{"id":9346,"date":"2016-01-18T22:07:11","date_gmt":"2016-01-19T02:07:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/?p=9346"},"modified":"2017-12-23T12:46:29","modified_gmt":"2017-12-23T16:46:29","slug":"episode-151-harold-bloom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/episode-151-harold-bloom","title":{"rendered":"Episode 151 – Harold Bloom"},"content":{"rendered":"

Virtual Memories Show #151: Harold Bloom<\/a><\/p>\n

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I visited Harold Bloom<\/a> in New Haven and we recorded a podcast. He recited poetry, and we talked about his new book, The Daemon Knows<\/a>\"\", the weight of age, the intifada of the young, and the epigraphs of his life. You should give it a listen!<\/a><\/p>\n

Here’s some of what he said:<\/p>\n

“I’m a reader and a teacher. Writing comes out of reading and teaching. Those are all three words for the same thing. I don’t think I’m going to be remembered at all; I don’t think any of us get remembered.”<\/p>\n

“Much as I permanently dislike T.S. Eliot’s prose — whether literary criticism (so-called) or his abominable religious writings . . . — or the whole essential nastiness of the man — misogynistic, anti-semitic, proto-fascist, despising Freud, full of a kind of contempt for humankind — at his best as a poet, he’s beyond argument.”<\/p>\n

“As you get old you get exhausted. You lose patience, not with your students, but with the nonsense that passes for criticism or passes for scholarship. For a while, I was proud to say I was the pariah of my former profession. Now I don’t even think I’m that. I think they’ve forgotten me, which is good.”<\/p>\n

“If in my youth you had asked me, ‘Harold, who is the better, more authentic poet: Alexander Pope or William Blake?’, I would have said Blake, of course. Now I’m not so sure. I read Pope with more pleasure, although I don’t know if Blake wants to be read for pleasure.”<\/p>\n

“I’m a Melamed. I don’t teach Tanakh, I don’t teach scripture; I teach the secular canon, but I take the same attitude towards it that Hillel or Akiva said, ‘Build a hedge about the scripture; be resolute in judgement; raise up many disciples.”<\/p>\n

“You want to be remembered by whoever’s going to recall you, for as long as they’re alive, with a certain degree of love. That’s about all you can hope for.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I went full Maron on my intro; the conversation with Bloom starts at the 12-minute mark. Oh,\u00a0and if you want to find out who he’s reading nowadays and get a list of all the books we talked about, join our Patreon<\/a> and become a monthly contributor to The Virtual Memories Show!<\/em>)
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