Trashing Harold Bloom

Everyone knows Harold Bloom; everyone has probably at one time or another had to read or buy some anthology or another 'edited' by him. For all you ppl who took oac music, our books were edited by Bloom.

For a guy who makes a bazillion dollars off the veneration of other people's genius I was torn as to if he was the big bad wolf knocking down anything that didn't fit into his exacting idea of 'good' work OR if he was someone who just geniunely loved within specific boundaries. Still, after reading Edward Said's new book, I laughed out loud when I read a thorough thumping of Bloom:

"This catholicity of vision is not at all what we have been getting from Harold Bloom, who has become the popular spokesman of the most extreme kind of dismissive aestheticism calling itself canonical humanism."

"In his incessant, grab-bag evocations of what he dismissively calls the school of resentment, Bloom includes everything said or written by the non-European, non-male, non-Anglo educated upstarts who don't happen to agree with his tiresome vatic trumpetings."

"Bloom's opinions about the humanistic canon show an absence rather than an invigorating presence of mind: he nearly always refuses to answer questions at public lectures, he refuses to engage with other arguments, he simply asseverates, affirms, intones. This is self-puffery, not humanism, and certainly not enlightened criticism" (27).

hahahahaha - i'm a fan. And read it aloud...it just flows off the tongue.