Whipped Cream Difficulties

I’m sorry I’m a little late on these: I had one of those “don’t feel much like blogging” days yesterday.

Harold Bloom, noted critic.

Professor Bloom was frequently called the most notorious literary critic in America. From a vaunted perch at Yale, he flew in the face of almost every trend in the literary criticism of his day. Chiefly he argued for the literary superiority of the Western giants like Shakespeare, Chaucer and Kafka — all of them white and male, his own critics pointed out — over writers favored by what he called “the School of Resentment,” by which he meant multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, neoconservatives and others whom he saw as betraying literature’s essential purpose.

…

Armed with a photographic memory, Professor Bloom could recite acres of poetry by heart — by his account, the whole of Shakespeare, Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” all of William Blake, the Hebraic Bible and Edmund Spenser’s monumental “The Fairie Queen.” He relished epigraphs, gnomic remarks and unusual words: kenosis (emptying), tessera (completing), askesis (diminishing) and clinamen (swerving).
He quite enjoyed being likened to Samuel Johnson, the great 18th-century critic, essayist, lexicographer and man about London, who, like Professor Bloom (“a Yiddisher Dr. Johnson” was one appellation), was rotund, erudite and often caustic in his opinions. (Professor Bloom even had a vaguely English accent, his Bronx roots notwithstanding.)Or if not Johnson, then the actor Zero Mostel, whom he resembled.
“I am Zero Mostel!” Professor Bloom once said.

John Giorno, avant-garde poet. Back when I shopped for compact discs, I used to see copies of “You’re the Guy I Want to Share My Money With” all over the place. Never bought one, though: I’m a big Laurie Anderson fan, but how often was I going to listen to spoken word stuff by Giorno and William S. Burroughs? Probably not very often, was my considered opinion.

(There’s a little bit of Giorno available from iTunes, mostly as tracks on compilation albums. They do have “The Best of William S. Burroughs from Giorno Poetry Systems”, but that’s $40 for 69 tracks.)

NYT obit for Robert Forster, just for the historical record.

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