Dear diary,
Weirdness dictates. Not I but The Weird wanted this. I’m not referring to what is merely abnormal, spooky-freaky; I’m trying to say that although I keep intending to begin each new entry with an avalanche of reactions to the Roman poets I’ve recently been reading (Horace, and more Horace—I’ve moved from his odes to his satires and now I’m working through his epistles; after which I plan to tackle some Seneca, all for the first time; I’ve been provoked to this pleasant obligation by the poet M.P. Powers, whose name I set as a link because I wish more people knew of his work: the only thing that I regret about being an underground artist myself is that I don’t have the taste-maker’s MEGAPHONE that comes with cheap glitzy fame… for, if, instead of a small-time ship-log captain, I were, say, a Popular Soap Opera Sexpot, I could type a single status update commanding my followers to “Read book X!” and the multitudes would mob to that text like fruit flies on vinegar…) however a stubborn, eerie force takes my nightmare by the mane and spurs it north-north-west. So I’ll start like so:
Why are the footnotes in André Breton’s Manifestoes of Surrealism so often finer than the body text? —I preached an hour-long sermon on this subject to my sweetheart last night, so I’ll not waste more energy typing out my theories here this morning (I write at 6 a.m., trembling with unrest; my heart is faster than a hummingbird’s… No I’m not on drugs – in the words of Officer Rough, when he answers an inquiry about his “breathing,” which, to Officer Duke, “sounds strange,” from the 2013 film-of-the-eon Wrong Cops: “It’s nothing; I’m just cold.”)—here below, from Breton’s second manifesto, is the passage that sparked my wonder and admiration:
[The following is translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane.]
…to give up love, whether or not it be done under some ideological pretext, is one of the few unatonable crimes that a man possessed of some degree of intelligence can commit in the course of his life. […] the truth is that almost no one has the courage to affront with open eyes the bright daylight of love in which the obsessive ideas of salvation and the damnation of the spirit blend and merge, for the supreme edification of man. Whosoever fails to remain in this respect in a state of expectation and perfect receptivity, how, I ask, can he speak humanly?
[…] If any idea seems hitherto to have eluded all efforts to reduce it, to have resisted down to the present time even the most out-and-out pessimists, we think it is the idea of love, which is the only idea capable of reconciling any man, momentarily or not, with the idea of life.
This word—“love”—which all sorts of practical jokers have strained their wits to subject to every generalization, every possible corruption (filial love, holy love, love of country, etc.), is used by us here, it goes without saying, in its strictest sense, we are restoring it to its meaning which threatens a human being with total attachment […] What we have to say about it is, we hope, of a nature to dissuade the “pleasure” specialists from answering us, as well as the collectors of amorous adventures, the dashers after sensual delight…
[…] More than ever—since what we are discussing here are the possibilities of occultation of Surrealism—I turn toward those who are not afraid to conceive of love as the site of ideal occultation of all thought. I say to them: there are real apparitions, but here is a mirror in the mind over which the vast majority of mankind could lean without seeing themselves. Odious control does not work all that well. The person you love lives. The language of revelation says certain words to itself, some of which are loud, others soft, from several sides all at once. We must resign ourselves to learning it in snatches.
The fall of humankind. To fall in love. To consider love as a type of madness more sane than sanity, because bigger and far better than one’s mere being. To be water poured into a funnel and say “I will this direction of travel!” Amor fati: The embracing of fate. To desire the relinquishing of your volition to a superior benevolence. (Or is it malevolent? That question would only be asked by one out-of-love. That’s the danger about it: it’s purely quixotic.)
On the afternoon of that day when the most recent mass shooting bloodbath happened (I mean the one we all heard about from the news—no, not THAT mass shooting bloodbath, the OTHER mass shooting bloodbath), my sweetheart’s mem-mem sent her a text message stating starkly: “I love you.” Just so: a sentence ending with a period. I only mentioned the national tragedy because we (my sweetheart and I), after engaging in full minutes of semi-detective work (which is to say: lazy brainstorming), assume that that massacre was what provoked this declaration of “affection”; for the act was context-free, and there was no sequel beyond the smiley-face glyph that was sent in acknowledgement of my sweetheart’s parroted reply. —This leads me to blurt three questions:
- What type of love is this?
- What would Jesus do?
- What would Breton do?
More than once in his books, if my fast-failing memory is correct, Harold Bloom has occasion to quote the following maxim of Ludwig Wittgenstein:
Love is not a feeling. Love, unlike pain, is put to the test. One does not say: “That was not a true pain because it passed away so quickly.”
But now I’m off-track, derailed. I wanted to go from Breton’s courageous embrace of the fondest love (and fond as in Milton’s ‘Lycidas’: “Ay me, I fondly dream” [56] – Middle English fonned, foolish); AMOUR FOU… I’m talkin’ chivalrous, courtly, quixotic love — & I should add “so-called”; for I don’t intend to elevate any medieval European traditions; I mean only to evoke that total-takeover-of-the-self that reminds me of the LORD’s relation to prophets, like Amos (3:8) “The lion hath roared, who will not fear? the Lord GOD hath spoken, who can but prophesy?” or Jeremiah (20:9)
His word was like a raging fire in my heart,
Shut up in my bones;
I could not hold it in, I was helpless.
Yes I wanted to proceed from Breton’s valuation of mad-love to the Vita Nuova, “The New Life of Dante Alighieri,” because that was the next section in the book we’re hauling from park to park and reading aloud: the Library of America’s Collected Poems and Translations of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I did not know that Emerson made a complete version of this work – it made the perfect transition, or rather there was no transition at all, from Breton’s love passages to Dante’s:
Nine times already after my birth was the heaven of light returned to the same point in its proper gyration, when to my eyes first appeared the gracious lady of my mind, who was called Beatrice by many who did not know her name. [ . . . ] At that moment, I say verily the spirit of life which dwells in the secretest chamber of the heart did so quake that it appeared violently in my least pulses, and trembling said,
Ecce deus fortior me; veniens dominabitur mihi.
Behold a god stronger than I who cometh to rule me.At that moment, the animal spirit which dwells in the chamber into which all the sensuous spirits carry their perceptions, began to marvel much, &, speaking specially to the spirits of sight, said,
Now hath appeared our Supreme Good.
Apparuit jam Beatitudo nostra.At that moment, the natural spirit which dwells in that part where our nourishment is supplied, began to weep & weeping said,
Heu miser, quia frequenter impeditus ero deinceps.
Wo is me I am henceforth to have my way no longer.From that hour forth, I say, that, Love ruled my soul, which was so much disposed by him & he began to take over me so much lordship & governance, through the strength which my imagination gave to him, that it behoved me to do all his pleasure to the utmost…
I quote this at length because it’s a summit of all creation. While reading it yesterday, I found myself thinking: What if THIS were to be appended to the Holy Scriptures, as a sort of final word – or, even better, a most-recent word! And then I recalled the high appraisal that Harold Bloom, in The Western Canon, gives to Dante (albeit to his Divine Comedy, yet the point remains relevant) in his essay “The Strangeness of Dante”:
[NOTE. in the following excerpts, the terms “Yahwist” and “J writer” refer to the author of the strongest portions of the biblical books Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers – instead of these names, I suppose many modern churches would say “Moses”; I only note this because, where I live currently, almost nobody is familiar with the biblical scholarship that generated this terminology. Especially regarding literary discoveries, time moves glacier-slow in the city of Eagan.]
Nothing else in Western literature, in the long span from the Yahwist and Homer through Joyce and Beckett, is as sublimely outrageous as Dante’s exaltation of Beatrice, sublimated from being an image of desire to angelic status, in which role she becomes a crucial element in the church’s hierarchy of salvation. Because Beatrice initially matters solely as an instrument of Dante’s will, her apotheosis necessarily involves Dante’s own election as well. His poem is a prophecy and takes on the function of a third Testament in no way subservient to the Old and the New. Dante will not acknowledge that the Comedy must be a fiction, his supreme fiction. Rather, the poem is the truth, universal and not temporal. What Dante the pilgrim sees and says in the narrative of Dante the poet is intended to persuade us perpetually of Dante’s poetic and religious inescapability.
I also love what Bloom asserts about Dante’s “gracious lady of my mind”:
No single personage in Shakespeare, not even the charismatic Hamlet or the godlike Lear, matches Beatrice as an exuberantly daring invention. Only the J writer’s Yahweh and the Gospel of Mark’s Jesus are more surprising or exalted representations. Beatrice is the signature of Dante’s originality, and her triumphant placement well within the Christian machinery of salvation is her poet’s most audacious act of transforming his inherited faith into something much more his own.
What these couple excerpts say about Dante has stuck with me for lifetimes – I accept their observations about his accomplishment as an insinuation of every artist’s job; they’re at once a calling to and a manifestation of HARDEST LOVE. This is also why I can’t side with my fellow atheists in wanting to abolish religion: I’m more attracted to reclaiming the church – I view the concept of GOD the same way that Bernie Sanders sees the Democratic Party (yes I am indulging in an analogy knotted to our present bad-sad year of 2017): for the deity has one thing in common with what should be our leftmost faction: it’s like a giant machine that the wrong individuals are operating; I want to infiltrate its command center, oust the villains and pull the levers for beauty. Now here’s one last passage from Bloom:
I do not see how we can disengage Dante’s overwhelming poetic power from his spiritual ambitions, which are inevitably idiosyncratic and saved from being blasphemous only because Dante won his wager with the future within a generation after his death.
To win our wager with the future: imagine that. Mad love suffuses our frame, moves us to reclaim the evil robot that is attacking our galaxy, curtail its ugliness, and employ its immense laser-blaster to transmit our most fertile imaginations to our faraway ur-selves.
21 comments:
What is love?
Baby don't hurt me
Don't hurt me
No more
Hhahah. Thanks for the shout-out, Sir! Because I'm idiot, and half hungover, you're ship-log planted the above song in my head. There's a name for that in German: Ohrwurm. Trans: earworm. Nice essay. I think Bloom is a blowhard, but when he likes something I like, his observations are usually spot-on and thought-provoking. I also like that he thought David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest was 'just awful.' I only read the first few pages of it and that was enough. Wallace was an good essayist, but not a fiction writer. At least that's what I got out of those first few pages.
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Ah our tastes have hereto proven so eerily similar that it’s almost a relief to discover a difference of opinion. I’ve never been able to find anyone, either online or off (that is, “in real life”), who loves Bloom as I do (tho admittedly I haven’t intentionally searched – I’m sure there’s at least one fan club on social networking dedicated to him somewhere out there). In fact, I could change that above phrase “anyone who loves Bloom” to “anyone who does not loathe Bloom”; for especially when I read through the comments appended to, say, essays of his that appear in e-magazines, or public “reviews” of his books at online retailers, the vast majority are downright hostile to him. So I’m accustomed to trying to hide his influence on me, and to rephrase or minimize my references to him or to his books; but the above passage about Dante and Beatrice meant too much to me not to give it in full.
I’m always eager to hear any negative criticism of my favorites, because I yearn to learn more and expand my knowledge, so I hope that you feel free to let loose and tear Bloom apart, any time I tout him unduly. The same goes for Ammons, Ashbery, Stevens, etc.—all of whom I first learned about via Bloom. I don’t want to be stuck in my own Bloomian bubble; and I’ve always feared that my lack of exposure to counter-opinions (the risk of being a recluse) will leave my mind lopsided, so I presume that one of the healthiest things that could happen to me is for other intelligent readers to say “Wake up and look around: there is more to heaven and earth than is contained in your philosophy, Bryan, because your views all sprang from the same handful of poets and critics, and you’ve been hovering around them all your life, which has stunted your development!”
Now, having said that, I hope it’s not too shameful for me to admit that Harold Bloom is more important to me than any other mind alive. And I’ll venture the following prediction, only to have something for the record to be right or wrong about: I think that the future will judge Bloom to be the most important writer of our time—better than any of our poets or novelists or essayists or critics or etc.
I gauge that we live in an age of criticism, the age of the devourer rather than the prolific (to use again Blake’s dichotomy from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell); and what Bloom MAKES of the works that he appraises always reminds me, in the best way, of Oscar Wilde’s main idea from his dialogue The Critic as Artist – so, if I’m right about this, then Bloom has found a way to morph the devourer into the prolific. This idea enthralls me.
But the prevalent revulsion to Bloom gives me pause – I wonder what I see that others don’t; or what they see that I'm missing. I begin to take stabs at an explanation: I wonder if it makes a crucial difference where one BEGINS with Bloom. Because I know that my first encounter with him won me over spectacularly (I saw The Western Canon on the library shelf when I was just browsing, and I opened it right there, not expecting much because this type of scholarly book normally sickens me, but the “Preface and Preamble” and initial “Elegy” essay wholly transfixed me: I read through them right there standing in front of the shelf: they pinpointed what was abhorrent to me about the current state of colleges and even of my own high school's classes in “literature” which caused me to JUST SAY NO to the academy; and yet, more importantly, his WAY of appraising literature, what he looked for and how he defined what is superior in the realm of creative writing, rung perfect to me); and the next book of his that I decided to seek out converted me to the cause of literature permanently – How to Read and Why – I don’t think I’d have written a single book of my own if it weren’t for the fire that Bloom ignited in my spirit.
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But he wrote works in the earlier part of his career which are more academic in style. There was a sweet moment at a certain part of his life when he shifted toward writing for a more general audience of “common readers” – I tend to like his work from that period best. ...And yet I just now looked at a selected bibliography of his, and, now that I return from studying it, I realize that there are works from every period of his development which appeal to me greatly.
But I also wonder if people see Bloom as some sort of stuffy, dusty, sinister, foreboding professor. A gatekeeper, stern, unwelcoming. I don’t see this at all. The one I love is he who says:
I've been accused of bardolotry so much that I've made a joke out of it. As I am something of a dinosaur, I've named myself Bloom Brontosaurus Bardolator. It's not such a bad thing to be. [Source]
And he who says:
I left the English department twenty-six years ago. I just divorced them and became, as I like to put it, Professor of Absolutely Nothing. [Ibid.]
And (one last quote) he who says:
I am your true Marxist critic, following Groucho rather than Karl, and take as my motto Groucho’s grand admonition, “Whatever it is, I’m against it!” [from The Western Canon, “Elegiac Conclusion”; p.520]
The foundation of Bloom’s critical judgment attracts me – I have to give one last quote, even though the last “last quote” was supposed to be the last – I love the simple clarity of the following sentence (from the preface to the collections of critical essays that Bloom wrote for Chelsea House); I can’t think of how to better this:
I accept only three criteria for greatness in imaginative literature: aesthetic splendor, cognitive power, wisdom.
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AND, as for David Foster Wallace – again and again I’ve been urged by friends and acquaintances to read the novel that you mention, but I’ve never gotten around to it – not because of Bloom’s disparaging remarks (I always check everything out for myself; I don’t take Harold Bloom as a priest, I just appreciate how much time he saves me by pointing to the best creations) but because I have a billion books waiting to be read already. I pushed everything aside for Horace and the few other authors that we’ve recently been talking about, because I’ve been intending to familiarize myself with their work for years, and your enthusiasm provided the perfect mood and moment for me to get the most out of their works. But nobody’s ever given me a good specific reason to open DFW’s book, so I consider it something that I intend to try reading eventually, yet, as long as I lack any extra PUSH, I can’t give Jest priority over, say, Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, which is the last of Pynchon’s works that I’d like to peruse but which I keep getting torn away from… or even the thought of re-reading the essays of Montaigne, or abolishing my shameful ignorance of a couple tomes of Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, or re-reading Proust’s vast, vast, secular scripture – or revisiting the Bible or Shakespeare…
All of this ends up obscuring the sight of DFW from my purlieu.
Plus, honestly, after hearing SO much praise of DFW, I’ve begun to wonder: WHY exactly is that novel of his so popular? I wish that someone could explain, because I keep hearing people dote on the book and its author—and these pro-DFW voices, by the way, are people who I respect very much, from old friends to interviewers like Christopher Lydon (whose admiration seems to stem from the Boston connection) but admirers rarely quote the actual text of any passage, or give specific reasons for their zest – so I feel like someone who simply “didn’t get the memo”; and, as usual, I begin to suspect that it has something to do with the fact that I avoided the university.
I have read very little of Bloom, just a handful of second-hand quotes here and there, so I'm not in a position to say much that's insightful or critical of what he's put out there. I did however do a little internet search not long ago to see what he had to say about Charles Bukowski, and strangely there's no mention of him at all. This, to me, boggles the mind. It's like talking about 20th century painting and not mentioning Picasso, who was also innovative and said much in a very simple way. Bukowski may not have had what Bloom calls aesthetic splendor, but the cognitive power and wisdom were certainly there, along with soul (which I think is more important than aesthetics), and humor, and dissidence. Academics hated him. They tend to ignore him just like Bloom because he spoke out against them. But I think when time cleanses the doors of perception he'll be one of the lasting ones from our time. I hope so anyway. Either way, I can't help but wonder if Bloom's non-mentioning of him is because Bukowski's sleazy alcoholic post office lifestyle was too contrary to his own posh and comfortable NYC existence. What do you think? I know I should get better acquainted with his stuff, and what you say about him makes me think it even more, but this one thing very much peeves me.
p.s. I just want to clarify, when I say 'soul' another way of saying it is 'speaks to the gut.' 'soul' is a bit too abstract otherwise.
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Well, first, regarding what you say at the end “I should get better acquainted with his stuff” – I say: only pursue him if there’s a book or essay that he wrote which piques your interest; but don’t take my word for it. I fear that by praising Bloom so much in my last comment, it might have appeared that I was trying to tell you that you need to respect him or pay attention to his views – that’s not what I intended at all: My remarks were an attempt to be honest about my love for Bloom, which I felt I needed to voice, since, if I didn’t admit this, I might seem, by my silence, to accept and passively approve of your remark “I think Bloom is a blowhard…” (I admittedly wrote WAY too much, both there and here, thus exposing myself as a genuine blowhard, and proving that I’m nowhere near mad enough hahaha!) – so please dismiss all thought of Bloom, if he doesn’t naturally appeal to you. You and I have already expressed our mutual admiration of Emerson, who doesn’t give a fig about any artwork, however timeworn and well-respected, if that creation doesn’t speak to one’s own mind on one’s own terms. Neither Bloom nor any other artist is an exception to this demand.
Also, I should admit that I’ve never read Bukowski: I haven’t avoided him or prejudged him; I just don’t know his work – so I’m totally ignorant of its quality. This is perhaps fortunate for our conversation here, because if I HAD read his work and either loved it or hated it, this informed opinion might boost my rosy tinted shades to technicolor, whereas now I can provide a sanely sanitized, monochromatic response:
You yourself like Bukowski enough to compare him to Picasso (whom I love too, for the record: in fact, capital LOVE). But you say that you performed “a little internet search” which turned up “no mention… at all” by Bloom of Bukowski. So the question is: Why the omission? Bloom either doesn’t admire Bukowski, OR he does indeed like Bukowski but hasn’t yet found a publisher to pay him to write about him, OR something in between. Let’s take the worst-case scenario: We love Bukowski but Bloom hates him. If this hypothesis is true, then here’s what I say: We’re lucky and Bloom is unlucky. An example from my own life is this: I love rap and Bloom loathes rap. I am lucky to be able to experience the splendors of rap, whereas Bloom is unluckily barred from perceiving rap’s splendors. That is all.
No, that’s not all: there is one more boon for us. If we wish for Bukowski to receive his due respect, and Bloom has not performed the critical duties requisite for this to become a part of our reality, then a path of right-action is opened to us: WE can be the “voice crying in the wilderness” on behalf of Bukowski (or rap, or what we will). That’s what is so beautiful about the realm of textual artistry: The problems that are caused by words can be solved by words.
There is also this simple possibility, which struck me just now: We’ve already established how the previous age’s “Great Cham of Literature” fumbled Milton’s “Lycidas” and got Tristram Shandy wrong – for, as Horace admits: Even Samuel Johnson nods – therefore, when it comes to Bukowski, perhaps Harold Bloom is asleep at the wheel?
But we can take a lesson from the man. Bloom grew up in a time when certain poets were touted by the universities; these poets, whom Bloom disliked, dominated the universities. What did Bloom do? He used his words to tout OTHER poets who were more desirable to him. His first book was a full-length study of Shelley. A subsequent early book was a collection of essays on the rest of the Romantics; then he wrote a full-length study of William Blake specifically; he edited volumes of the criticism of his forerunners Ruskin and Pater; and then he published a full-length study of Yeats. (From what I understand, Bloom was most active, among the professors of what used to be the humanities, in gaining for Yeats his current sky-high standing. Which, if you ask my truth-meter, is well-deserved.)
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This reminds me of something that I remember reading about in a biography of James Joyce. I must paraphrase, so take it with a grain of salt. James was talking to his brother Stanislaus, who was complaining about the badness of a certain novel; and James Joyce’s reaction was to tell his brother that those feelings of contempt for this book, Stanislaus’ strong desire to “correct the stylistic errors” of that novel, constitute a divine calling for Stanislaus to create his OWN artistic composition: for the energy expended in denunciating an existing artwork would be better spent in forging a NEW CREATION, and the obverse of a censorious impulse is an idea upon which an original artwork may thrive. How this relates to Bloom is as follows:
We could either complain about Bloom’s omissions, OR we could use the same energy to write appreciations of our OWN favorites, to persuade the future generations to side with us. It’s all a great game of persuasion. And we should remember that the canon is an imaginary construct, in constant flux; it changes when professors choose to teach certain works to students, it also changes when poets reference other poets; etc. There are many ways that it changes. You can do your part to add Bukowski to the canon by including, alluding to, and referencing him in your own novels and poems. This is in addition to writing critical essays in praise of Bukowski, or whoever else you believe in. Persuade futurity! That’s why I incessantly promote Wrong Cops (2013) – I think it’s the film of our epoch, but I know of no critic (not even Bloom!) who’s reviewed it, let alone given it the acclaim that it deserves: so I strive to remedy the crime of that indifference by trumpeting its worth. But instead of writing a dusty old film review, I opt to incorporate fragments of the screenplay into my journal writings, every chance that I get, even if, or rather especially if they do not fit. I try to make the act of curation enjoyable, because who wants the judgment of art to be a tedious chore?
Whether or not Bukowski possesses the “criteria for greatness” that Bloom listed earlier is something for every reader to decide for herself. If Bloom were plainly to assert that Bukowski checks all three boxes (of “aesthetic splendor”, “cognitive power”, and “wisdom”), it would still be incumbent on Bukowski’s poetry to PROVE that it checks these boxes. All that a critic like Bloom (or you, or I) can do is to make EXPLICIT the merits in the artwork that otherwise might remain IMPLICIT. The future generations will learn by reading us, and if we guide them to the best passages in our favorite works, we might convert them to our tastes. Isn’t this a lot like what the churches did? Here’s a gospel for you to accept: now, please believe our guy is the savoir, join our congregation and relinquish your wealth to us; thanks a mill! (I’m speaking in a purposely demotic way about much of this, because I want to stress that there’s an ugly side to it all – “check the boxes of greatness” and “pool your wealth in our cult”, etc. – I’m trying to convey the fact that I KNOW it’s a sordid affair, messy and convoluted, yet I love it and choose to participate nevertheless.)
You say: Bukowski spoke out against academics, and academics hated Bukowski. I say: Bloom also spoke out against academics, and academics hated Bloom. To me, this is all interesting in an historical sense and from a biographical perspective. But, at the end of the day, what seems to me to be the most crucial aspect, regarding literary worth, despite all of a given writer’s admirers or detractors, is whether their actual words appeal to each individual reader. I sense that what I just said might sound tautological: yes, that’s one of the things that fascinates me about the realm of art: it’s rocket science, yet, at the same time, it’s a mother nursing a baby.
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On a personal side-note: I’d like to learn how to ENJOY, rather than complain about, the unfairness of the situation of being an unknown artist; for perhaps that shall be the only reward I’ll receive. (And I ask myself: What if God proves to be Sigmund Freud?)
You think that Bukowski “will be one of the lasting ones from our time.” —I have my hopes for this or that artist too. Who knows: Maybe your own works will be more respected than Bukowski’s, so that future readers will wonder why you cared for HIM when you yourself were so clearly superior. We have Arthur Schopenhauer praising the works of Immanuel Kant, and the former is arguably philosophy’s greatest stylist while the latter’s unreadable. Also William Blake, infinitely preferable to Emanuel Swedenborg, found it worthwhile to wage mental warfare on Swedenborg’s ideas, and ended up writing a most memorable tract, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (the phrase from its “Memorable Fancy” which you incorporated in your previous comment is duly noted: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite / For man has closed himself up, til he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern”); wherein Blake mentions Swedenborg by name, which may prove to be the only reason Swedenborg is remembered in futurity. This strange arrangement always fascinates me.
Now I’ll quote one final statement from your comment verbatim, so that I can respond as fairly as possible. You say: “Either way, I can't help but wonder if Bloom's non-mentioning of him is because Bukowski's sleazy alcoholic post office lifestyle was too contrary to his own posh and comfortable NYC existence.” —Well, consider that this “non-mentioning” is still a supposition: its foundation is that you could find, after “a little internet search,” no instance of Bloom having written about Bukowski. But even if we accept this supposition as truth, I don’t know how much we should read into it. (I mean: How much thought does any author really put into NOT MENTIONING someone?) I’m on the side of letting every soul write about or refrain from writing about any topic they please. …But, to the question of whether an individual’s lifestyle or tendencies, appetites, inclinations (etc.) have caused Bloom to prejudge that poet’s text, I answer: Decidedly not. If anything, you can rest assured it’s the contrary. That’s what I love most about Bloom – I can find absolutely none of that attitude that you posited for him above. His hero is Shakespeare’s Falstaff. Within the confines of the humanities, or what is left of them, Bloom identifies with Falstaff almost to the extent that Don Quixote identifies with knighthood. This is significant because, to me, the lifestyle that you ascribe to Bukowski seems to be practically synonymous with Falstaffianism. You describe Bloom as enjoying a “posh and comfortable NYC existence” – I’m not familiar with the details of Bloom’s personal life; so IF it’s accurate to say that Bloom lives like this, I wasn’t aware of it until now: I’m solely concerned with Bloom’s writings, his thoughts, his mind. But if a person does enjoy a sumptuous lifestyle, that doesn’t disqualify them as a creator of potentially genius works; and if a person engages in a “sleazy alcoholic post office lifestyle”, this doesn’t disqualify them as a creator of potentially genius works either – no example in the spectrum of possible lifestyles precludes the potential of creating the finest compositions. But, again, that’s MY opinion – here I’ll quote a passage from Bloom himself, from the intro to his stab at prophesying a future catalogue, in hopes that it might help to clarify his stance:
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“Not all of the works here can prove to be canonical; literary overpopulation is a hazard to many among them. But I have neither excluded nor included on the basis of cultural politics of any sort. …What is here doubtless reflects some accidents of my personal taste, but by no means wholly represents my idiosyncratic inclinations. [Poet X] and [Poet Y] are here because I seem to be the only critic alive who regards them as over-esteemed, and so I am probably wrong and must assume that I am blinded by extra-aesthetic considerations, which I abhor and try to avoid. …Critics do not make canons, any more than resentful networks can create them, and it may be that poets to come will confirm [Poet X] and [Poet Y] as canonical by finding them to be inescapable influences.” [—The Western Canon, p.548]
By quoting this and saying all that I said above, I am attempting to represent what I take to be Professor Bloom’s consummate evenhandedness. But I am, alas, just myself—Bryan Ray, a kosmos, of Minnesota the son—thus I can only give my own opinions. Do I say anything against Charles Bukowski? Not at all. Though, I repeat, I’m totally ignorant of him. I have my own favorite poets who I’m discouraged that other minds will not read or praise. But Bloom must ultimately answer for himself – only what he has said or written about a poet can be fairly criticized, whether positively or negatively; all else is conjecture. So I think one very good practice to follow, if we are to attempt to discover Bloom’s worth or his shortcomings, is to quote his words directly.
To my mind, it has been established unquestionably that your own views and judgment are excellent. You and I have billions of opinions in common, and we will yet discover that we share billions more beyond these – of this I am certain. As I said at the start, I don’t want to be trapped inside my own Bloomian bubble; and I fear that my lack of exposure to counter-opinions will leave my mind lopsided – my aim is to expand the self and embrace the truth – plus any idea that CAN be broken SHOULD be broken; so if you desire to take a sledgehammer to the Brontosaurus, I’m gleefully willing to take my part in the play. Or if you were to react to the conclusion of my paragraph above by exclaiming (as I assume that you will not, since it’s totally out-of-character for you, but I concoct the following retort for the sake of absurd humor): “Never will I quote that man’s words directly – I shall not waste my time perusing the books of a blowhard: I will condemn him to obscurity by refusing even to mention his name, as he has attempted to blot our next Picasso by refusing to mention the name of Charles Bukowski,” then I myself say, by all means, let us pass over in silence what should not be spoken of. We could banish Harold Bloom from all future discussion and it wouldn’t bother me in the least. My favorite titles of his would still be:
• Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine
• Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present
• Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection
• [Bloom’s commentary on] The Book of J
• Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism
• Figures of Capable Imagination
• The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
• The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation
• How to Read and Why
• Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?
• Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
• Fallen Angels
• Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds
Plus two anthologies:
• The Best Poems of the English Language
• Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages.
And there are also many other books among my favorites that Harold Bloom wrote, the which, if I should copy down every title, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the names that should be listed. Amen.
I can't contradict anything you say above, and wouldn't even try given that my knowledge of Bloom and his works is so shallow. I've literally spent no more than an hour reading little discursive quotes of his here and there, along with his Wikipedia page, but your enthusiasm for him has piqued my interest. The idea I got of his posh and comfortable lifestyle is mostly due to the fact that he's been in the academic world since 1955, teaching at Yale, New York University, etc. To be clear, I don't hold that against him, and am in full agreement with your comment:
if a person does enjoy a sumptuous lifestyle, that doesn’t disqualify them as a creator of potentially genius works...
But I must admit it was the first conclusion I jumped to when I did my little internet search, looked at his creds on Wiki, and questioned his omission of a drunken workingclass poet like Bukowski.
That said, Bukowski really only wrote a handful of what I would call GREAT poems. The rest were either very good, or good, or sometimes even sloppy and bad. But he brought his HUGE PERSONALITY into all of them, which in my opinion made up for any aesthetic imperfections.
Bukowski is one of the most read poets of our time, and I would guess the most imitated, but none of the imitators (that I have read anyway - the small press is full of them) compare, because to write like Bukowski, you have to steal his whole personality and that's impossible.
Here is something that probably has nothing to do with Bloom, but when I read this I think about no one more than I do about Bukowski and his lack of presence in academia, and the Best of 20th Century books, etc. This is from Goethe's Conversations with Eckermann.
"Certainly," said Goethe, "personality is everything in art and poetry; yet there are many weak personages among the modern critics who do not admit this, but look upon a great personality in a work of poetry or art merely as a kind of trifling appendage. However, to feel and respect a great personality one must be something oneself. All who denied the sublime to Euripides were either poor wretches incapable of comprehending such sublimity, or shameless charlatans who by their presumption wished to make more of themselves - and really did make more of themselves than they were."
Again, I'm not saying this with Bloom in mind. He too seems like a big personality. But I have to suspect it's a good bit why Buk has been given the shaft in academic circles.
Anyway, I'm coming down with the flu so if this has come off sloppy or doesn't clarify what it's supposed to, that's my excuse.
p.s. our travel discussion on my page I will get back to once I climb out of my funk.
Ah, NO FLU: I wish you perfect health: I command the virus to leave you alone and instead go bug some robotic lemmings and make them run violently down a steep place into the sea, and perish in the waters. But (re: "if this has come off sloppy or doesn't clarify what it's supposed to, that's my excuse") your words here are clear as a bell – I would’ve never suspected any distraction. And our travel talk is as any of these online discussions: it can be taken up or dropped whenever, wherever, for any reason – there’s never a dissatisfied customer because there are neither rules nor pressure nor expectations whatsoever…
“There is no solution because there is no problem.” – Marcel Duchamp
I allowed myself to take a day away from the keyboard, because I wore myself out writing about Bloom – I’ve always wanted to get some of those preliminary thoughts down, yet I never had a good occasion to do so; and your comments above provided the prefect impetus. So I’m pleased that I got so many thoughts into the computer screen, but I didn’t realize how far I’d flung myself until I stopped to take a rest! Anyway, I hope it doesn’t all come off as fanfaronade.
That last word isn’t the best one for the situation, but I just learned it today and was eager to use it: we’re still reading, very slowly aloud, the Pevear-Lolokhonsky translation of Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, and there is this outburst by Ivan:
“But how could I know that I didn’t love her at all! Heh, heh! And it turns out that I didn’t. Yet I liked her so! How I liked her even today, as I was reciting my speech. And, you know, even now I like her terribly, and at the same time it’s so easy to leave her. Do you think it’s all fanfaronade?”
And Alyosha answers:
“No. Only maybe it wasn’t love.”
But Harold Bloom is no Katerina Ivanovna. (Now this last sentence is an example of one that I think sounds right in the context but I have no idea what it means; and, by making it, I intend nothing other than to get myself out of this mess of Karamazov quotations and back to my reply…)
It’s funny: you say that you learned a few of those specifics about Bloom from reading his Wikipedia page – I normally do that, too, as a first move, for any artist who’s unknown to me; but I’ve never looked at the Wiki-page for Bloom, until now (I just glanced at it); now I hope that whatever I said about him matches their facts – for anything I know (or misremember but think I know) came from reading his books.
***
This will have to be "Reply #1 of 2" because the A.I. system that is wholly evil is telling me that I am writing too many words and must therefore break up my response and resume it in another comment box: TO BE CONTINUED...
A tiny thought on one idea – you say: “I questioned Bloom’s omission of a drunken workingclass poet like Bukowski.” – I stress that it wouldn’t be hard to find poets who are just as drunken and workingclass as Bukowski and who are praised and touted and championed by Bloom in his books (or in his interviews or miscellaneous essays, etc.)... Our exchange about the professor has led me down at least one rabbit hole – I just finished reading an interview that Bloom endured with a major newspaper for his latest book, and the author of the article, who doesn’t seem to be Bloom’s biggest fan, labels Bloom “an esoteric populist, like his first subjects, Blake and Shelley.” That sounds right to me. Make what you will of the esotericism, but Bloom’s genuine populism would never reject a poet for being a drunkard, let alone workingclass. Those traits would only serve to endear the poet. (By the way, after many years of devouring Bloom’s appraisals and appreciations, I’m left with the impression that being a drunkard and lower- or working-class is almost a prerequisite to being among the finest makers… couldn’t we yet again drag Shakespeare into this? and of course Blake, Whitman…? well instead of boring even myself with a cascade of names, I’ll let those three stand in for all, as they’re my favorites… (I would say they are my Trinity but I think the Trinity should have a woman to play the mother: for it should be father-mother-child, unlike Xianity which uses father-son-GHOST so as to keep everyone masculine and put a transparent phantom in place of the feminine role, therefore I’d like to include Emily Dickinson but I honestly don’t know if she qualifies as “workingclass” (OR a drunkard—I’ve ever thought about the possibility of her being a secret Fallstaffian: perhaps she was!)))…
Sorry: I’m confusing myself: this is good and muddled; but that’s OK. I’m just trying to convey the idea that, since times change and thus monetary values and lifestyles and riches and expectancies of all kinds are in constant unrest, I can never tell what constitutes the genus workingclass, beyond the obvious fact of a member being required to perform labor for a living, whereas many poets got paid to write, which seems alabaster-handed compared to, say, a christ who works as a carpenter. Yet I’d rather see a savior compose a sentence than a crucifix.
(Just ignore that last paragraph, now that you’ve read it.)
I love what you say about Bukowski possessing a “HUGE PERSONALITY” – I totally agree about THAT being an important asset, maybe even the most important, in an artist: This reminds me of another Duchamp aphorism: “I don’t believe in art. I believe in the artist.”
STAY TUNED FOR PART 3 OF 3...
When you say “the small press is full of [Bukowski’s imitators]” – that makes a lot of sense to me. As I admitted, I know almost nothing of the man; but I have seen a poem of his turn up here or there on THE Social Network, back in my Facebook Period – and then I noticed the same “scent” from a lot of the poems of upcoming poets who would share their own works (chapbook excerpts; recent poems published in e-mags, etc.) also online... So although I was ignorant and just on-the-outside-looking-in, I could tell there was a shared stance evinced by many of these writers...
And now that I think of it, probably my own stuff has the same aroma as the moderns who I admire. (Ashbery, etc.) But I hope that I seem super strong and original to anyone who reads me, no matter how much they know. I hope I appear as a writer who burst out of a golden egg that was laid by no progenitor — not even the holy spirit in the shape of a dove — no: I just appeared on the horizon inexplicably.
Also I hope that my books are known in futurity as “literature for the illiterate.” That has a nice ring to it.
O GOD that Goethe quotation is a GEM — you’re really lassoing me towards those Eckermann convos: I promise myself that I’ll find a copy and peruse it. Goethe is the manifestation, the EPITOME of that type of personality that he’s talking about. And when he mentions the “poor wretches” and “shameless charlatans” who “denied the sublime to Euripides,” I see the bad guys as the so-called “New Critics” who obstructed Bloom in his early days at Yale, just as much as you see the bad guys as the academics who “gave Buk the shaft.” (Incidentally, I love Euripides: whenever I’m talking friends’ ears off, I always call E. the David Lynch of ancient Athenian dramatists—for I’m in awe of his creations… And yet, if you ever point out any place in Aristophanes’ plays where he makes a mockery of Euripides, I shall laugh and side with BOTH because God is Love.) And this part of the excerpt from Goethe “…to feel and respect a great personality one must be something oneself” reminds me of a quote-within-a-quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s speech “The American Scholar” which Harold Bloom used as the epigraph for his Figures of Capable Imagination:
One must be an inventor to read well. As the proverb says, ‘He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry out the wealth of the Indies.’
I won't say anything more about Bloom until I dive into him myself, so that's another one for the stack. Will pick something up on Amazon. Man, I really need to get reading. I don't do it nearly as much as I used to. I used to go through 1-2 books per week. Now it's more like one a month. I blame the internet and all its distractions. Well, at least you've helped me set up my material for the next year.
You say: I hope that I seem super strong and original to anyone who reads me, no matter how much they know.
I don't think you have any worries in that regard. I can say after reading your book Spinelessness, which I enjoyed immensely for its linguistic jaberwocky, humor and unconventional qualities, your work IS super strong and your love of the language blazes on every page. But when you speak of originality and say:
I hope I appear as a writer who burst out of a golden egg that was laid by no progenitor — not even the holy spirit in the shape of a dove — no: I just appeared on the horizon inexplicably.
I am reminded of another quote by the great Goethe in his conversations with Eckermann. This book is the closest thing I have to a Bible, btw. It's sooo instructive and beautiful. Nietzsche called it the best book in the German language.
Goethe says:
"People are always talking about originality; but what do they mean? As soon as we are born, the world begins to work on us, and this goes on to the end. What can we call our own except energy, strength and will? If I could give an account of all that I owe to great predecessors and contemporaries, there would be but a small balance in my favour."
But maybe I have misunderstood what you meant by originality. If you meant it as writing in a way that only you, Bryan Ray, are capable of doing, then I am in full agreement. You are without a doubt on your own frontier and I think that's probably the number one thing all us writers should aspire to. re: going some place no man's ever gone before. Nothing worse than writing like the herd, treading an old worn-out tow path.
I'm gonna stop there because I'm still a bit out of it. Flu's gone, but sleep was a diminishing return last night.
p.s. I've read MOST of Dostoyevsky, but never Brothers. I love that quote. Anxious to hear your thoughts when you finish.
I just read this and see I wrote Spinelessness and not the correct Spinelessnesses. Wow, I was really tired.
Signed, M.P. Powers,
author
of Fortune Munich
(1/3)
Ah re the book’s title, no worries! That’s never a precious thing to me, and especially not in this case – the name you’re talking about is just a simple, literal description, rather than a truly creative decision: I only settled for it because the publisher had a rule stating that a book must possess at least 100 pages before it could be manufactured with a spine—otherwise, the printer would fold a paperback cover around the pages and leave the area rounded (or sort of creased) where the spine should’ve been; so all my shorter texts ended up as little pamphlet-style booklets that were literally spineless in their initial editions; so when I collected them all into that single volume, I plainly and offhandedly labeled them SPINELESSNESSES. (As a bonus, I liked the way that this name invited me to think of these texts as little jellies: inchoate creatures devoid of bones. Also the connotation of “spineless = cowardly”; like timid lions being chased by lambs…)
And regarding Bloom, I hope that you only seek out his work if its subject interests you – I myself happen to love the study of (Western) religion, and Bloom has published a number of works on that topic, so those are the titles of his that win my affection, beyond the focuses on canonical literature and general wisdom. I can’t stress enough that if Bloom doesn’t attract you naturally, just ignore him: there’s too much brilliant writing out there to allow oneself to be bogged down with other readers’ fetishes. So much to read and so little time!! ...You say: “I really need to get reading. I don't do it nearly as much as I used to.” I feel exactly the same way. Even if I do manage to conquer a few books at my youthful pace from days gone by, it exhausts me and I end up needing a break. If I were being fairly compensated for this mental fight, it’d be a different story; but since all such pleasurable brainwork must share each day’s hours with the necessities of wage-labor (cursed be it) and mortal flesh (cursed be it, too), my literary progress must remain but demigodlike.
I thank you for the kind words and compliments about that text of mine that you endured. (I say endured rather than perused, to be falsely humble.) I’m hidden so far underground, I almost forgot that my words can reach minds and spark reactions! I appreciate your appreciation (no joke: this sentence just came out funny). And if I’ve said the same before, then I say it again: The support you’ve shown during our online sojourn has been like an air tank to an astronaut.
Now when, in my previous comment, I say that I hope to be seen as an original writer, and you quote the divine Goethe while wondering what I might mean by that word “originality,” I can assure you that we’re on the same page about this: I agree 100% with Johann Wolfgang. My fantasy about appearing from nowhere and proving devoid of parentage was meant to be filed away with such whimsical thoughts as, for instance, the question that (in the 2004 tragicomedy The Life Aquatic) Ned Plimpton includes in the postscript of his youthful letter to Steve Zissou: “Do you ever wish you could breathe underwater?”
(2/3)
That quote (read: MUCH LOVED WISDOM) that you gave is too enticing not to respond to slowly...
Re: “People are always talking about originality; but what do they mean? As soon as we are born, the world begins to work on us, and this goes on to the end.” —I myself am a fragment of the forces that created the world, as well as a fragment of the material that IS the world; that’s why, when the world “works on me”, it is myself working upon myself — a distant me working on the present me (or vice versa: for chronology is a tiny mind’s hobgoblin) — so, in a sense, the most original thing that a living human can achieve is unoriginality, because THAT were truly impossible: this also reminds me of the poet Jean Cocteau’s quote, which I hope I’m remembering right: “An original artist is unable to copy; he has only to copy in order to be original.” And, for proof text, here is the last stanza of Wallace Steven’s Tea at the Palaz of Hoon:
I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
...& re “What can we call our own except energy, strength and will?” —It is THIS that I want my books to bring to mind: if there’s anything serious in my desire to represent “originality,” it’s that I wanted my compositions to approach as close as possible to the state of PURE energy, PURE strength, PURE will – by way of words alone, to evoke unadulterated energy-strength-&-will.
Re “If I could give an account of all that I owe to great predecessors and contemporaries, there would be but a small balance in my favour.” Again I imagine Goethe himself saying this TO ME and if I were to summon the courage to respond honestly, I’d say as follows, and I suspect that he would smile on my audacity:
The fact that I owe much to many predecessors and contemporaries is mitigated by the truth that I AM all predecessors and contemporaries.
I recall reading an interview, actual or imagined, with William Blake, where, upon being asked his opinion about an act of Jesus, Blake answered that he remembered being Jesus, for he was him. And Whitman’s pre-“Song of Myself” notebook has this passage that I’ve quoted often before:
In vain were nails driven through my hands.
I remember my crucifixion and bloody coronation
I remember the mockers and the buffeting insults
The sepulchre and the white linen have yielded me up
I am alive in New York and San Francisco…
Lastly, St. John (8:58) quotes the man himself:
Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am.
(3/3)
And although this a diversion, I must copy the following outburst from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra — I was searching for the passage where Z defines true redemption as making time’s “it was” into “thus I willed it”; but, in light of the Jesus-centered passages above, this caught my interest:
[Jesus of Nazareth] died too early; he himself would have recanted his teaching, had he reached my age.
But I was taken aback when you said that Nietzsche called the Eckermann/Goethe Gespräche “the best book in the German language” – again you provoked me to scour through the contents of my bookcase; not because I distrusted this memory-freshener, but because I wanted to remember even MORE. So I enlisted the help of Walter Kuafmann’s book on Nietzsche—Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist—which credits the quote to N’s The Wanderer and his Shadow (108) and also has the following observations, which I give at length not only because they illuminate N’s admiration of G but because they end on a note that, as I read it in my cheerfully boundless conceit, reconciles my own stance on “originality” with the master’s (or at least Kaufmann’s perspective on Nietzsche’s perspective on Goethe’s perspective!):
*
A note, written in preparation for the second Betrachtungen, is characteristic:
«Goethe is exemplary: the impetuous naturalism which gradually becomes severe dignity. As a stylized human being, he reached a higher level than any other German ever did. Now one is so bigoted as to reproach him therefor and even to censure his becoming old. One should read Eckermann and ask oneself whether any human being in Germany ever got so far in noble form.»
Nietzsche never abandoned this conception of Goethe; he merely elaborated it. Not long after, he declared flatly that he considered “the Conversations with Eckermann the best German book there is.” Till the end, he preferred it to Faust and Meister; for what he associated with Goethe was neither the boundless striving that pushes on into infinity, like Schopenhauer’s irrational will, nor the dreamlike dissolution of all border lines between illusion and reality (which Schlegel had found in Meister)—but the hardness of the creator who creates himself.
*
Here it seems right to give the line from Stevens again: And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
...Yes & I’ve not worked thru all of Dostoevsky either, and I was worried that my opinion would not align with the popular consensus on Karamazov (not that I think there’s any virtue in agreeing with the mob; I just prefer concord to discord, as long as it’s genuine, organic, unforced—and I tire of being a naysayer), like, although I ADORE other books from Dickens, when I faced A Tale of Two Cities I thought it overrated; but, so far, Karamazov is stronger than almost anything I’ve ever read—and its strength is a different kind than I’ve ever encountered: it’s so psychologically rich that the force of its life-passions (which is to say: its SPIRITUALITY) is almost TANGIBLE: the moods and scenes are so thick, so real, they’re as substantial as statues plinth’d about the vista where you’re reading.
Since this reply of mine has distinguished itself as a quotation repository, I’ll give just one last excerpt, from a letter (dated 31 January 1921) that the poet Hart Crane wrote to the poet Wilbur Underwood, where Crane in turn cites the words of an unnamed “friend”:
Dostoevsky leaves his mark upon you forever. As a friend of mine writes:—“Flaubert one can say a great deal about, but Dostoevsky,—what more can you say than that his novels each give one an experience which leaves its mark till death? The reading of most books is the living through a series of incidents. But you can’t escape SUFFERING an experience at the hands of old ‘Dosty’.”
Amen and amen.
I've recently discovered the maddest example of mad love in a very strange and very Renaissance Renaissance book called "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili" - or The Strife of Love in a Dream, although I prefer the more intimidating Latin title. The book follows the dreamer Poliphili as he chases his lover Poly through a mythical forest, but he constantly gets distracted by his love of the Greek temples, formal gardens, and Pagan gods that populate the wilderness. The text is accompanied by extensive line illustrations that remind me of Windsor McCay's Little Nemo. It's a fascinating book and would go well alongside Roman poets:
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
Sleep + Love + Fight!? I can’t believe I’ve never heard of this before!! Thanks for mentioning it – I’ll definitely check it out: it’s the type of work that appeals to me strongest. After reading what you said and also the description in the link to Godwin’s translation (plus the Wikipedia entry), I aim to get my hands on a copy ASAP... Also I’m glad that you mention McCay’s Little Nemo—I’ve heard of this, but I’m not too familiar with it, and yet I love what I know about it, so it’s good to be reminded to spend more time with it... Yes, thanks AGAIN for the fine recommendations – I loved the Simic books that you mentioned before: I have become a genuine admirer... & NOW my dilemma is, as usual: So much to read, so much to write, & so little time!!
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