Harold Bloom interview in.......VIce?
The preface and interview in this is as good an explanation of why I’m so demented in my discussion of any art….
http://www.viceland.com/int/v15n12/htdocs/harold-bloom-431.php?source=homepagefeature
The crux of his work and this interview is surrounding how literary criticism has gone away from a strict reading and judgement of the linguistic and metaphorical quality of a work of literature and gauged too much on all these other socio-cultural, gender, race, geographic, etc. factors.
In grad school for English lit this was the schizophrenic discussion and climate which scarred me for life regarding all art. Everything was either taught with Bloom like bludgeon insisting that only the classics or work that apes the classics has any worth and that any external factors are meaningless (which I don’t agree with) or academic readings of absolutely crappy books that were deemed worthy of discourse simply because judgement of them was graded on a curve due to other factors (which I also don’t agree with. In short I was constantly being told I sucked because some of the most classic books bored me because there was nothing to relate to in them for me, or that I sucked because I thought a more current book was not very good outside of the fact that it was written by a Ugandan hermaphrodite base jumper or some such thing.
And this pretty much is my internal push and pull on all art, but in my case mostly music but also movies and literature. Can something be judged simply on it’s merits any more? Or is it impossible to assess something without taking into account ones own experiences and cultural and personal biases as well as those of the person(s) creating the art. How do you judge something created decades or centuries ago in another place and time against something created today in a completely different climate without allowing exceptions.
Needless to say I don’t have the answers, but given some of the discussions I engage in on here and elsewhere I figured this is as good an explanatory piece as any as to why I seem so obsessed and unhinged when it comes to art.
Comments
I really do love Vice magazine. Whether they’re filling a jar with gross shit and letting it sit under the sun or interviewing literary or photography legends, they always capture my interest.
As for the article, Bloom, and lit-crit at large, there was one line from Bloom in the article that really caught my attention:
> Without a real teacher, an authentic teacher, a real mentor, it’s very difficult for anyone to get started.
This really had me thinking because it very much reflects my line of thinking on a lot of things. I very much appreciate the teacher/student relationship and have gotten a lot out of it. Even now, I’m always looking for teacher-types to tell me about shit I wouldn’t ordinarily have known. Working with one guy at work in particular, Dave, has been incredibly good for my film catalog.
I realized after reading the article that I haven’t read anything of any real substance since college when I had teachers to push me into reading and guide me towards figuring out what makes a book special. I don’t know that I am literate enough to finding the way on my own.
That said, the aforementioned Dave also pushed me into reading Ulysses. I even got the annotated companion book that explains all the jokes and puns and references. After maybe five pages, I threw my hands up in disgust. How is that considered reading where I have to look up a minimum of 20 footnotes a page to get what makes a book so great?
So maybe I just need a teacher with lower standards.
As a teacher, I don’t see that much in the teacher/student relationship. Most of the time I’m telling kids to sit down.
Clearly I should be your teacher.
hahahahhahahah! It’s true. I do have trouble with that.
John said:I really do love Vice magazine. Whether they’re filling a jar with gross shit and letting it sit under the sun or interviewing literary or photography legends, they always capture my interest.
for some reason, i always thought Vice was a hip-hop magazine. then i realized all the while i was thinking of Vibe.
While a teacher student relationship can be helpful I found that the peer relationship was more so. I got more out of the post-class bullshit sessions over drinks at the bar off campus or even just hearing other people’s thoughts in the classroom setting than I did from any one individual teacher. I think that having discussions beyond just the text on the page is awesome but it doesn’t necessarily have to come from someone in a position of authority as it does have to come from someone other than yourself.
That could also have to do with the fact that this whole critical divide that he speaks of was first rearing it’s ugly head (or at the very least reaching it’s nadir) when I was in grad school in the early-mid 90’s so all the professors were digging themselves into their respective camps/schools of thought and all seemed to have an agenda, whether that agenda was multi-culural exceptionalism or dogmatic claccisism to the exclusion of all others.
I’m in the same boat though in that I have not read nearly as much as I should have since leaving an academic environment.
We should start a scrabbled book club. Would anyone be into that?
I would definitely be. That’s a phenomenal idea.