Hey Harold Bloom, You’re a Liar…
Wednesday, May 7th by Shane
I also have some humorous things to say about your physical appearance
Ok, so in this insane, rambling interview Bloom bellyflops on Harry Potter, Maya Angelou, Stephen King, a million other people, calls himself “Professor Moldy Fig” and then brags about how he’s never heard of People magazine. Man, what a dick. Oh, and the liar thing. He said he used to read a thousand pages an hour and now only reads 500 pages an hour. He does this with serious literature and retains everything. What a lying liar who lies a lot. He should take Pat Robertson on in a leg press contest. Why do old people think they can make up obviously fake stuff and people aren’t going to call them on it? I can’t wait until our elders actually understand what the internet is.
That last bit of sweetness came from my friend Tim, and this story about Princeton University Press editors swilling moonshine while checking for typos came from The Syntax of Things. Seriously, people, we’re talking a 245-page book with over 90 spelling and grammar errors. Time for some basic division- at least two typos Every Page. Princeton said they gave it to an inexperienced copy editor, and by that I assume they mean “We just threw the thing in the printer. You guys read this stuff?”. They then fall back on their hundred and three years of not one typo ever or something. Any bored nerd wanna go through their collections and prove them wrong?
China keeps pissing me off in the weirdest ways.
And finally, writers need to be readers. They need to be. Sorry, but the idea that reading will make you unoriginal or derivative is merely an excuse made by unoriginal and derivative writers. The point is that nothing is wholly original (here’s your blatantly obvious tip for the day) and to spend your life worried that every word you write may have a passing parallel to something jotted down by John Banville is just going to drive you crazy. And what does it matter; Bloom’s gonna hate it anyways.
May 13th, 2008 at 5:14 am
Not to take away from most of your insightful critique or anything, but for a book of 245 pages to have “at least two typos Every Page”, there’d need to be at least 490 typos in the book.
On average, a book of 245 pages with 90 typos has fewer than one typo every two and a half pages.
May 14th, 2008 at 6:22 am
Bloom is getting crotchety, but he is a pretty amazing intellectual mind. There are many people who’ve witnessed him as an undergrad recite Hart Crane’s poetry backwords word-for-word. Pretty impressive even if he has become an industry unto himself.
May 15th, 2008 at 5:33 pm
[…] one heart in an effort to find some synthesis between heart and head certainly results in ill-thought douchery from the “important” critics. And I would like to think that an enlightened reader […]