cartesian or Jungian invention. It’s not just that Shakespeare gives us most of our representations of cognition as such; I’m not so sure he doesn’t largely invent what we think of as cognition. I remember saying something like this to a seminar consisting of professional teachers of Shakespeare and one of them got very indignant and said, You are confusing Shakespeare with God. I don’t see why one shouldn’t, as it were. Most of what we know about how to represent cognition and personality in language was permanently altered by Shakespeare. The principal insight that I’ve had in teaching and writing about Shakespeare is that there isn’t anyone before Shakespeare who actually gives you a representation of characters or human figures speaking out loud, whether to themselves or to others or both, and then brooding out loud, whether to themselves or to others or both, on what they themselves have said. And then, in the course of pondering, undergoing a serious or vital change, they become a different kind of character or personality and even a different kind of mind. We take that utterly for granted in representation. But it doesn’t exist before Shakespeare. It doesn’t happen in the Bible. It doesn’t happen in Homer or in Dante. It doesn’t even happen in Euripides. It’s pretty clear that Shakespeare’s true precursor—where he took the hint from—is Chaucer, which is why I think the Wife of Bath gets into Falstaff, and the Pardoner gets into figures like Edmund and Iago. As to where Chaucer gets that from, that’s a very pretty question. It is a standing challenge I have put to my students. That’s part of Chaucer’s shocking originality as a writer. But Chaucer does it only in fits and starts, and in small degree. Shakespeare does it all the time. It’s his common stock. The ability to do that and to persuade one that this is a natural mode of representation is purely Shakespearean and we are now so contained by it that we can’t see its originality anymore. The originality of it is bewildering.

By the way, I was thinking recently about this whole question as it relates to the French tradition. I gave what I thought was a remarkable seminar on Hamlet to my undergraduate Shakespeare seminar at Yale. About an hour before class, I had what I thought was a very considerable insight, though I gather my students were baffled by it. I think that I was trying to say too much at once. It had suddenly occurred to me that the one canon of French neoclassical thought that was absolutely, indeed religiously, followed by French dramatists—and this means everyone, even Molière and Racine—was that there were to be no soliloquies and no asides. No matter what dexterity or agility had to be displayed, a confidante had to be dragged onto the stage so that the protagonist could have someone to whom to address cogitations, reflections. This accounts not only for why Shakespeare has never been properly absorbed by the French, as compared to his effect on every other European culture, language, literature, dramatic tradition, but also for the enormous differences between French and Anglo-American modes of literary thought. It also helps account for why the French modes, which are having so absurd an effect upon us at this time, are so clearly irrelevant to our literature and our way of talking about literature. I can give you a further illustration. I gave a faculty seminar a while ago, in which I talked for about two hours about my notions of Shakespeare and originality. At the end of it, a woman who was present, a faculty member at Yale, who had listened with a sort of amazement and a clear lack of comprehension, said with considerable exasperation, Well you know Professor Bloom, I don’t really understand why you’re talking about originality. It is as outmoded as, say, private enterprise in the economic sphere. An absurdity to have put myself in a situation where I had to address a member of the school of resentment! I was too courteous, especially since my colleague Shoshana Felman jumped in to try to explain to the lady what I was up to. But I realized it was hopeless. Here was a lady who came not out of Racine and Molière but in fact out of Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault. Even if she had come out of Racine and Molière, she could never have hoped to understand. I remember what instantly flashed through my head was that I had been talking about the extraordinary originality of the way Shakespeare’s protagonists ponder to themselves and, on the basis of that pondering, change. She could not understand this because it never actually happens in the French drama; the French critical mind has never been able to believe that it is appropriate for this to happen. Surely this is related to a mode of apprehension, a mode of criticism in which authorial presence was never very strong anyway, and so indeed it could die.

INTERVIEWER

Can you explain how you came to notice this about Shakespeare’s protagonists?

BLOOM

Yes, I can even remember the particular moment. I was teaching King Lear, and I’d reached a moment in the play that has always fascinated me. I suddenly saw what was going on. Edmund is the most remarkable villain in all Shakespeare, a manipulator so strong that he makes Iago seem minor in comparison. Edmund is a sophisticated and sardonic consciousness who can run rings around anyone else on the stage in King Lear. He is so foul that it takes Goneril and Regan, really, to match up to him . . . He’s received his death wound from his brother; he’s lying there on the battlefield. They bring in word that Goneril and Regan are dead—one slew the other and then committed suicide for his sake. Edmund broods out loud and says, quite extraordinarily (it’s all in four words), “Yet Edmund was belov’d.” One looks at those four words totally startled. As soon as he says it, he starts to ponder out loud. What are the implications that, though two monsters of the deep, the two loved me so much that one of them killed the other and then murdered herself. He reasons it out. He says, “The one the other poison’d for my sake / And after slew herself.” And then he suddenly says, “I pant for life,” and then amazingly he says, “Some good I mean to do / despite of mine own nature,” and he suddenly gasps out, having given the order for Lear and Cordelia to be killed, “Send in time,” to stop it. They don’t get there in time. Cordelia’s been murdered. And then Edmund dies. But that’s an astonishing change. It comes about as he hears himself say in real astonishment, “Yet Edmund was belov’d,” and on that basis, he starts to ponder. Had he not said that, he would not have changed. There’s nothing like that in literature before Shakespeare. It makes Freud unnecessary. The representation of inwardness is so absolute and large that we have no parallel to it before then.

INTERVIEWER

So that the Freudian commentary on Hamlet by Ernest Jones is unnecessary.

BLOOM

It’s much better to work out what Hamlet’s commentary on the Oedipal complex might be. There’s that lovely remark of A. C. Bradley’s that Shakespeare’s major tragic heroes can only work in the play that they’re in—that if Iago had to come onto the same stage with Hamlet, it would take Hamlet about five seconds to catch onto what Iago was doing and so viciously parody Iago that he would drive him to madness and suicide. The same way, if the ghost of Othello’s dead father appeared to Othello and said that someone had murdered him, Othello would grab his sword and go and hack the other fellow down. In each case there would be no play. Just as the plays would make mincemeat of one another if you tried to work one into the other, so Shakespeare chops up any writer you apply him to. And a Shakespearean reading of Freud would leave certain things but not leave others. It would make one very impatient, I think, with Freud’s representation of the Oedipal complex. And it’s a disaster to try to apply the Freudian reading of that to Hamlet.

[AdamSmith]

INTERVIEWER

Have you ever acted Shakespeare?

BLOOM

Only just once, at Cornell. I was pressed into service because I knew Father Falstaff by heart. But it was a disaster. I acted as though there were no one else on stage, something that delights my younger son when I repeat it. As a result, I never heard cues, I created a kind of gridlock on stage. I had a good time, but no one else did. Not long ago President Reagan, who should be remembered only for his jokes because his jokes I think are really very good, was asked how it was he could have managed eight years as president and still look so wonderful. Did you see this?

INTERVIEWER

No.

BLOOM

It was in the Times. He said, “Let me tell you the story about the old psychiatrist being admired by a young psychiatrist who asks, ‘How come you still look so fresh, so free of anxiety, so little worn by care, when you’ve spent your entire life sitting as I do every day, getting worn out listening to the miseries of your patients?’ To which the older psychiatrist replies, ‘It’s very simple, young man. I never listen.’ ” Such sublime, wonderful, and sincere self-revelation on the part of Reagan! In spite of all one’s horror at what he has done or failed to do as President, it takes one’s breath away with admiration. That’s the way I played the part of Falstaff. I’m occasionally asked by old friends, who don’t yet know me well enough, if I had ever considered becoming a psychoanalyst. I look at them in shock and say, Psychoanalyst! My great struggle as a teacher is to stop answering my own questions! I still think, though no one in the world except me thinks so and no one’s ever going to give me an award as a great teacher, I’m a pretty good teacher, but only in terms of the great Emersonian maxim “that which I can receive from another is never tuition but only provocation.” I think that if the young woman or man listens to what I am saying, she or he will get very provoked indeed.

INTERVIEWER

Do you ever teach from notes? Or do you prefer to improvise?

BLOOM

I have never made a note in my life. How could I? I have internalized the text. I externalized it in different ways at different times. We cannot step even once in the same river. We cannot step even once in the same text.

[AdamSmith]

INTERVIEWER

What do you think of creative-writing workshops?

BLOOM

I suppose that they do more good than harm, and yet it baffles me. Writing seems to me so much an art of solitude. Criticism is a teachable art, but like every art it too finally depends upon an inherent or implicit gift. I remember remarking somewhere in something I wrote that I gave up going to the Modern Language Association some years ago because the idea of a convention of twenty-five or thirty thousand critics is every bit as hilarious as the idea of going to a convention of twenty-five thousand poets or novelists. There aren’t twenty-five thousand critics. I frequently wonder if there are five critics alive at any one time. The extent to which the art of fiction or the art of poetry is teachable is a more complex problem. Historically, we know how poets become poets and fiction writers become fiction writers—they read. They read their predecessors and they learn what is to be learned. The idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me.

[AdamSmith]

INTERVIEWER

Do you think that the word processor has had or is having any effect on the study of literature?

BLOOM

There cannot be a human being who has fewer thoughts on the whole question of word processing than I do. I’ve never even seen a word processor. I am hopelessly archaic.

INTERVIEWER

Perhaps you see an effect on students’ papers then?

BLOOM

But for me the typewriter hasn’t even been invented yet, so how can I speak to this matter? I protest! A man who has never learned to type is not going to be able to add anything to this debate. As far as I’m concerned, computers have as much to do with literature as space travel, perhaps much less. I can only write with a ballpoint pen, with a Rolling Writer, they’re called, a black Rolling Writer on a lined yellow legal pad on a certain kind of clipboard. And then someone else types it.

INTERVIEWER

And someone else edits?

BLOOM

No one edits. I edit. I refuse to be edited.

INTERVIEWER

Do you revise much?

BLOOM

Sometimes, but not often.

INTERVIEWER

Is there a particular time of day when you like to write?

BLOOM

There isn’t one for me. I write in desperation. I write because the pressures are so great, and I am simply so far past a deadline that I must turn out something.

INTERVIEWER

So you don’t espouse a particular work ethic on a daily basis?

BLOOM

No, no. I lead a disordered and hurried life.

INTERVIEWER

Are there days when you do not work at all?

BLOOM

Yes, alas, alas, alas. But one always thinks about literature. I don’t recognize a distinction between literature and life. I am, as I keep moaning, an experimental critic. I’ve spent my life proclaiming that what is called “critical objectivity” is a farce. It is deep subjectivity which has to be achieved, which is difficult, whereas objectivity is cheap.

[AdamSmith]

INTERVIEWER

What is it that you think keeps you from writing when you’re unable to write?

BLOOM

Despair, exhaustion. There are long periods when I cannot write at all. Long, long periods, sometimes lasting many years. Sometimes one just has to lie fallow. And also, you know, interests change. One goes into such different modes. What was incredibly difficult was the commentary on the J-Writer, which underwent real change for me as I became more and more convinced that she was a woman, which made some considerable difference. I mean, obviously it’s just a question of imagining it one way or another. No one will ever demonstrate it, that he was a man or she was a woman. But I find that if I imagine it that J was a woman, it produces, to me, more imaginatively accurate results than the other way around.

INTERVIEWER

But do you think that the importance of the J-Writer’s being a woman has been exaggerated?

BLOOM

Oh, immensely exaggerated. In an interview that was published in The New York Times, the extremely acute Richard Bernstein allowed me to remark at some length on my strong feeling, more intense than before, that on the internal, that is to say psychological and literary evidence, it is much more likely to have been a woman than a man. I also said—I believe this quite passionately—that if I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t have mentioned the putative gender of the author. It has served as a monstrous red herring that has diverted attention away from what is really controversial and should be the outrage and scandal of the book, which is the fact that the god—the literary character named Yahweh or God—has absolutely nothing in common with the God of the revisionists in the completed Torah and therefore of the normative Jewish tradition and of Christianity and Islam and all their branches.

INTERVIEWER

Certainly that aspect of the book has caught the notice of the normative Jewish reviewers.

BLOOM

The normative Jewish reviewers have reacted very badly, in particular Mr. Robert Alter. And the other Norman Podhorrors–type review was by his henchman, Neil Kozody, a subscriber to the Hotel Hilton Kramer criteria. (The marvelous controversialist Gore Vidal invariably refers to that dubiety as the Hotel Hilton Kramer.) Mr. Kozody, in playing Tonto to the Lone Ranger, went considerably further than Mr. Alter in denouncing me for what he thought was my vicious attack on normative Judaism. And indeed, I’ve now heard this from many quarters, including from an absurd rabbinical gentleman who reviewed it in Newsday and proclaimed, “What makes Professor Bloom think there was such a thing as irony three thousand years ago?”—which may be the funniest single remark that anyone could make about this or any other book.

But I’m afraid it isn’t over. It’s just beginning. There was a program at Symphony Space, where Claire Bloom and Fritz Weaver read aloud from the Bible, and I spoke for ten minutes at the beginning and end. I got rather carried away. In the final ten minutes I allowed myself not only to answer my normative Jewish critics, but to start talking about what I feel are the plain spiritual inadequacies for a contemporary intellectual Jewry. It has been subsequently broadcast, and all hell may break loose. Many a rabbi and Jewish bureaucrat has been after my scalp.

INTERVIEWER

What did you say?

BLOOM

Well, I allowed myself to tell the truth, which is always a great mistake. I said that I could not be the only contemporary Jewish intellectual who was very unhappy indeed that the Holocaust had been made part of our religion. I did not like this vision of six million versions of what the Christians call Jesus, and I did not believe that if this was going to be offered to me as Judaism it would be acceptable. I also allowed myself to say that the god of the J-Writer seems to me a god in whom I scarcely could fail to believe, since that god was all of our breath and vitality. Whereas what the Redactor, being more a censor than an author of the Hebrew Bible, and the priestly authors and those that came after in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic tradition, gave us are simply not acceptable to a person with literary sensibility or any high spirituality at this time.

[AdamSmith]

INTERVIEWER

How have you found being in the public eye? The Book of J is your first book on the best-seller list.

BLOOM

Though it’s the first time, I’m informed, that a work of literary criticism or commentary has been on the best-seller list, it has not been a pleasant experience.

INTERVIEWER

How so?

BLOOM

I did not, on the whole, relish the television and radio appearances, which I undertook because of the plain inadequacies of the publisher. The people who work for that publisher did the best they could, but they were understaffed, undermanned, never printed enough books, and have most inadequate advertising. I know that all authors complain about that, but this is manifest.

INTERVIEWER

You were on Good Morning America of all things.

BLOOM

I was on Good Morning America, I was on Larry King, and many others. I must say that I came away with two radically opposed insights. One is the remarkably high degree of civility and personal civilization of both my radio and TV interlocutors. In fact, they’re far more civilized and gentlemanly or gentlewomanly than journalistic interviewers usually are, and certainly more so than the so-called scholarly and academic reviewers, who are merely assassins and thugs. But also, after a lifetime spent teaching, it was very difficult to accept emotionally that huge blank eye of the TV camera, or the strange bareness of the radio studio. There is a terrible unreality about it that I have not enjoyed at all.

[AdamSmith]

INTERVIEWER

You have mentioned you might write on the aesthetics of outrage as a topic.

BLOOM

Yes, the aesthetics of being outraged. But I don’t mean being outraged in that other sense, you know, that sort of postsixties phenomenon. I mean in the sense in which Macbeth is increasingly outraged. What fascinates me is that we so intensely sympathize with a successful or strong representation of someone in the process of being outraged, and I want to know why. I suppose it’s ultimately that we’re outraged at mortality, and it is impossible not to sympathize with that.

INTERVIEWER

This is a topic that would somehow include W. C. Fields.

BLOOM

Oh yes, certainly, since I think his great power is that he perpetually demonstrates the enormous comedy of being outraged. I have never recovered from the first time I saw the W. C. Fields short, The Fatal Glass of Beer. It represents for me still the high point of cinema, surpassing even Groucho’s Duck Soup. Have you seen The Fatal Glass of Beer? I don’t think I have the critical powers to describe it. Throughout much of it, W. C. Fields is strumming a zither and singing a song about the demise of his unfortunate son, who expires because of a fatal glass of beer that college boys persuade the abstaining youth to drink. He then insults a Salvation Army lassie, herself a reformed high-kicker in the chorus line, and she stuns him with a single high kick. But to describe it in this way is to say that Macbeth is about an ambitious man who murders the King.

[AdamSmith]

INTERVIEWER

Can essays like Hazlitt’s or Ruskin’s or Pater’s still be written today?

BLOOM

Most people would say no. I can only say I do my best. That’s as audacious a thing as I can say. I keep saying, though nobody will listen, or only a few will listen, that criticism is either a genre of literature or it is nothing. It has no hope for survival unless it is a genre of literature. It can be regarded, if you wish, as a minor genre, but I don’t know why people say that. The idea that poetry or, rather, verse writing, is to take priority over criticism is on the face of it absolute nonsense. That would be to say that the verse-writer Felicia Hemans is a considerably larger figure than her contemporary William Hazlitt. Or that our era’s Felicia Hemans, Sylvia Plath, is a considerably larger literary figure than, say, the late Wilson Knight. This is clearly not the case. Miss Plath is a bad verse writer. I read Knight with pleasure and profit, if at times wonder and shock. These are obvious points but obviously one will have to go on making them. Almost everything now written and published and praised in the United States as verse isn’t even verse, let alone poetry. It’s just typing, or word processing. As a matter of fact, it’s usually just glib rhetoric or social resentment. Just as almost everything that we now call criticism is in fact just journalism.

INTERVIEWER

Or an involvement with what you refer to as the “easier pleasures.” What are these easier pleasures?

BLOOM

Well, I take the notion from my friend and contemporary Angus Fletcher, who takes it from Shelley and Longinus. It’s perfectly clear some very good writers offer only easier pleasures. Compare two writers exactly contemporary with one another—Harold Brodkey and John Updike. Updike, as I once wrote, is a minor novelist with a major style. A quite beautiful and very considerable stylist. I’ve read many novels by Updike, but the one I like best is The Witches of Eastwick. But for the most part it seems to me that he specializes in the easier pleasures. They are genuine pleasures, but they do not challenge the intellect. Brodkey, somewhat imperfectly perhaps, does so to a much more considerable degree. Thomas Pynchon provides very difficult pleasures, it seems to me, though not of late. I am not convinced, in fact, that it was he who wrote Vineland. Look at the strongest American novelist since Melville, Hawthorne, and James. That would certainly have to be Faulkner. Look at the difference between Faulkner at his very best in As I Lay Dying and at his very worst in A Fable. A Fable is nothing but easier pleasures, but they’re not even pleasures. It is so easy it becomes, indeed, vulgar, disgusting, and does not afford pleasure. As I Lay Dying is a very difficult piece of work. To try to apprehend Darl Bundren takes a very considerable effort of the imagination. Faulkner really surpasses himself there. It seems to me an authentic instance of the literary sublime in our time. Or, if you look at modern American poetry, in some sense the entire development of Wallace Stevens is from affording us easier pleasures, as in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” and before that “Sunday Morning,” to the very difficult pleasures of “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” and then the immensely difficult pleasures of a poem like “The Owl in the Sarcophagus.” You have to labor with immense intensity in order to keep up. It is certainly related to the notion propounded by both Burckhardt and Nietzsche, which I’ve taken over from them, of the agonistic. There is a kind of standard of measurement starting with Plato on through Western thought where one asks a literary work, implicity, to answer the question “more, equal to, or less than?” In the end, the answer to that question is the persuasive force enabling a reader to say, I will sacrifice an easier pleasure for something that takes me beyond myself. Surely that must be the difference between Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, an enigmatic and to me in many ways unequal play. I get a lot more pleasure out of Barabas than I do out of the equivocal Shylock, but I’m well aware that my pleasure in Barabas is an easier pleasure, and that my trouble in achieving any pleasure in reading or viewing Shylock is because other factors are getting in the way of apprehending the Shakespearean sublime. The whole question of the fifth act of The Merchant of Venice is for me one of the astonishing tests of what I would call the sublime in poetry. One has the trouble of having to accommodate oneself to it.

[AdamSmith]

INTERVIEWER

How do you manage to write so quickly? Is it insomnia?

BLOOM

Partly insomnia. I think I usually write therapeutically. That is what Hart Crane really taught one. I was talking to William Empson about this once. He never wrote any criticism of Crane, and he didn’t know whether he liked his poetry or not, but he said that the desperation of Crane’s poetry appealed to him. Using his funny kind of parlance, he said that Hart Crane’s poetry showed that poetry is now a mug’s game, that Crane always wrote every poem as though it were going to be his last. That catches something in Crane which is very true, that he writes each lyric in such a way that you literally feel he’s going to die if he can’t bring it off, that his survival not just as a poet but as a person depends upon somehow articulating that poem. I don’t have the audacity to compare myself to Crane, yet I think I write criticism in the spirit in which he wrote poems. One writes to keep going, to keep oneself from going mad. One writes to be able to write the next piece of criticism or to live through the next day or two. Maybe it’s an apotropaic gesture, maybe one writes to ward off death. I’m not sure. But I think in some sense that’s what poets do. They write their poems to ward off dying.

[AdamSmith]

INTERVIEWER

You’ve written that the Christian Bible is, on the whole, a disappointment.

BLOOM

The aesthetic achievement is so much less than that of the Old—or original—Testament. The New Testament is a very curious work from a literary point of view. So much of it is written by writers who are thinking in Aramaic and writing in demotic Greek. And that curious blend of Aramatic syntax with a Greek vocabulary is a very dubious medium. It’s particularly egregious in the Revelation of St. John the Divine, the Apocalypse, which is a very bad and hysterical and nasty piece of writing. Even the most powerful parts of the New Testament from a literary point of view—certain epistles of Paul and the Gospel of John—are not works that can sustain a close aesthetic comparison with the stronger parts of the Hebrew Bible. It is striking how the Apocalypse of John has had an influence out of all proportion to its aesthetic, or for that matter, I would think, its spiritual value. It is not only an hysterical piece of work, but a work lacking love or compassion. In fact, it is the archetypal text of resentment, and it is the proper foundation for every school of resentment ever since.

INTERVIEWER

Is belief anything more than a trope for you now?

BLOOM

Belief is not available to me. It is a stuffed bird, up on the shelf. So is philosophy, let me point out, and so, for that matter, is psychoanalysis—an institutional church founded upon Freud’s writings, praxis, and example. These are not live birds that one can hold in one’s hand. We live in a literary culture, as I keep saying. This is not necessarily good—it might even be bad—but it is where we are. Our cognitive modes have failed us.

INTERVIEWER

Can belief be as individual and idiosyncratic as fiction?

BLOOM

The religious genius is a dead mode. Belief should be as passionate and individual a fiction as any strong, idiosyncratic literary work, but it isn’t. It almost never is. Religion has been too contaminated by society, by human hatreds. The history of religion as an institutional or social mode is a continuous horror. At this very moment we see this with the wretched Mr. Rushdie, who, by the way, alas, is not much of a writer. I tried to read Midnight’s Children and found myself quite bored; I have tried to read The Satanic Verses, which seems to me very wordy, very neo-Joycean, very much an inadequate artifice. It is not much better than an upper-middle-brow attempt at serious fiction. Poor wretched fellow, who can blame him? There’s no way for him to apologize because the world is not prepared to protect him from the consequences of having offended a religion. All religions have always been pernicious as social, political, and economic entities. And they always will be.

[AdamSmith]

INTERVIEWER

I’ve heard that you occasionally listen to rock music.

BLOOM

Oh sure. My favorite viewing, and this is the first time I have ever admitted it to anyone, but what I love to do, when I don’t watch evangelicals, when I can’t read or write and can’t go out walking, and don’t want to just tear my hair and destroy myself, I put on, here in New Haven, cable channel thirteen and I watch rock television endlessly. As a sheer revelation of the American religion it’s overwhelming. Yes, I like to watch the dancing girls too. The sex part of it is fine. Occasionally it’s musically interesting, but you know, ninety-nine out of a hundred groups are just bilge. And there hasn’t been any good American rock since, alas, The Band disbanded. I watch MTV endlessly, my dear, because what is going on there, not just in the lyrics but in its whole ambience, is the real vision of what the country needs and desires. It’s the image of reality that it sees, and it’s quite weird and wonderful. It confirms exactly these two points: first, that no matter how many are on the screen at once, not one of them feels free except in total self-exaltation. And second, it comes through again and again in the lyrics and the way one dances, the way one moves, that what is best and purest in one is just no part of the creation—that myth of an essential purity before and beyond experience never goes away. It’s quite fascinating. And notice how pervasive it is! I spent a month in Rome lecturing and I was so exhausted at the end of each day that my son David and I cheerfully watched the Italian mtv. I stared and I just couldn’t believe it. Italian MTV is a sheer parody of its American counterpart, with some amazing consequences—the American religion has made its way even into Rome! It is nothing but a religious phenomenon. Very weird to see it take place.

[AdamSmith]

INTERVIEWER

Has the decision to be a critic . . . or it’s not really a decision, I suppose.

BLOOM

It’s not a decision, it’s an infliction.

INTERVIEWER

Has the vocation of criticism been a happy one?

BLOOM

I don’t think of it in those terms.

INTERVIEWER

Satisfying?

BLOOM

I don’t think of it in those terms.

INTERVIEWER

Inevitable only?

BLOOM

People who don’t like me would say so. Denis Donoghue, in his review of Rain the Sacred Truths, described me as the Satan of literary criticism. That I take as an involuntary compliment. Perhaps indeed it was a voluntary compliment. In any case, I’m delighted to accept that. I’m delighted to believe that I am by merit raised to that bad eminence.

INTERVIEWER

Are there personal costs to being the Satan of literary criticism?

BLOOM

I can’t imagine what they would be. All of us are, as Mr. Stevens said, “condemned to be that inescapable animal, ourselves.” Or as an even greater figure, Sir John Falstaff, said, “ ’Tis no sin for a man to labor in his vocation.” I would much rather be regarded, of course, as the Falstaff of literary criticism than as the Satan of literary criticism. Much as I love my Uncle Satan, I love my Uncle Falstaff even more. He’s much wittier than Satan. He’s wiser than Satan. But then, Shakespeare’s an even better poet than Milton.

[RA1]

Back to the original topic. This reminds me of the song:

Soldier, soldier, will you marry me with your musket, fife and drum?

How can I marry such a pretty little girl when I have no shoes to put on?

Off to the cobbler she did run.

Bought him the finest that was there.

Now, soldier, put them on.

Soldier, soldier, will you marry me, with your musket, fife and drum?

How can I marry such a pretty little girl when I have no coat to put on?

ETC. To the final verse:

Soldier, soldier, will you marry me with your musket, fife and drum?

How can I marry such a pretty little girl with a wife and child at home?

Jimmy Swaggert + Mickey Gilley + Jerry Lee Lewis were all cousins from Ferriday, Louisiana. They were all locally viewed as wild children and destined for "no good". As it happens, my father spent his years from about 1 year old until about 12 or so years old in Ferriday. He was older than those cousins but still kept up with them via the news + other relatives stories and he told me and my sister all or at least some.

Small world and what goes around, comes around.

Best regards,

RA1

[Suckrates]

Where the Fuck are the Nudie pics ????

[AdamSmith]

Where the Fuck are the Nudie pics ????

Bait & switch!