NP a reader who doesn't like Harold Bloom

[Doug Millison]

http://www.hudsonreview.com/epstein.html
[...] In an interview in the Paris Review, he declared
that he never revises his prose, and nothing in his
work refutes this impressive claim. [...] Bloom writes
like a man accustomed to speaking to his inferiors—to
students, that is, a captive audience beholden to him
for grades and promotion. To them he may lay down the
law, brook no argument, take great pleasure in his own
performance, be utterly unworried about someone
coughing politely and saying, “Excuse me, pal, but
what you just said seems to me a bunch of bullshit!”
One has the sense that everything Bloom writes he has
probably said before, scores, perhaps hundreds of
times, to students; it all comes out of that great
booming Bloombox, the academic equivalent of a great
Boombox, but this one with no Off switch and no
control whatsoever over the volume.
Harold Bloom resembles no one so much as Zero Mostel,
with something of the same physique and verbal mania
but none of the amusing punchlines. Such laughs as are
to be found in Bloom are all unconsciously created on
his part. [...] For you and me reading is not the hell
that it is for Harold Bloom, who, in Kabbalah and
Criticism, writes that “reading is defensive warfare,
however generously or joyously we read, and with
whatever degree of love, for in such love or such
pleasure there is more-than-usual acute ambivalence.”
If you are what Bloom calls a “strong reader,” it gets
even worse, as he notes in his A Map of Misreading:
“Such a reader, at once blind and transparent with
light, self-deconstructed yet fully knowing the pain
of his separation both from text and from nature,
doubtless will be more than equal to the revisionary
labors of contraction and destruction, but hardly to
the antithetical restoration that increasingly becomes
part of the burden and function of whatever valid
poetry we have left or may yet receive.” It’s almost
enough to make a person turn in his library card.
[...] 

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