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Thirtythirst4sissies
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talk about books or smth idk
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I never thought about that but I suppose that critics are also affected by current year social norms to be as corporate and non-abrasive as possible
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There will never be another Harold Bloom
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I love the pasta he inspired so much
Particularly because the "stretched his legs" part appears to have been completely made up.
A generation later, it looks like he was right though. What did they go on to read after Harry Potter? Apparently nothing, they are just still reading Harry Potter.
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What an utterly incredible double-kill
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Holy shit this guy rules
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-sep-19-oe-bloom19-story.html
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Ivy Leaguers seething over guy who came from the working class, went to a literally who state school and worked as a high school teacher and made it as big as a writer can make it big will always warm my heart.
What's that professor? You went to Harvard, got a master's from Yale, attended the Iowa writer's thing, are a tenured professor at Princeton and none of you books have sold more than 5000 copies? Oh no no no.
Stay mad
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Yeah, but at least Rowling is based and good for dramacoin.
As a kid, I definitely preferred A Series of Unfortunate Events over Harry Potter (though I definitely enjoyed HP), which I still maintain was a far superior series for sparking literary curiosity in young people.
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upmarseyd because ASOUE was childhoodbookkino of the highest order
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I liked that series. I remember also being impressed by The Phantom Tollbooth.
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Oh shit, that was like my FAVORITE book in 5th grade. My teacher started reading it to us and I loved it so much that he gave me his copy to read ahead with by myself.
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I liked the Warrior cats books, they had marseys.
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Most Warriors fans I knew were fricking foids, I preferred the fricking series about bears.
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And the Netflix adaptation wasn’t even bad.
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Nah she still a c*nt
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I read HP as a kid and Stephen King as a teen and went on to read real literature as an adult
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Gay erotica also teaches you to read Mishima
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Hahahah frickin owned that b-word Rowling and that cuck
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On the contrary, there are thousands upon thousands of Harold Blooms. Literary academia is absolutely stuffed up to the gills with people who sneer at anything that can be read with only an idiomatic understanding of English--they only respect books whose reading requires a level of additional education in historical or literary context, or significant familiarity with some historical dialect, idiom, or vocabulary.
For all the noise that is made about "woke" academia, feminist literary analysis, etc, that stuff is still by far in the minority, and is noteworthy for being a challenge to what is still the overwhelming majority of literary academia, which is overwhelmingly dominated by boring and useless gatekeepers whose life's work is to validate their own existence of perpetual college, by coming up with complicated rules to explain why the only good books are ones that are difficult for people outside of academia to read. Howard Bloom was sort of a high priest of that world, but not necessarily the best nor smartest of them. If anything, he was like the JK Rowling of his own field, popularizing and dumbing-down literary snootiness to a digestable level, so that people who never managed to make it all the way through Gravity's Rainbow could still have some quips to talk shit about John Grisham at cocktail parties.
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I believe the article is referring to criticism for the general audiences, the type Bloom did, rather than scholarly criticism. Regular people buying books will probably read reviews from websites like goodreads or from famous magazines and newspapers, and it seems like professional critics writing for the latter are the ones who got too soft.
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We watched Educating Rita in english class and my main takeaway from it was that literary academics are miserable and broken people who desperately are reading tealeaves and making up nonsense to try and convince themselves they're not worthless parasites
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There's actually a good article recently put out there about the general public's hatred for literary criticism, and how we got here.
Basically, literary criticism used to be a small, wonderful thing (Montaigne, Sam Johnson, Hazlitt, DH Lawrence) predicated on producing the most coherent close-reading of the most literate layperson for the average layperson. It was done by very few people, but it was made for very many people, to compound enjoyment for already-liked works.
Nowadays it's 'publish or die', so an infinite list of talentless, uninteresting people create papers built out of an opaque argot designed to tendentiously reinforce ideas that nobody but the aberrant, noisome literati could agree with. This shit is read by up to two people: the writer himself if he proofreads it (unlikely), and his mother is she's alive or still loves him (more unlikely).
The Death of the Author means that Moby Peepee means what I want it to mean: frick Melville, and frick you. Ahab was a trans cutie because he was into body modification, and Ishmael's disrespect for Queequeg's BBC and a BIPOC's innate closeness to nature explains Moby Peepee's anger.
Stream-of-conscious that shit, get tenure, and die covered in dust: the public isn't wrong about current criticism.
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That's nice sweaty. Why don't you have a seat in the time out corner with Pizzashill until you calm down, then you can have your Capri Sun.
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Is it nonsense if it passes a research grant application?
Pay me to read, prole. That's why you're here.
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I notice you didn't bother to refuse the miserable and broken part, bookcuck
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I agree with you, for the most part.
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Also 'Re-Educating Rita' by Carter USM is a fricking great song
It really goes hard
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You had a chance to not be completely worthless, but it looks like you threw it away. At least you're consistent.
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Gatekeeping is good.
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Wrong. They are all wokes scared to hurt authors feelings.
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That's on my "to red" list. Any of you neighbor's read it? If so, how was it?
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It's long and dense and psychedelic and it has a lot of oblique references to science and history and literature.
Also, the novel and movie Trainspotting stole perhaps the most memorable scene from Gravity's Rainbow, except in Gravity's rainbow a young JFK is involved.
Also, there is part where a character is eating a turd and imagines it is a black man's penbis.
So...only recommended if that sounds like stuff you would be into.
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What's that scene?
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Diving into the potty
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Sounds perfect
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If that sounds like your thing, then Flann O'Brien might be another writer to check out.
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I read The Third Policeman a long time ago and remember really enjoying it. Any other recommendations from him?
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At Swim Two Birds and the Dalkey Archives are both funnier and a bit more approachable than Third Policeman, which is a bit more heady. But they are all great.
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I've read it
It's incredibly oblique and hard to get through, at times incoherent, very much the sort of thing where there's a 'meaning' encoded like six levels deeper than the actual surface text, lots of pass-by-reference stuff that you'd never get unless you've read what it's referring to... a lot of fetish material buried in there... something something octopus eyes
I enjoyed it though...
If you get more than a third of the way through it and you haven't had any 'this seems like a callback to...' bells ringing in your head I'd skip the rest of it.
Half in front and I'm on the way!
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Is it like reading James Joyce where I will need a reference guide or something to look things up the whole time?
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It's like...
If you're reading Gravity's Rainbow for the _right_ reasons then you should have... organically... read enough of the material that's referenced within it to be getting little tingles of 'hey that seems like a a nod to...' every now and then, like, it should feel familiar to you. In short it should be a comfy experience.
You shouldn't have to look anything up, it shouldn't be a chore.
You could say that it's a bit self-indulgent because it's so many little nods to people and authors that move in the same literary circles and share the same mindset. It's a bit of a catalogue of sorts.
If you're interested in reading Pynchon then Inherent Vice is where I might suggest you start. Movie's good too.
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Lol my dad loved John Grisham books i always figured it was for out of it boomers
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Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiip
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Street fighter black trans is ultra ugly and disgusting and he shits on bipocs
But @_____ bet you can’t criticise that shit for ethical reasons
JEWISH LIVES MATTER
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