Requiestat in pace, Harold Bloom

[Mark Kohut]

With the Bloom hype, we get lots of ....stuff. I have read his saying, I
think, that when in his prime
he could read A THOUSAND PAGES AN HOUR!......

Maybe, per Mark T. this is why he also claimed to constantly reread
everything important.....Crowley's
Little, Big forty-eight or forty nine times, I think I just read....

It's all hype fog for whatever the reality was....what sticks with me is
that poet/writer, is it Hollander who did
say watching him read was a memorable experience.....I guess the pages did
turn fast..........

I have always been a slow reader yet, professionally and even now, when I
have to get something pragmatically useful
from a book, I can pull out what I need by flipping pages and almost
randomly alighting.......that isn't reading.....

Grandmaster chess players can play simultaneous games 'blindfolded' due to
getting so deep into the patterns of the game....
even good players can do it with one board or two as a kind of party
trick....
Somehow I do think he did read, sorta unthinkingly while reading, as fast
as grandmasters can win at speed chess......
yet, he musta needed more time to feel and think thru the works....

I still remember his advice on one's first reading of The Crying of Lot 49
(which came after my first reading, of course):
Read it again immediately.

I think speed reading Against the Day might be why he dismissed it so
cavalierly.....a loose baggy monster (James) so
formally different from GR and M & D....

Ultimately, in fiction, he liked a unified form over loose baggy monsters
o'erstuffed with thematic content, I'd say.



On Sat, Oct 19, 2019 at 4:08 AM Mark Thibodeau <jerkyleboeuf at gmail.com>
wrote:

> A 400 page book... in an HOUR?
>
> I used to pride myself on being able to read fast. That was when I was
> in high school. Then, in university, I realized I wasn't actually
> "reading" so much as skimming. And that I was missing a LOT by doing
> so.
>
> I could still probably read 400 pages of, say, a Stephen King novel in
> one evening, and get the basic gist. But when it comes to reading
> Pynchon, I'd say that after roughly 20 pages, I'm already whatever the
> literary equivalent of stumbling drunk might be, and reading any more
> would be pointless. I have to let what I've read already digest
> overnight, or for a few hours at least, before even attempting to
> continue.
>
> J.
>
> On Sat, Oct 19, 2019 at 1:19 AM peterthooper at juno.com
> <peterthooper at juno.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > NYT obit said he could read 400 page book in an hour. Dang!
> >
> > Doesn’t he get some kind of ethnic points for being Jewish?
> >
> > ---------- Original Message ----------
> > From: "Erik T. Burns" <eburns at gmail.com>
> > To: Mark Thibodeau <jerkyleboeuf at gmail.com>
> > Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> > Subject: Re: Requiestat in pace, Harold Bloom
> > Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2019 19:34:58 +0100
> >
> > Dead White Male
> >
> > On Tue, Oct 15, 2019 at 11:26 AM Mark Thibodeau <jerkyleboeuf at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > Oh, nooo...
> > >
> > > He was a great man of letters, there can be no denying that.
> > >
> > > And better yet, he was on our side.
> > >
> > > Fair winds and following seas, Mr Bloom.
> > >
> > > Jerky LeBoeuf Esq.
> > >
> > > On Mon, Oct 14, 2019 at 4:08 PM Heikki R
> > > <situations.journeys.comedy at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > "I don't know what I would choose if I had to select a single work of
> > > > sublime fiction from the last century... it would probably be _Mason
> &
> > > > Dixon_, if it were a full-scale book, or if it were a short novel it
> > > would
> > > > probably be _The Crying Of Lot 49_. Pynchon has the same relation to
> > > > fiction, I think, that my friend John Ashbery has to poetry: he is
> beyond
> > > > compare." Harold Bloom in 2009
> > > > --
> > > > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> > > --
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> > >
> > --
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> >
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