Ashutosh Jogalekar, The many tragedies of Edward Teller, Scientific American (January 15, 2014)
Edward Teller was born on this day 106 years ago. Teller is best known to the general public for two things: his reputation as the “father of the hydrogen bomb” and as a key villain in the story of the downfall of Robert Oppenheimer.
Edward Teller was born on this day 106 years ago. Teller is best known to the general public for two things: his reputation as the "father of the hydrogen bomb" and as a key villain in the story of the downfall of Robert Oppenheimer. To me Teller will always be a prime example of the harm that brilliant men can do - either by accident or design - when they are placed in positions of power; as the famed historian Richard Rhodes said about Teller in an interview, "Teller consistently gave bad advice to every president that he worked for". It's a phenomenon that is a mainstay of politics but Teller's case sadly indicates that even science can be put into the service of such misuse of power
Ironically it is the two most publicly known facts about Teller that are also probably not entirely accurate. Later in life he often complained that the public had exaggerated his roles in both the hydrogen bomb program and in the ousting of Oppenheimer, and this contention was largely true. In truth he deserved both less credit and less blame for his two major acts. Without Teller hydrogen bombs would still have been developed and without Teller Oppenheimer would still have been removed from his role as the government's foremost scientific advisor.
The question that continues to dog historians and scientists is simple; why did Teller behave the way he did? By any account he was a brilliant man, well attuned to the massive overkill by nuclear weapons that he was advocating and also well attuned to the damage he would cause Oppenheimer and the scientific community by testifying against the father of the atomic bomb. He was also often a warm person and clearly desired friendship with his peers, so why did he choose to alienate so many who were close to him? The answers to these questions undoubtedly lie in Teller's background. Growing up in progressive Hungary at the turn of the century as the son of a well to do Jewish father, Teller was part of a constellation of Hungarian prodigies with similar cultural and family backgrounds who followed similar trajectories, emigrated to the United States and became famous scientists. Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner and John von Neumann were all childhood friends.
Sadly Teller became a psychological casualty of Hungary's post-World War 1 communist and fascist regimes early in his childhood when he witnessed first hand the depredations visited upon his country by Bela Kun and then by Miklos Horthy. The chaos and uncertainty brought about by the communists left a deep impression on the sensitive young boy and traumatized him for life. Later when Teller migrated to Germany, England and America he saw the noose of Nazism tightening around Europe. This combined double blow brought about by the cruelties of communism and Nazism seems to have dictated almost every one of Teller's major decisions for the rest of his life.
The fear of totalitarianism manifested itself early, leading Teller to be among the first ones to push for a US nuclear weapons program. He was Leo Szilard's driver when Szilard went to meet Einstein in his Long Island cottage and got the famous letter to FDR signed by the great physicist. Along with Szilard and Wigner Teller was the first one to raise the alarm about a potential German atomic project and he lobbied vigorously for the government to take notice. By the time the war started he was a respected professor at George Washington University. Goaded by his experiences and inner conscience, Teller became one of Oppenheimer's first recruits at Los Alamos where he moved at the beginning of the Manhattan Project in the spring of 1943.
Oppenheimer and Teller's meeting was like one of those fateful events in Greek tragedies which is destined to end in friction and tragedy. Perhaps the most ironic twist in this story is how similar the two men were; brilliant physicists who were both products of high culture and affluent families, interested in literature and the arts, envisioning a great role for themselves in history and sensitive to the plight of human beings around them. However their personalities clashed almost right from the beginning, although the mistrust was mostly engendered by Teller.
Not all of it was Teller's fault however. By the time Teller met Oppenheimer the latter had established himself as the foremost American-born theoretical physicist of his age, a man who could hold sway over even Nobel Laureates with his astonishingly quick mind, dazzlingly Catholic interests and knowledge and ability to metamorphose into adopting whatever role history had thrust upon him. But men like Oppenheimer are hardly simple, and Oppenheimer's colleagues and students usually fell into two extreme camps, those who saw him as an insecure and pretentious poseur and those who idolized his intellect. Clearly Teller fell into the former group.
The friction between the two men was accentuated after Teller moved to Los Alamos when Oppenheimer made Hans Bethe the head of the project's important theoretical division. Teller understandably chafed at the choice since unlike Bethe he had lived with the project since the beginning, but Oppenheimer's decision was wise; he had sized up both physicists and realized that while both were undoubtedly scientifically capable, administering a division of prima donnas needed steadfast determination, levelheaded decision making and the ability to be a team player while quietly soothing egos, all of which were qualities inherent in Bethe but not in the volatile Teller.
Teller never really recovered from this slight and from then on his relationship with both Oppenheimer and Bethe (with whom he had been best friends for years) was increasingly strained. It wouldn't be the first time he let the personal interfere with the professional and I think this was his first great tragedy - the inability to separate personal feelings from objective thinking. It was also during the war that the idea of using an atomic bomb to ignite a self-sustaining fusion reaction caught Teller's imagination. Teller confirmed Oppenheimer's decision to hire Bethe when he refused to perform detailed calculations for the implosion weapon and insisted that he work on his pet idea for the "Super", a diversion that was undoubtedly orthogonal to the urgent task of producing an atomic bomb, especially one which was necessary to light up the Super in any case.
After the war got over Teller kept on pushing for the hydrogen bomb. History was on his side and the increasing encroachment of the Soviets into Eastern Europe followed by major events like the Berlin airlift and the testing of the first Soviet atomic bomb firmed up his conviction and allowed him to drum up support from scientists, politicians and the military. Sadly his initial design for the Super was fatally flawed; while an atomic bomb would in fact ignite a large mass of tritium or deuterium, energy losses would be too rapid to sustain a successful fusion reaction. Even after knowing this Teller kept pushing for the design, taking advantage of the worsening political situation and his own growing prominence in the scientific community. This was Teller's first real dishonest act.
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His second dishonest act was withholding credit from the man who actually came up with the first successful idea for a hydrogen bomb - Stanislaw Ulam. An exceptionally brilliant and versatile mathematician, Ulam first performed detailed calculations that revealed holes in Teller's original Super design and then thought of the key process of radiation implosion that would compress a batch of thermonuclear fuel and enable its sustained fusion. Teller who had been smoldering with rage at Ulam's calculations until then immediately saw the merit of the idea and significantly refined it. Since then almost every hydrogen bomb in the world's nuclear arsenals has been constructed on the basis of the Teller-Ulam model. Yet Teller seems to have denied Ulam the credit for the idea even in his later years, something that is especially puzzling considering that he downplayed his own role in the development of hydrogen bombs in the waning years of his life. Was this simply a ploy engineered to gain sympathy and to display false modesty? We will never know.
The act for which Teller became infamous followed only a few years later in 1954. Since the end of the war Oppenheimer had been steadfast in his opposition to the hydrogen bomb, not just on a moral basis but also on a technical basis. This did not go down well with the establishment, especially in the face of the increasingly dire-looking international situation. Oppenheimer was hardly the only one opposing the project - prominent scientists like Enrico Fermi and Isidor Rabi were even more vocal in their opposition - but Oppenheimer's reputation, his role as the government's foremost nuclear advisor and his often casual cruelty and impatience with lesser men made him stand out. After the Teller-Ulam design came to light Oppenheimer actually supported the project but by that time he had already made powerful enemies, especially in the person of Lewis Strauss, a vindictive, petty and thin-skinned former Secretary of the Navy who unfortunately had the ear of President Eisenhower.
When the government brought charges against Oppenheimer Teller was asked to testify. He could have declined and still saved his reputation but he chose not to. Curiously, the actual testimony offered by Teller is at the same time rather straightforward as well as vague enough to be interpreted damningly. It has an air of calculated ambiguity about it that makes it particularly potent. What Teller said was the following:
In a great number of cases I have seen Dr. Oppenheimer act - I understood that Dr. Oppenheimer acted - in a way which for me was exceedingly hard to understand. I thoroughly disagreed with him in numerous issues and his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated. To this extent I feel that I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better, and therefore trust more.
What is interesting about the testimony, as explained by Freeman Dyson in his autobiography, is that it's actually quite undramatic and true. Oppenheimer had lied to army officials during the war regarding an indirect approach made to him for ferrying secrets to the Soviet Union. He had refused right away but had then concocted an unnecessary and bizarre "cock and bull story" (in his own words) to explain his actions. That story had not gotten him into trouble during the war because of his indispensable role in the project, but it certainly qualified him as "confused and complicated". In addition after the war, Oppenheimer's views on nuclear weapons also often appeared conflicted, as did his loyalties to his former students. Oppenheimer's opinions on the hydrogen bomb which were quite sound were however also interpreted as "confused and complicated" by Teller. But where Teller was coming from, Oppenheimer's actions were hard to understand, and therefore it was clear that Teller would trust opinions regarding national security in someone's else's hands. Thus Teller's testimony was actually rather unsurprising and sensible when seen in a certain context.
As it happened however, his words were seen as a great betrayal by the majority of physicists who supported Oppenheimer. The result of this perception was that Teller himself was damaged far more by his testimony than was Oppenheimer. Close friends simply stopped talking to him and one former colleague publicly refused to shake his hand, a defiant display that led Teller to retire to his room and weep. He was essentially declared a pariah by a large part of the wartime physics community. It is likely that Teller would have reconsidered testifying against Oppenheimer had he known the personal price he would have to pay. But the key point here is that Teller had again let personal feelings interfere with objective decision making; Teller's animosity toward Oppenheimer went back years, and he knew that as long as the emperor ruled he could never take his place. This was his chance to stage a coup. As it happened his decision simply led to a great tragedy of his life, a tragedy that was particularly acute since his not testifying would have essentially made no difference in the revocation of Oppenheimer's security clearance.
This inability to keep the personal separate from reality exemplified Teller's obsession with nuclear weapons for the next fifty years until his death. At one point he was paranoid enough to proclaim that he saw himself in a Soviet prison camp within five years. I will not go so far as to label Teller paranoid from a medical standpoint but some of the symptoms certainly seem to be there. Teller's attachment to his hydrogen bombs became so absolute that he essentially opposed almost every effort to seek reconciliation and arms reductions with the Soviets. The Partial Test Ban Treaty, the NPT, the ABM treaty and sound scientific opposition to Reagan's fictional "Star Wars" defense; all met with his swift disapproval even when the science argued otherwise, as in the case of Star Wars . He also publicly debated Linus Pauling regarding the genetic effects of radiation just as he would debate Carl Sagan twenty years later regarding nuclear winter.
Sagan has a particularly illuminating take on Teller's relationship with nuclear weapons in his book "The Demon- Haunted World". The book has an entire chapter on Teller in which Sagan tries to understand Teller's love affair with bombs. Sagan's opinion is that Teller was actually sincere in his beliefs that nuclear weapons were humanity's savior. He actually believed that these weapons would solve all our problems in war and peace. This led to him advocating rather outlandish uses for nuclear weapons: "Do you want to find out more about moon dust? Explode a nuclear weapon on the moon and analyze the spectrum of the resulting dust. Do you want to excavate harbors or change the course of rivers? Nuclear weapons can do the job". Teller's proposal to excavate harbors in Alaska using bombs led to appropriate opposition from the Alaskan natives. In many of these scenarios he seemed to simply ignore the biological effects of fallout.
But as much as I appreciate Sagan's view that Teller was sincere in his proposals I find it hard to digest; Teller was smart enough to know the collateral damage caused by nuclear weapons, or to know how ridiculous the idea of using nuclear weapons to study moon dust sounded when there were much simpler methods to do it. My opinion is that by this time he had travelled so far along the path which he chose for himself after the war that he simply could not retract his steps. He clung to dubious peacetime uses of nuclear weapons simply so that he could advocate their buildup in wartime. By this time the man was too far along to choose another role in his life. That, I think, was another of Teller's tragedies.
But in my view, Teller's greatest tragedy had nothing to do with nuclear weapons. It was simply the fact that in pursuit of his obsession with bombs he wasted his great scientific gifts and failed to become a truly great physicist. Ironically he again shared this fate with his nemesis Robert Oppenheimer. Before the war both Oppenheimer and Teller had made significant contributions to science. Teller is so famous for his weapons work that it is easy to ignore his scientific research. Along with two other scientists he worked out an important equation describing the adsorption of gases to solids. Another very significant Teller contribution known to chemists is the Jahn-Teller effect, a distortion of geometry in certain inorganic molecular complexes that impacts key properties like color and magnetic behavior. In nuclear physics Teller again came up with several ideas including the Gamow-Teller rules that describe energy transitions in nuclei. Even after the war Teller kept on thinking about science, working for instance on Thomas-Fermi theory which was the precursor of techniques used to calculate important properties of molecules.
But after 1945 Teller's scientific gifts essentially lay undisturbed, stagnating in all their creative glory. Edward Teller the theoretical physicist was slowly but surely banished to the shadows and Edward Teller the nuclear weapons expert and political advocate took his place. A similar fate befell Oppenheimer, although for many years he at least stayed in touch with the latest developments in physics. Seduced by power, both men forgot what had brought them to this juncture in history to begin with. In pursuing power they ignored their beloved science.
Ultimately one fact stands apart stark and clear in my view: Edward Teller's obsession with nuclear weapons will likely become a historical curiosity but the Jahn-Teller will persist for all eternity. This, I think, is the real tragedy.
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina | The Latest: Gasoline bombs found near summit protest site
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina | The Latest: Gasoline bombs found near summit protest site
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — The Latest on the Group of 20 summit (all times local):
1:50 p.m.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman have shared a smiley, enthusiastic greeting as the Group of 20 summit opened in Argentina’s capital.
The two men beamed widely and clasped hands in something of a cross between a handshake and a high-five. The crown prince patted…
John Dolan, Exterminate the Men: Honoring Andrea Dworkin, A Feminist who Meant it and Paid, The Exiled (September 14, 2013)
The recent death of Andrea Dworkin didn’t even make the small print news in Russia. Feminism, at least the feminism of the kind Westerners take for granted, never caught on. Patronizing Westerners often see that as a sign that Russians are culturally too primitive. Russians, particularly Russian women — and particularly the Russian female intelligentsia — literally laugh and roll their eyes when you mention feminism of the American or West European brand. The reason is fairly simple: Russians haven’t quite learned the Western art of sloganeering for radical philosophy without meaning a word of what they say. A Russian woman would assume that if you’re a feminist, you’d actually have to live out the philosophy. In that sense, Andrea Dworkin was, in her own way, the only “Russian” feminist in America — and that is why she was so hated.
There was a strange undertone of smug satisfaction in the obituaries for Andrea Dworkin. The fact that she died relatively young, at 58, got a lot of space, followed by long descriptions of her obesity and the medical problems that supposedly resulted from it. In other words, she was fat, fat, fat. Case closed.
Then there were her stories of rape and abuse, which the London Times called “probability-defying.” American papers were more sly and cowardly, of course, but managed to imply that she was crazy as well as fat.
Feminists more comfortable in the meanstream had some very strange comments on her. Elaine Showalter, a sleek Princeton gender commissar, said, “I don’t wish Andrea Dworkin any harm, but I doubt that many women will get up at 4 am to watch her funeral.”
If you know anything about the verbal habits of upper-echelon academics, this is easy to translate: “Die, you bitch! Shut up and die so I can dance on your XL grave!”
I can’t recall so much barely-concealed delight in a celebrity death since Sam Kinison was wiped out by a couple of drunken kids in a pickup. He had it coming, the papers of record informed us; he too was fat and crazy and said things you’re not supposed to say about women.
Dworkin’s fatness and madness hardly disqualify her from intellectual distinction. If we excluded the fat and/or crazy from recent intellectual history, we’d be left with a very bland, Clinton-style consensus. And that, of course, is the goal, the point of these non sequiturs. They’re great for dismissing loud, unbroken voices. American academics have a habit of skipping to the slur with disconcerting speed, as I found out a couple of years ago when I mentioned my love for Wallace Stevens’ poetry to a Film professor. She winced, then said, “Wasn’t he a racist?”
She didn’t really know or care whether Stevens was a racist. As I realized later, that wince meant that she hadn’t read Stevens, didn’t want to be shown up and so had simply reached for the nearest available non sequitur. The notion that Stevens might be a racist AND a great poet, just as Dworkin might be a fat loon AND a crucial figure in feminist intellectual history, is simply beyond our Beige compatriots.
The habit has sifted so far down it’s affected the dialogue of disaster films, as I noticed while watching a bunch of unconvincingly attractive pseudo-nerds try to survive the fastest Ice Age ever in theDay After Tomorrow. There’s a great scene where a male and female nerd, stranded in the NYC Public Library, are arguing about whether to burn Beyond Good and Evil for warmth. The guy says, “Nietzsche was the most profound thinker of the nineteenth century!” The woman replies, “Nietzsche was a chauvinist who was in love with his sister!” It gave me a nightmare vision of what Lite Beer Super Bowl ads will be like in a few years, after everybody and their dog has been to grad school.
In the mating rituals of healthy people — that is, people who aren’t like Andrea Dworkin — these stylized collisions about ideology, usually personified by clashes about an historical figure, are usually no more than flirtation. That’s literally true in Day After Tomorrow; in the last scene of the movie, the male and female nerd are holding hands in the rescue helicopter, their Nietzsche dispute remembered, if at all, as the first scene of a third-hand screwball comedy they’re using as their romance template.
We’re supposed to know that you don’t take it seriously — you don’t live as you speak. What I revere about Dworkin is that she never realized that. Dworkin is hated so intensely simply because she accepted first-wave feminism fully. She blurted naively the implications of that ideology. And that appalled and embarrassed millions of smoother women, who liked the cool, fashionable tune feminism gave their bitching but had never had any intention of letting it get in the way of their romantic career plans.
I remember, ladies. I was there — at Berkeley in the 70s. And I was like Dworkin, a naive loser from a family which actually lived the ideology it claimed. Hers was the classic east-coast Jewish progressive tradition; mine was the most severe, self-flagellating brand of Irish Catholicism. The common denominator was the lack of compromise. Dworkin had a great line on this: “I don’t find compromise unacceptable, I find it incomprehensible.”
When she came of age, feminists like Steinem were speaking in the rhetoric of third-world national-liberation movements. Their case was simple and unassailable: women were oppressed, the biggest and most deeply, ubiquitously abused ‘minority’ on the planet. It was a view so simple that an intellect as subhuman as Yoko Ono was capable of absorbing it and translating it into “Woman is the nigger of the world.”
The difference is that Yoko would never have dreamed of letting her revelation get in the way of her relationship with that mangy meal ticket of hers, John. He was the reason she was able to get her 20-minute yodels on wax, baby. No way was she going to ditch him. Being the ultimate groupie, trading sex (let’s just move right along rather than get into what “sex” meant for John and Yoko) for money and fame had nothing to do with that line about women as niggers.
But there were people like me who’d been raised all wrong, who didn’t know any better, who actually believed that Steinem’s essays, which we had to read in our Norton Anthology, implied a code of conduct. And above all, that meant that man/woman mixing was going to come to a grinding halt. It was, according to the national-liberation model, fraternizing with the enemy. People were garroted for that kind of thing in places like Algeria, and Frantz Fanon had told us all how glorious it was that revolutionary piano wire was used to enforce this Spartan revolutionary separatism.
In my book Pleasant Hell I describe at length how I drifted sadly around the Berkeley campus in the 70s, convinced that everyone there was as bitterly lonely as I, and that this was simple historical necessity. And how shocked I was, happening to walk across campus at a later hour one night, to realize that men and women still fraternized with a vengeance once the sun went down. This may sound silly, but it was the biggest surprise of my life, and my introduction to the sleazy agility with which normal Americans dodge the inconvenient implications of the ideologies they mouth during the day.
Dworkin took the same Norton Anthology truisms to their obvious, clear, unbearable conclusions. If women were an oppressed group on the model of Fanon’s Algerians, Ho’s Vietnamese or Yoko’s “niggers,” then the steps to a revolutionary cleansing were simple:
1. The oppressed minority must re-learn history and re-evaluate society in order to see the horrors beneath the facade of normalcy.
In 70s campus feminism, this meant getting excited about footbinding, bar-b-que’d witches, and then acquiring a proper alienation from standard male-female interaction. In other words, learn all of the horrible oppressions males have unleashed upon women, and then cite the examples as reasons why you hate men and demand a fundamental change in the relationship.
This, comrades, was the tricky part. What Dworkin’s simple, loyal, canine mind could never grasp was that for a sly player like Steinem, this first stage of the process was fine, no matter how violent the denunciation of men and patriarchy became. Why not? As long as one didn’t let it interfere with one’s life (Steinem’s relationships with a series of male billionaires, for example), then Hell — the more violent the denunciation, the better!
Because — and this was another wrinkle I, like Dworkin, was far too naive to grasp — most meanstream men were in on the joke too. They were, in fact, more aware of what a joke it was than the young women students who in many cases, truly thought they believed their own clenched-fist chantings. The male response to 70s feminism was horror from old fools like Mailer, but a tolerant smile from the cool dudes whose job it was to disarm and fuck the feisty ladies. Their stance was a slightly more subtle, coy version of “you’re so cute when you’re mad, honey.”
2. The oppressed minority must mobilize, replacing its colonial relationship with the oppressors with ties to comrades among the oppressed.
What this meant for a “sane” or normal 70s woman depended on the degree of identification with the movement. At least, it meant lip service to a female version of “bros before ho’s” — high-profile socializing with female friends, during which male company was noisily disparaged. (This type of socializing, of course, was already a common habit of middle-class female socializing; giving it an ideological cast was simply a matter of replacing a few jargon terms.)
At most, it meant lip service of another sort: the big plunge into lesbianism. If you wanted to be a professional activist, you had to make the jump. A Women’s Studies lecturer I knew said a colleague once told her outright, “You’ll never have any street cred, Jennifer, because you don’t sleep with women.” For meanstreamers, the lesbian allegiance was all anyone could ever be asked to give; it was, in fact, more than most were willing to make. All you really needed to do was grit your tongue and give it a try — a rite of passage, a gesture of solidarity. After that you could get back to planning your wedding. That’s why the university lesbian interlude has been compressed into mock acronyms like BUG, “bisexual until graduation.”
But even full-time dyking around had little to do with the original model, the Fanon national-liberation rhetoric. He and Ho and Che didn’t advocate fucking other proletarians; they were in favor of wiping out the Other, the Oppressor. Fucking other revolutionaries was, if anything, a dubious way to spend time owed the Revolution.
Which brings us to Dworkin’s sexual orientation. If she was a lesbian, she was the worst I ever saw. And I should know — read my book. She called herself a lesbian, but then she also called herself a celibate. Even Morrissey would be scratching his head at that point. And besides, once the term acquired a positive connotation, everybody was a lesbian — Jane Fucking Austen was a card-carrying dyke, according to the ideologically-correct journals. Men at UC Berkeley who were cool but still wanted to fuck women took to calling themselves “male lesbians.” I don’t want to dwell on this; it wasn’t a great moment in American culture.
The point is that Dworkin never offered the world a significant other of the proper gender. Instead, she lived openly with…a man. I don’t mean to dwell on such sordid things, but it’s a matter of public record. The point was that they didn’t fuck.
And in this, once again she was a good orthodox Fanon/Guevara feminist. For the revolutionary, the point is not to screw in your own class but to stop getting it on with the enemy. And this was something America’s avid, proud young lesbians-until-that-first-big-job never, never promised to do. They’d made their point by licking girls; after that, they had every intention of fucking, or as Dworkin would insist, getting fucked by men.
For Fanon and the rest, any interaction between the Oppressor and the Oppressed is to the disadvantage of the Oppressed. That’s axiomatic. What that means in Dworkin’s simple, obvious reading of the Revolutionary Scriptures is that when men fuck women, it’s always an act of oppression.
That was where she went too far in the views of her more flexible colleagues. They didn’t like having their options reduced. That, in the view of an American striver, was the worst thing you could do to anybody.
Dworkin didn’t know a thing about her audience. Didn’t know they were talking career and fun when she was talking sacrifice, martyrdom. (It’s no accident her heroine was Joan of Arc. Dworkin was a Catholic without knowing it, an old-time Catholic who never suspected it of herself. She and J. K. Toole, another fat loser who died young, are the only Catholic writers to survive, for a while, in modern America.)
Dworkin maintained this strictly orthodox view in her most-hated book, Intercourse (1987), arguing that heterosexual intercourse was rape. Oh, and please, don’t tell me that’s not her argument. I not only read and reread that book but taught it to a group of horrified Berkeley students in 1990. That damn well is what she said. You could tell it by the expression on their little faces — a great moment!
Even the reviewers who praised Dworkin did it in ways intended to alert their readers that they were encountering a nut, someone who was to be admired rather than listened to. Intercourse was “daring,” “radical,” “outrageous” — in other words, beyond the pale. It was something to have on your shelf, or your reading list, as ballast, another sort of street cred. It was never meant to accuse women who fucked men of, to coin a phrase, sleeping with the enemy.
But that was exactly what Dworkin meant, and all she meant. It was so obvious; the real shock is that it took so long for someone in the women’s movement to say that and get noticed for it.
The last stage in Fanon’s and Guevara’s blueprint was the one that put Dworkin out of play forever:
4. Kill the oppressor.
That’s what the revolutionaries said, and they didn’t mean it figuratively. They meant get a fucking machete and kill a cop, take his gun and use that on as many of the oppressors as you can get. They were pretty damn clear on this, as clear as a Calvinist ruling out salvation by works. You could not overthrow the oppressor with harsh language, or the evil eye, or moving depictions of slum conditions. You had to kill the bastards. Are we clear?
And Dworkin, as loyal and dumb as the horse in Animal Farm, trotted along to this fatal fourth step — and found herself alone.
She said it, as usual, with simple clarity, in the language of Che Guevara. It must have amazed her that she even needed to say it; it had been so obvious from the start. Her pleas for resistance are couched in a wonderful diction, mixed of Catholic martyr-cult and Fanon’s call to jacquerie: “I’m asking you to give up your lies. I’m asking you to live your lives, honorably and with dignity. I’m asking you to fight. I am asking you to organize political support for women who kill men who have been hurting them…They resisted a domination that they were expected to accept. They stand there in jail for us, for every one of us who got away without having to pull the trigger.”
In the end, the most remarkable thing about Dworkin is that there was only one of her. Hundreds of millions of women more sly, raised with the notion of compromise and an immunity to ideology, scrambled away from the inconvenient implications of liberation rhetoric. She alone stood their on her famously arthritic knees, doing her simple best to fight the jihad she’d been fool enough to believe would actually take place.
What if they held a war and only one fat lady sang? You don’t need to ask; you’ve lived through it.
Dan Schneider, Americancer: The Silly Anxieties of Harold Bloom (January 27, 2001)
In 1973 Yale University professor, literary poobah & would-be vates Harold Bloom foisted a monumentally bold & silly book (both bold in its silliness & silly in its boldness!) into the public literary realm. Titled The Anxiety Of Influence: A Theory Of Poetry it posited some rather manifest, & trite, observations garbed in pseudo-Freudian mumbo-jumbo- much like most of Bloom’s simplistic Manichaean thought & writing. Although these observations had some truth, they were true to very limited areas & small degrees. Here, then, the sine qua non of the book/theory, & its 6 pillars/techniques (or in Bloom’s hoodooery revisionary ratios):
The Argument: Past Masters are always & necessarily better than latter-day scrubs (Bloom referring originally to poetry, alone, yet he & others have greatly expanded its application since) because they came first; therefore got to all the great & essential ideas/things first. This circular reasoning/paralogism is best called Classic Chicken Littleism.
The 6 pillars:
Clinamen (or misprision- Bloom)- The scrub must always misread/misinterpret the Master- i.e.- claim he (most often, as opposed to the shes now readily available for future scrubs to misread) was OK to a point, then fucked up so badly that the scrub is obliged to paste a DeKooningian smile over the Mona Lisa!
Tessera- The scrub sees the Master is a Genius (& didn’t fuck up) but did not go far enough, so the scrub must therefore complete the thing (Master’s idea/work/oeuvre)- i.e.- the scrub must make art in the way the Master would have, had the Master not been so dumb/given up/been cut down in his prime like so many past Masters (be it by circumstance or their own hand).
Kenosis- The scrub glumly realizes he cannot surpass the Master’s works, so the scrub labels his garbage GREAT- but in a different way than the Master’s- i.e.- the scrub declaims apples cannot be compared with Shelley Winters, much less oranges.
Daemonization- The scrub must lessen the Master’s genius/works by claiming him/it “merely one of the many great Masters/works in the form’s Pantheon”- i.e.- the scrub counters, “C’mon, with all the Citizen Kanes, 2001: A Space Odysseys, & Apocalypse Nows out there, you cannot say Titanic is not right up there with them!”
Askesis- The scrub’s purgative of putting his stamp on something already done by the Master- i.e.- the scrub rewrites Paradise Lost as a heroin snortfest war between supermodels & rap stars in Burbank, then preens over his originality.
Apophrades- The scrub’s assumption of the Master, seen anew through the scrub’s work- i.e.- the scrub (son) kills & devours the Master (father), shits him out, then claims to have always loved the shit/Master/father, and killed/devoured him for his own good.
Now, as said, to a small degree, each of these points have some truth to them & seem obvious. Who cannot point to an artist/artwork/instance of such in the arts, much less Life itself? Bloom’s cardinal error is that he has never budged from, nor expanded, these observations over the decades since he first made them. He is, then, not even poor old A Square (from Abbott’s Flatland)- moreso & precisely a single point in a short Lineland. Or, to pseudo-scientifically ape Bloom: Bloom’s microscopic purview of art & life fails to realize its own quarky demesne revels in its own self-sanguine inability to not just “not recognize”, but “not even allow” for the hypothesis, much less reality, of a macroscopic world. It is all part of this closed, reductivist, & sacerdotal sea the Ahab of the Romance wanders, lonely & afraid of, on & in.
But this is not new, as Bloom has always displayed a great breadth of reading (although not nearly as wide as his Dead White Male pursuits will allow) leavened by an onion-skin depth of reading. His clearly prosaic mind (while often up to the easier task of critically engaging prose) is almost comic in its poetic insularity- to this day I still chuckle over his lumping of Sylvia Plath & Maya Angelou together as bad poets who share many traits. In brief, while a passable prose critic, Bloom is a terrible poetry critic.
In the decades & books since Anxiety Bloom has not just not grown- if anything he’s retrogressed; thereby reducing himself into the role of perfect foil/whipping boy to the carping Multicultural Crowd & Politically Correct Elitists he reviles for their (in Bloom’s view, & a rare correct one!) attempts to not erect Mountains to rival Bloom’s Himalayas, but to level said Himalayas to a Kansan plain of mediocrity. He sees them as willfully disdainful of Excellence (theirs or others) as he is of theirs, or others outside his insular realm.
Bloom also conflates greatness with originality; not seeing they are NOT synonyms & only have at times, and at best, a tangential relationship. An illustration of this is his undying fawning over that bane of the Multiculties’, William Shakespeare’s, every iamb & fart; a demonstration of blind fealty to a God rivaled in academics by- perhaps- only that of Charles Darwin’s twin (but contentious) idolators- Richard Dawkins & Stephen Jay Gould. Bloom gives easy target to the PC Despoilers of the Stratfordian by claiming for him nothing less than “The Invention Of The Human”!- in the Freudian sense (My! My!). The Multiculties, in true Pavlovian response, counter (in essence), “Nothing he wrote is that good anyway! He’s just held in place by the Power Structure!” Bloom weakly defends (from The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages- 1994):
‘....If it is arbitrary that Shakespeare centers the Canon, then they need to show why the dominant social class selected him rather than, say, Ben Jonson....how much simpler to admit that there is a qualitative difference, a difference in kind, between Shakespeare and every other writer....Originality is the great scandal that resentment cannot accommodate, and Shakespeare remains the most original writer we will ever know....’ [assorted ascending emphases mine, not Bloom’s.]
In other words Bloom sticks out his tongue, yells, “Nah-nah-nah-nah-nah! I’m taking my blocks & going home to mom!” Bloom is nothing if not famous for his refusal, in person & print, to debate those who refuse to drink of his insight- accept the deus or not! The obvious flaw in Bloom’s thought is that since he is purporting Shakespeare above all other wordsmiths it is HIS, not THEIR, duty to argue for such a claim. And it is not as if such has not been posited before & reasonably well. But Bloom foregoes such in favor of childish invective, accusation, & an enduring case of Joseph Campbellitis (from The Western Canon):
‘....he [Shakespeare] is always ahead of you, conceptually and imagistically, whoever and whenever you are. He renders you anachronistic because he contains you; you cannot subsume him. You cannot illuminate him....’
About here is where one would start backing away if approached by a person saying these things of another- especially if they were bald, banging tambourines & gyrating about airports. The charges of PC Elitists- that Bloom’s arguments are his biases alone- are true. For instead of grounding his arguments in a straight material defense of craft he denudes & weakens his case with such nonsense as quoted above. Bloom’s rationale is therefore based not on any model of excellence, but on personal affection- the first love of a lonely boy discovering art- despite his protests contrary, & he is just like his detractors! That he has more hits than misses than his foes is simply because the task of winnowing the chaff was already done by earlier critics, thus leaving him a riper & healthier field to admire & anoint his own. But his opinions- right or wrong- are the byproducts of chance- not any rational reason. Shakespeare is not defended nor advocated by Bloom; he is idolized- nay, apotheosized- period. And Bloom is his Pope. Yet, despite his cultic tendencies & posturings, Bloom is oddly bereft of acolytes. He is a self-installed superstar sans discernable logical credentials or legitimate arguments. These, not his noxious solipsisms, are why he is alone. He is a creatively bankrupt & logically bunkrapt critic who longs to be an artist, who tries to argue that criticism is- indeed- a form of poetry:
‘The meaning of a poem can only be another poem.’ (from Kabbalah and Criticism- 1975)
Oy vey! Does he intend the dudgeon, or not?! Such leaching onto a higher art form is a sad & ironic aping of the scenarios set forth by his own silly revisionary ratios. But, then, of course, Bloom is happy, because by being a Critic of his God, he becomes like his God. The PC Elitists see this relationship- yet instead of exposing its inconsistencies & artistic necrophilia, they prefer to bury Shakespeare with his perverted idolator.
Yet neither side acknowledges the truth about Shakespeare- i.e.- he is a GREAT, but manifestly flawed & limited writer. Old Willy penned a dozen or so truly great sonnets (all the ones that immediately spring into mind), a dozen or so good to so-so sonnets on the same general themes as the great ones, and well over 100 sonnets that range from bad to terrible- those that are tongue-tyingly, peanut-butter-and-crackers-talkingly, difficult. His long poems are generic, unoriginal, dull & inert- even Shakespeareans admit they are his black sheep! And his 37 plays fall fairly neatly into thirds: a dozen greats (Othello- his true masterpiece devoid of the annoying sidebar subplots that plague most of his plays, Hamlet, The Tempest….), a dozen mediocrities (most of the comedies, some histories), and a bakers dozen of atrocities (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titus Andronicus….). Yet all his plays have a soliloquy or two of note. That’s it. A great, but limited, artist; as any artist is- & likewise incomplete, assuming their human mortality.
But certainly NOT original- neither in subject matter nor sophistication of the psyche (Hello; calling Gilgamesh, Aesop, Sir Gawain & the Green Knight, Bosch….)- not in his plays’ themes nor drama, not in his sonnets’ themes nor structure- he merely “popularized” the Shakespearean sonnet (through his excellence, granted!) much the same way, 3 centuries later, David Sarnoff popularized- but did not “invent”- television. And he was equally limited- by his time mainly, but also by his society & the lesser amount of history such place in time dictates. Obviously he lacked a Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Blake, Whitman, Eliot, Stevens, Crane to build upon- not to mention a Goethe, Dickinson, Plath, Neruda, Tagore, Tsvetaeva, Harlem Renaissance, centuries of history, leaders, science, & discovery, etc. Yet Bloom persists in his insular microbial ken, proffering castrated views (as the 6 above) whose only reply is “Duh! But there is a wee more you’re missing….”.
Unfortunately Bloom’s critics- both Dead White Males, Feminists, & Multiculty/PC Elitists- are as ballocksed as he, & consistently keep giving him wiggle room by nailing him for NOT the things which he can rightly be nailed for, but for those very few points he is CORRECT on, such as his logical insistence on hierarchy (from The Western Canon):
‘the ancient and quite grim triple question of the agonist: more than, less than, equal to?’
But instead of acknowledging the manifest hierarchical nature implicit in art (& life), as well betrayed by their own replies, rebuttals, & choices of argument, the PC Elitists deny hierarchy in toto- that it’s merely a construct of oppression- rather than acknowledge it & honestly debate its nature & structure. It’s akin to the extreme nihilist who abnegates all yet wants to talk about which pizza topping is best. They fail to grasp the better way to deflate Bloom’s bubble- & here it is:
The best analogy & point of attack would be to point to the old outmoded “ladder of progress” hierarchy of evolution (or more properly to Bloom- the devolutionary “Descent Of Man” model, upon which so much of his theory rests) , which has in recent decades been supplanted by the “ever-branching bush” model of evolution. In this way I (for example- or Bloom’s scrub) can never legitimately claim to out-Whitman Whitman or out-Picasso Picasso, etc.- i.e.- be more particularized & individuated in that mode of greatness than the original. Therefore, Whitman/Picasso/Master of your choosing is in effect the furthest extension of their own particular twig on the branch of a certain kind of poetry/art, which is part of a larger branch, trunk, or tree of poetry/art, which is- in reality- not a tree, but merely another branch on the tree of literature/art, which is part of a branch/tree of the arts, human endeavor & so forth till reaching its roots in humanity, or existence, itself. Similarly, in the other direction, all of Whitman’s great poems are endleaves on the branch-cum-tree of Whitmanian verse- i.e.-Song of Myself cannot out-I Sing the Body Electric I Sing the Body Electric. But it may be a greater poem overall, because it has more identifiable great components & less identifiable weak ones. As well, Whitman may be a greater poet than his many copiers (the poetasters) who form various parts of the branches & twigs which lead to Whitman’s endleaf. And, obviously, Whitman’s own lesser verses are part of the twigs which lead to his great poems’ extremities.
Here comes the BUT- & a refutation to Bloom’s whole theory. But, because the Whitman, or Tu Fu, leaf extends farthest out in Direction A does not mean a living artist cannot be GREATER. In fact, a living artist can NECESSARILY (or truly POSSIBLY, depending on his/her own talent & drive) go higher & extend further (into a different general space)- if only because of the ever-increasing lode of past examples from which to cull ideas & learn from. Yet, still the living artist cannot go further than the past artist’s particular twig.
This should not be a difficult thing to apprehend & its usage in Darwinian circles has helped illumine the true wonder of evolutionary diversity, sans the disparagement of pre-human cousins & forebears. Likewise it allows me to posit Great Poet B is greater than Great Poet A, point to the varied components of greatness, yet not essentially diminish A’s achievement in the process. Let me analogize:
Famed thoroughbreds Affirmed & Alydar are considered 2 of the greatest racehorses of all time. Both won many laurels. Head-to-head Affirmed beat Alydar 7 of 9 times- including all 3 1978 Triple Crown races. While acknowledging both horses’ greatness it is reasonable to say that a 7-to-2 ratio implies statistically (or componentially) that Affirmed was greater. But one cannot say Affirmed out-Alydared Alydar- Alydar’s greatness was unique- Affirmed’s was likewise unique, only greater- a greatness different in kind & degree. Similarly we all point to elements in art, sport & life that constitute greatness. We can argue over what they are & the merits of a claim, but the underlying structure we valuate is there.
A chimp may be a more intelligent & better equipped primate to suffer & perdure chance changes in its life & environs than, say, a lemur. Yet, however better in general, particularly speaking, a lemur is perfectly equipped (& much more so than the chimp) for a lemur’s life!
The sad point is that neither Bloom nor his detractors can see these manifest points from their tiny & receding redoubts. Why? Perhaps because neither side has the Creationary, much less Visionary, impetus that great artists have (even though many greats are unaware of this talent).
Let me digress briefly to thrust my own ideas on Greatness, & its relation to Art, specifically, based upon years of observation, especially in regards to intellect. (& I shall refer back to this later in the essay). Here is my posit: the human mind has 3 types of intellect. #1 is the Functionary- all of us have it- it is the basic intelligence that IQ tests purport to measure, & it operates on a fairly simple add & subtract basis. #2 is the Creationary- only about 1% of the population has it in any measurable quantity- artists, discoverers, leaders & scientists have this. It is the ability to see beyond the Functionary, & also to see more deeply- especially where pattern recognition is concerned. And also to be able to lead observers with their art. Think of it as Functionary2 . #3 is the Visionary- perhaps only 1% of the Creationary have this in measurable amounts- or 1 in 10,000 people. These are the GREAT artists, etc. It is the ability to see farther than the Creationary, not only see patterns but to make good predictive & productive use of them, to help with creative leaps of illogic (Keats’ Negative Capability), & also not just lead an observer, but impose will on an observer with their art. Think of it as Creationary2 , or Functionary3 .
Now for an actual example of how a latter-day artist can achieve a greatness earlier artists could not- without falling into Bloom’s folly. (And how many critics would kill to be able to “ape” me here- to disprove another critic with not just rhetoric but great art itself?) Let me first quote the last stanzas of 2 widely recognized great poems by two 20th Century poets. First is British poet Philip Larkin’s High Windows:
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
on Earth. Then the sun will begin to swell, and life
will cease, shorelines will retreat as oceans boil,
and all will glow a barren red and airless gray.
amid joys and sorrows, with the love of a girl
in a backseat, behind her mommy and daddy,
as they pilgrim to a motel in New Hampshire,
drunk in a sportscar, honking and cursing at her
family squareback's pace, as they are full on passing,
as if they are ready to face eternal sleep,
that is endless, and endless, and everything.
So I grafted, with confidence- not anxiety- Larkin’s triple ending, its positive last word, doubled/repeated that last word (for the same reason Frost used his repetition), & ended my triplet with a positive that goes beyond the mono-dimensional repeated endless; the multidimensional & infinite everything.
And this is the truly most malign thing about Bloom & his presence- not only has his influence been anxious, it has been infectious- downright carcinogenic- to artists who buy in to it willingly, as well those who unwittingly do- yet deny so! And near as I can tell this is one of the few stands that does not engage Bloom by his own dour terms, one of the fewer that succeeds in breaking his solipsistic reasoning, & the only to do so by dint of great art & reason.
Next is American poet Robert Frost’s Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening:
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
I now quote the final sonnet from my first Omnisonnets ms. (see the Omnisonnets page in this website) The Passings:
There are years to go before the last perfect day
By then I will be shadow, long dead. Now, I live
blowing kisses out her window to teenage strays,
as they leave her family behind on the highway,
The debt in the last line to the 2 previous poems is obvious. Here are the 4 major elements that make up this sonnet. 1) My family’s annual sojourns via highway to New Hampshire as a child. 2) My desire to rehabilitate & expand the highway metaphor from its Victorian tones & Beatnik-era usage. 3) The image of a future expanding red giant sun engulfing the earth that I first saw, & was rapt by, in Carl Sagan’s PBS TV show Cosmos. 4) And lastly wanting a boffo ending.
The 4th element led me to Larkin & Frost. Both are great poems. Larkin’s lacks a little music & could be trimmed from its 20 to 16 lines to better dramatize its plight- however it is Larkin’s best poem, mainly because of the unforgettable tripartite ending- 2 negatives subsumed by the positive- it really sucks you one way to propel you out the other way. Also, rhythmically the building ta-tum, ta-tum, BOOM end really socks the reader. As for Frost, I am generally not a fan of his (same could be said of Larkin) although I acknowledge the dozen or so great poems he wrote. But this poem is his best- by far- it is like Affirmed- greater than any of his other great poems in kind & degree (I could rhapsodize on the poem’s virtues for pages!)- suffice to say it is to Frost’s oeuvre what Ozymandias is to Shelley’s (another great poet), and its end is legendary- the repeated last line hammering home the drowse of the speaker, the eternal recurrence of things/beauty, etc., plus the musical lulling, & on….
“But you’re only proving Bloom’s points!” you say. No. 1) The Passings is a great poem- as are the other 2. It is its own endleaf. 2) I do think it’s better than Larkin’s great, but demonstrably flawed, poem (for the 2 are not synonyms). I briefly said how his, nonetheless great, poem could be improved, & I think I could argue effectively the point of its neediness- & one day I may do so in another essay. 3) As for Frost- that poem is not only GREAT, but virtually PERFECT- 2 more tangential, not synonymous things! 4) Therefore Bloom’s ratios do not apply in my analysis, for while The Passings may or may not surpass Phil’s and/or Bob’s poems, by using elements from both (& to a different- still great- end) it is on a higher branch (if only for having succeeded the others in time) that has NOT displaced their two endleaves.
Similarly, there are many other poems of mine- great & not- where I have applied techniques from other great poets/poems to my own use. Rather than cowering at the past I am bucking the bronc. I don’t shrink from the challenge, as many poets do- as Bloom rightly points out. I offer up my poetic corpus- a small part of which graces Cosmoetica, as well this essay as stark disproof of his theoretical nonsense. And I could offer many poems of that corpus up which manifestly may be unoriginal in subject and/or theme, yet are original (as well great) in their combination of such, or in how they scrape that greatness (or a different greatness) their predecessors did. Art, therefore, is not ideas (that is philosophy) but the motion (or construction) of ideas.
Yet, instead of offering up excellence in counterpoint (as I did) Bloom’s foes fob demonstrably weak alternatives for him to smack down. To those longtime baseball fans- it’s akin to thrusting a Mario Mendoza (of the .200 Mendoza [batting average] line) to hit against a gopher-ball pitcher (Bloom). They offer puerile Beatnik rants on the scandal of the day; clunky, unmusicked & over-rationalized Jazz poetry; self-pitying & unstructured Confessional narratives; airheaded, pseudo-Buddhist, hippy pastorals; angry racial/ethnic/religious/political/sexual/homosexual screeds sans poetic art save their own declamations. Then they praise the least talented AND least hard-working of the lot. Any Beatnik after Ginsberg & Corso (including the horrid Kerouac), Adrienne Rich, Maya Angelou, Louis Zukofsky, David Mura, Hal Sirowitz, etc. Yet a James Emanuel, Kenneth Patchen, Margaret Walker, etc. (see the Neglected Poets page) are tossed aside.
And herein the rub- they echo Bloom’s narrowness with their own. The maxim “Choose your enemies well….” apparently was not in their canon! As they push cronies, so too does Bloom- most of his praise of contemporaries revolves not around their writing but their closeness & fealty to Bloom. To wit: how else to explain his asshole-buddy boosterism of the tired, post 1970-W.S. Merwin (great innovation, Bill- by dropping punctuation one can free up one’s poetastry!), the declining powers of John Ashbery- from his mid-70’s peak of greatness, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, to the horrid Flowchart (Egochart?) to the last decade of dreck, and absolutely anything by born-comatose Donald Hall? Or, to use a prose example- he marginalizes John Updike (a noted critic of Bloom) but boosts Philip Roth (a known pal- as is Ashbery). This is on Bloom’s record & not a reflection of my opinion of Updike or Roth since I’ve never read either’s fiction, & only Updike’s meager verse.
In another failed opportunity to nail Bloom, Bloom argues that PC Elitists (or in his own typically dull way “the School of Resentment”) make true literary achievement impossible by expelling notions of competition from art. Unquestionably true (unless one wants to posit truth in the absence of falsehood). But instead of denying how, who, & why Bloom canonizes as he does, they instead deny canonization is a good thing- we should be artists of equal merit & mediocrity. We should settle for its gray gurgle over Bloom’s (or other DWMs’) benighted Pantheon (which even, if by chance alone, would necessarily have a few winners worth emulation). Yet they then offer up a counter-Pantheon whilst denying standards & choices- save their own!
Too often, as mentioned, Bloom’s foes fall into his obvious neon-glowing traps; all the more curious since not only he, but his few defenders necessarily resort to psychobabble to cloak, or attempt to, their spurious & wan arguments. Here is poetry pinhead & critic Helen Vendler (second only to Bloom in contemporary poetry critical name recognition & malfeasance) in a 6/25/76 New York Times Review of Bloom’s Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens (1976):
‘....Until the literary meaning of a poem is understood- and about this Bloom is indisputably right- absolutely nothing of worth can be said about its moral or metaphysical ideological impact.’
Uh-huh! Take a deep breath, Helen, please, & get off your knees! Again with the mumbo-jumbo! Morality & metaphysics in art- the supposed bastions scoundrels as Multiculties hide behind! Yet perfectly suitable for a Bloomy as Vendler to choose! More hypocrisy for the similarly smug PC Elitists to chew on (not to mention more specious reasoning- of course, never taken advantage of by the PCEs!).Such pap merely gives vaunt to the claims that such DWM critiquing is ideology & dogma- therefore PC Elitists are merely countering Bloom’s with theirs- & THEY’RE RIGHT! At least in that! Yet, still, both sides take a pass on the bare-boned rigor of parsing poems, new & old, to divine the commonalities, differences, & relative strengths- or not- of each poem to another, as well to greatness & its constituent components (minus that ineffable oomph greatness always seems to inhere).
Witness this brief litany of absurdities given life by Bloom himself:
‘creative misprision’- Anxiety….(1973)- Ooh! I can play with words like Johnny Keats!
‘Influence is influenza- an astral disease.’- ibid.- Ach du lieber Gott in Himmel!
‘antithetical criticism’- ibid.- I was Post-Modern before you!
‘the fearsome process by which a person is reborn a poet.’- A Map of Misreading- 1975- See, I’ve always been a poet, Mommy!
‘poems are not ‘created’ but are interpreted into existence, and by necessity they are interpreted from other poems.’- Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism- 1982- I say it so it must be so!
‘The Western Canon is Shakespeare and Dante. Beyond them it is what they absorbed and what absorbs them.’- The Western Canon….(1994)- And I really mean it this time! (However, beyond histrionics it is also, logically, the same for any writer- be they Robert Service or Edgar Rice Burroughs. Again, Bloom will never show excellence- only anoint it by fiat- HIS!)
So, we see that despite his seeming towering intellect, Bloom relies on very suspect apothegms one CANNOT (snicker….) challenge; this nonsense which may ( & may be designed to) impress tyros but which leaves knowledgeable readers & writers of verse shaking their heads at how little Bloom does to establish his points beyond the Jabberwockian burble. A truly insightful critique would use & manifest such canards as mere rhetorical flourishes in support of keen insights. But Bloom lacks this ability- he is not merely Functionary, but didactic- in the worst sense. To him the Past Masters are High Priests, if not Gods, & the world but their excrement festering, stinking, & embarrassing the High Calling, for Poets (as Bloom clearly views himself- recall?) need only mingle with other poets.
So removed & obtuse is Bloom that his state was, perhaps, best evoked in a 3/19/76 review of Poetry and Repression by David Lodge, in New Statesman (& a stark contrast to Vendler’s bent-kneed assent):
‘....I find it significant that the book contains no index, nor a single note on its source....It seems impossible to arrest the text, to stem the flow of words, to grasp a single point that can be simply weighed and tested. Gradually one’s eyes glaze over, the mind goes numb. Somewhere in the background Professor Bloom is misreading away, tireless and wonderfully pleased with himself.’
If lymphocytes could could speak I wonder if their description of a cancer cell would vary much from this? Much has been written & speculated as to what the cause is behind this man’s pathetic drive to be accepted & considered preeminent- especially to himself. Born in 1930 East Bronx, New York, to poor non-English speaking Russian Jew immigrants, it has been thought he has the classic Child of the Depression drive to better himself at all costs to all challengers. His manic critical output, & its subsequent poor quality, has been attributed to a financial desire to provide for one of his children who suffers from a permanent debility. Even his well-reported (& self-boasted) philandering with nubile Yale coeds has been thought another manifestation of his screaming & empty ego needing its fill. Yet, I sense it all, perhaps, goes back to my 3 Intellects Posit. As a Functionary Bloom has spent decades, thousands of pages & millions of words in essays & books, to construct so easily disproved a theory based upon his own stinking, rutting, resentful (of real artists) Bloomium, & his innately epigonal desire to conflate himself with the artiste (O the eternal ephemeral twinkle!), yet his utter lack of concrete reasoning of how &/or why betrays it all, kicks him hopelessly back into the moldering faceless rabble of his foes, while I- in about 10 pages & 5000 words- easily prick his balloon, offer an alternative, & give several concrete examples/analogies. While the tenured Eli sciolist mumbles- doesn’t even talk the talk, I- the poor little white boy from Queens- simply walk the walk. Perhaps that’s the difference between a Cancer & a Visionary!
In Pakistan there are many controversial figures in one way or the other. In this list we will reveal the controversial personalities not only belonging to politics but also from sports, business and media. Below we will give the top ten list of most controversial people in Pakistan. 10. Shoaib...-
http://www.abcnewspoint.com/top-10-most-controversial-people-in-pakistan-2015/
One of my favorite philosophers in Western Culture. He is often misunderstood and few people know that he was a diplomat who traveled all over Europe. Much of his advice is provocative and sometimes life calls for a philosophy with a bit of daring. It isn’t always pleasant, but it can be a tremendous source of wisdom and insight into people’s lives.
