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Not dead yet?!?!

By Michael J. Smith on Sunday May 9, 2010 09:53 PM

The world's most ponderous and tiresome literary critic -- a field where there's plenty of competition, for tiresomeness and ponderosity -- has just plumbed new abysses of incoherence and bathos in what else, the NY Times Book Review:

The Jewish Question: British Anti-Semitism
By HAROLD BLOOM

TRIALS OF THE DIASPORA
A History of Anti-Semitism in England

Anthony Julius has written a strong, somber book on an appalling subject: the long squalor of Jew-hatred in a supposedly enlightened, humane, liberal society. My first, personal, reflection is to give thanks that my own father, who migrated from Odessa, Russia, to London, had the sense, after sojourning there, to continue on to New York City.

If the Brits had any capacity for gratitude at all, they would no doubt be equally thankful.
With a training both literary and legal, Julius is well prepared for the immensity of his task. He is a truth-teller, and authentic enough to stand against the English literary and academic establishment, which essentially opposes the right of the state of Israel to exist, while indulging in the humbuggery that its anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism.
Speaking of humbug -- at this stage of the game, it's amazing that even the Times would print this sad, muddled, banal series of unconnected eructations. Bloom is still quite angry about events that happened in 1290, and deeply disappointed in Bill Shakespeare for writing that nasty play The Merchant of Venice. Oh and Dickens, another monster, not to mention
Thomas Nashe, Daniel Defoe, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Wyndham Lewis, down to the contemporary poet Tom Paulin and the dramatist Caryl Churchill.

One can only suppose that Bloom gets away with this kind of sophomoric, ahistorical foolishness because he has Yale to certify his authority -- as Alan Dershowitz has Harvard, and David Mamet has Broadway. When you've got credentials, as far as the Times is concerned, you can be as crazy as a bedbug but you must be heard.

Comments (17)

And yet the "Book of J" - even if his penchant for speculation gets muddled up in his examination - is still a good read...

MJS:

Y'know, Jack, I hated that book, even though I opened it expecting to enjoy it. It's just lit-crit, really -- the usual shallow, made-up, "interpretative" stuff -- and the Hebrew scriptures deserve, and have received, much more intelligent and respectful treatment. Bloom has got a gimmick, arrived at after maybe five minutes of thought, and he goes through somebody else's translation of the book cherry-picking proof texts.

This racket started in departments of English, and it's one of the reasons that they ought to be subject to the Arizona state legislature's ban on ethnic studies.

I understand hating it.

I absolutely love reading Shlain's "The Alphabet Versus The Goddess," because I like the ideas he introduces, but the book itself is poorly constructed, barely argued and ridiculously speculative.

Perhaps so too with "J." A good deal of my enjoyment of the book comes from Bloom's willingness to leap from an imaginary female genius, "J," to Shakespeare and then on to Nietzsche.

Topically, Friedman's "Who Wrote The Bible?" is superior in all ways, especially as a popular introduction; and Bloom's book is highly derivative, compared to its predecessor.

But Friedman didn't quite have the panache for wholesale invention.

Mea Culpa: I love "Caesar's Messiah," Zechariah Sitchin and the old Schonfield body of work.

op:

crow bar

some blokes even anti semites
love magic wands even tacky fat
jewish american ones

and evocations of any of the heros on the argo

bloom ---didn't know he reached the size
of st thomas aquinas and orson welles
never wholey dismiss such a mound of a man--
look at that corn beef pagliacci face
how can u lash such a bag of a show man
such a barge like montebank
a cribber ?? what else
he'd pan handle sacks off a hobo

such a speed bump
makes the perfect visiting rabbi
and
leader of secular ceremony
at temple time square

why can't a peoples roll in their own shit
leave em be father S

op:

passport to global armed intervention

"Of the nearly 200 recognized nation-states in the world today, something like at least half are more reprehensible than even the worst aspects of Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians"

imagine
the israel acid test
are these target "peoples"
getting a worse shafting by "their state"
then the Palestinians
get from the conquistador zionics ??


why uncle -- given the lattitude
exploitable by a jesuit advisory--
would be able to use this " golden metric"
to drone in swrams
all over God's brown/green creation
like locust's in year 17

op:

"To protest the policies of the Israeli government actually can be regarded as true philo-Semitism,"

take heart
e have moved the front line well into
enemy territory
with this liberaloid rubber piety

" but to disallow the existence of the Jewish state is another matter"

BUT always the BUT
i use it way to often myself
a word for powder takers
deserters
for wolf ticket salesmen
come the final blasting of a breech
these types take a powder
liberal zionics never fear
are ...deserters


in general this controled criticism
that re affirs israel's right to "exist"
--a ham's cry indeed
very much
"do we not bleed "like eh bloomy
irony there --

but facts havre trampled on exodus

in conquest times
the "judges " and their storm tropers
final over step
post Sabra and Shátila

this shylock's defense becomes paramount

bathos once again
has to become
the zionic maginot line

MJS, OP,

Have you read Shlomo Sand? Worth it, as an antidote?

MJS:

I haven't.

sk:

FYI, an audio interview of Shlomo Sand in which he lays out his not too radical thesis:

http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/49474

Yitzhak Laor, a hawk eyed critic of the "human face of Zionism", as presented by angst-ridden Israeli authors grappling with existential fears while uprooting refugee camps, finds even Sand's purpose is to "collude with that which he set out to criticize—like Balaam, who had been sent to curse the Children of Israel but ended up blessing them.":

http://www.btinternet.com/~musicweaver/gabriel_piterberg_on_shlomo_sand.htm

http://www.countercurrents.org/cohen030410.htm

op:

since i left nyc in 81

and
post Sabra and Shátila

israel has lost all interest for me

in nyc israel is local politics
so mjs has his local
exceedingly real reasons
to be
still in the stew

as a punch toy for leftists
i find israel a diversion
a tar baby

not a litmus test

in fact getting up a head of steam agin
ft zion
takes too much focus off uncle
with his crusader zeal else where

the little "grab it rabbit "
chistling away
at this less then
6k km sq patch
of God's earth

mimi me's exactions on the "remaining people of palestine is bully filled
uniformly brutal
and blood soaked
as indeed were and are
all euro-settler hustles

in my estimation
a state for the jewish people in palestine
is no longer
worth fighting for or against
it's a entity
authored by empire and terror
sustained by hypocrisy and heavy weapons

headed for where ?
only Clio Herself
knoows for sure


Peter Ward:

What makes Israel/Palestine important is that it has the potential to be resolved without changing US imperial policy fundamentally, since the fate of the Palestinians is incidental as far as the Pentagon is concerned.

Treating it as a litmus test is absurd, but is this really being done? My own interest in ME politics was spawned by a Lebanese friend (I met when living in Scotland) who told in graphic detail, accompanied by photos, the horrors inflicted on his country in 1982 by the IDF. It has nothing to do with the "local" politics of New York City.

op:

not a litmus test now
as it was say circa 1970-78
why ??

everyone pwogie passes now

your suggestion
"What makes Israel/Palestine important "
makes but small sense to me


"..it has the potential to be resolved without changing US imperial policy fundamentally"
if so (and i don't believe it is so*)
then why not leave it to the liberals
to muster forces in washington

scarce forces suggest
anti empire types
oughta stick to the vital fronts
of the empire

* israel is the IUD
that prevents the arab world
from growing a sustained
progressive movement

* israel is the IUD
that prevents the arab world
from growing a sustained
progressive movement

Preach it, op-san, sensei!

Personally, I think the appeal of the Petrasian ZPC trope is that, to the extent it isn't just an unprincipled and toddleresque excuse for Islamism, it makes being radical so very much easier. A world-straddling pig with six stomachs becomes a single, snippable problem.

Yours truly, Lunch:

*
Is there no purpose served by opposing in any fashion at all the concentration camp that is Gaza? Let Clio deal with it! We have important forex hand waves to choreograph, classical fragments to translate.

TV is a swamp. People have been warped by it. Their children therefore must be warped by it in exactly the same manner, forever unto the nth generation. Except for the lucky few who have miraculously escaped TV's influence who must waste their time forever throwing feathers at it. Hard.

If it double posted it's b/c I'm outta practice.

Boink:

Who will rid me of these troublesome Semites? ... Or op washes his hands. Ha, ha.

op:

"Is there no purpose served by opposing in any fashion at all the concentration camp that is Gaza?"

opposing it ....who supports it ??

only a minority of zionic brutes

and yet ...thar she blows

talk about hurling feathers

look its the task of a people
to liberate themselves no ??

and the record seems to show

some do ...some don't

by my estimation
i'll not die one particle
different a person
for my short list
of correct views and values
or my long list of incorrect views and values

actions matter
and mine have been sinfully sparse
for that my own life is the only
and most likely inadequate atonement


my credot
we are all little burger
depraved souls
even unto the nth generation

and yet
each of us dies totally
and once and for all
in less then 115 years

only clio's mercy liberates
some of us by our own hands
during our brief span

and/or
some of our children's children's children
long later ...when our own very personal
special peck of quintessential dust
is back to dirty dust again

-------

even unto the nth generation fellow critters

--------

i like md's notion

hard punching kid zion
as uncle's plausible scape goat


--------

"TV is a swamp."
much like the jacobean stage no doubt

" People have been warped by it.
Their children therefore
must be warped by it "
yup

"in exactly the same manner,
forever unto the nth generation"
ooops there with that comrade
u swerve decidedly undialectical

it is precisely these children of the n-1 generation
these off spring ahead
that will expropriate
the aaron spelling expropriators
one by one and all at once

Sean:

"TV is a swamp."
much like the jacobean stage no doubt

" People have been warped by it.
Their children therefore
must be warped by it "
yup

Then there's this from our helpless and innocent little kapo in the Mideast humbly beseeching his masters to go to war to protect their own interests:

A former Israeli prime minister Thursday called upon the United States to effect regime change in both Iraq and Iran, prescribing a military invasion to topple the government in Baghdad and the transmission of ribald television programming via satellite into Persia, where he said the influx of pop culture would prove "subversive" to the conservative Islamic regime.

Citing the hundreds of thousands of satellite television dishes in Iran, Benjamin Netanyahu told the House Government Reform Committee that the United States could incite a revolution against the conservative Iranian clergy through the use of such Fox Broadcasting staples as "Melrose Place" and "Beverly Hills 90210" -- both of which feature beautiful young people in varying states of undress, living, glamorous, materialistic lives and engaging in promiscuous sex.

"This is pretty subversive stuff," Netanyahu told the committee. "The kids of Iran would want the nice clothes they see on those shows. They would want the swimming pools and fancy lifestyles."

Why the hell not? It works on us.

...But Ohio Democrat Dennis Kucinich was not as supportive of Netanyahu's calls for war. In a terse exchange that occurred before the former prime minister laid out his "Iran Strategy," Kucinich asked him for additional suggestions for places to invade.

"While you're here, Mr. Prime Minister, are there any other countries besides Iraq that you would suggest that we invade?" he asked.

http://www.libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=169288

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