Bloom Books

In this era of "Brokeback Mountain", when many heterosexual filmgoers are finding out to their surprise that even the most masculine of men may form unexpected emotional attachments, it's worth taking another look at "A Separate Peace" to consider whether the long-implied homoeroticism of the story is true, and whether it makes any difference.

I first read "A Separate Peace" as a sexually questioning male college student at a small isolated liberal arts school, much like the mythical "Devon". I experienced homoerotic infatuations with two Finny-like characters, both of whom became "best friends" with me and neither of whom became sexual partners (nor did anyone else until I was 38 years old). I felt a remarkable affinity with Gene and with his conflicted idolization and envy of Finny, whose Pied Piper attractiveness I could neither avoid nor imitate. I just re-read the book this weekend, shortly after turning age 50, now in a long-term monogamous relationship with another man and much "sadder but wiser" about the whole question of sexual orientation.

Here are some factors that would favor a homoerotic interpretation of "A Separate Peace": 1) as far as I can recall, there is not a single mention of teenage girls anywhere in the book. To think that a bunch of straight teenage boys imprisoned in bleak all-male dormitories in the frozen winter wouldn't even talk about girls late at night strains credibility. 2) The Devon boys never attended mixers with girl's schools, nor was there any evidence that any of them ever snuck out at night in search of sexual gratification. 3) When Gene and Finny rode their bikes to the beach and spent the night, there is no reference to the girls who surely must have been there. Gene talks only about Finny, about Finny undressing to go in the water, and about their intimate conversation just before going to sleep in the dunes. 4) Actually, the only references to women that I can remember at all are generally unflattering descriptions of professors' wives, hardly the objects of male teenage fantasies.

More important than any of these circumstantial evidences is the relationship between Gene and Finny. Based on my own similar experiences in college, I would guess that any homoerotic feelings were all on Gene's part: he knows exactly how much Finny weighs and how tall he is; he provides an almost lyrical description of the way Finny's muscles flow smoothly from his legs up to his neck; he misses no opportunity to report Finny being unclothed, from not wearing pajamas in the dorm to the final visit in the hospital, when Finny for no apparent reason is not wearhing a shirt.

Gene's terrible feelings of resentment toward Finny that caused Gene to jounce the tree limb could well have had their roots partly in repressed sexual frustration--I threw a couple of totally irrational fits toward my own objects of affection in college for that very reason.

So does it matter whether "A Separate Peace" has homoerotic overtones? Only if you think that "Brokeback Mountain" was nothing more than a "gay cowboy movie" and to heck with the fine acting and directing. The emotions that "A Separate Peace" expresses are universal and cross-cultural. That's why the book will always be a classic.

I read this book for a graduate Humanities course. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, written in 1899 is a seminal work about the ills of colonialism, as well as a postmodern look at the subject of mankind. Conrad's book had a crucial influence on five important works of the twentieth century: J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land, Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Francis Ford Coppolla's movie Apocalypse Now, screenplay by John Milius, was based on Conrad's book. Another interesting fact is that this work was read by Orson Welle's Mercury Theater Players on the radio and was to be his first movie. After doing some work on it he abandoned the project to do Citizen Kane! I would have loved to of seen what Welles could have done with this story. Conrad's story is so riveting in part, because he himself served as a riverboat captain. High school teachers and college professors who have discussed this book in thousands of classrooms over the years tend to do so in terms of Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche; of classical myth, Victorian innocence, and original sin; of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism.

Just a taste of the plot reels you in! Marlow, the narrator of Heart of Darkness and Conrad's alter ego, is hired by an ivory-trading company to sail a steamboat up an unnamed river whose shape on the map resembles "an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country and its tail lost in the depths of the land" (8). His destination is a post where the company's brilliant, ambitious star agent, Mr. Kurtz, is stationed. Kurtz has collected legendary quantities of ivory, but, Marlow learns along the way, is also rumored to have sunk into unspecified savagery. Marlow's steamer survives an attack by blacks and picks up a load of ivory and the ill Kurtz; Kurtz, talking of his grandiose plans, dies on board as they travel, downstream.

Sketched with only a few bold strokes, Kurtz's image has nonetheless remained in the memories of millions of readers: the lone white agent far up the great river, with his dreams of grandeur, his great store of precious ivory, and his fiefdom carved out of the African jungle. Perhaps more than anything, we remember Marlow, on the steamboat, looking through binoculars at what he thinks are ornamental knobs atop the fence posts in front of Kurtz's house and then finding that each is "black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids-a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth" (57).

I especially became interested in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness from the movie Apocalypse Now. There is a scene in the movie that shows Colonel Kurtz's nightstand in his cave. T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land is one of three books on the nightstand. The other two are Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, and J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Anyone wanting to understand the movie Apocalypse Now, especially the character of Colonel Kurtz, and what Milius and Copolla are trying to tell their audience need to read these three books as well as Conrad's Heart of Darkness!

As a graduate student reading in philosophy and history I recommend this book for anyone interested in literature, myth, history, philosophy, religion and fans of Apocalypse Now.

In his new biography Joseph Jefferson: Dean of American Theatre Arthur Bloom captures the life of one of the most compelling figures in the history of American Entertainment. As a comic actor and producer, Joseph Jefferson stood alone at the head of his art. In terms of financial and critical success, Jefferson had no rival. He built this success, for the most part, by perfecting a stage version of Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle". A role which Bloom shows Jefferson lived off-stage as well. Like Will Rogers and comics who followed, Jefferson traded on a home-spun simple image. For years and years audiences packed houses to see the simple character Rip experience the extraordinary. However, behind this mask was a man who lived a luxuriant life, and cultivated fame at the cost of artistic growth. In his life, Jefferson was filled with contradictions. He was the common man in public, and a pampered man in private.

It is the contradictions in Jefferson's life that Bloom reveals for the first time in this biography, and captures with great detail. Before he died, Jefferson had published and enormous autobiography which is charming and seemingly the last word on the subject of Jefferson's life. Fortunately, Bloom penetrates the amiable facade of Jefferson without viciousness. Indeed, the contradictions which Jefferson would have hid from the public, make him all the more appealing as subject for biography. Jefferson's response to the civil war, his relationship with his wives, his temperament as a manager, his impoverished childhood--all of these subjects keep this book from falling into the realm of the dry theatre biography.

Born into a theatrical family in 1829, he made his debut as an infant in crowd scene. His work as an actor would end only with his death in 1905. In his lifetime, Jefferson was praised as an actor of comedy touched with pathos. Like Robin Williams of today, this sentimental side was embraced by some and rejected by others. In this biography, the praise and criticism co-exist with dynamic results.

Wisely, Bloom has found a way to balance the details of Jefferson's 76 years of life at a swift pace. His method is to present the narrative followed by a large appendix. The core of the book is 300 pages, but what follows is another 200 pages of footnotes and performance information. While the appendix is not needed to appreciate the book, it holds additional colorful stories and odd bits of information. Bloom's style is straight-forward, clear, and he supports his work with details. At times, the biography is even quite fresh and witty. In discussing Jefferson's All-Star production of "The Rivals" , Bloom quotes a letter from Jefferson: "We all lived in four cars which were provided for us and during the whole four weeks of the trip, I never heard a cross word". Bloom responds: "If Jefferson never heard a cross word among ten star actors living together for four weeks in a railway train, it is probably because he was going deaf'. Bloom then provides evidence that there was much unhappiness on that tour.

Another strength of the book is the description of Jefferson's acting style. As an artist, Jefferson was consistently praised for his natural style. He achieved humor without artifice. His work as a comic actor seems to shatter many stero-types about 19th century theatre. He was an innovator. There is no question of Jefferson's artistic ability, but even here Bloom does not take anything for granted. Using criticism, promptbooks, and recordings, he is able to communicate Jefferson's unique artistic accomplishment in a clear way, without becoming clinical. In his autobiography, Joseph Jefferson wrote with great eloquence about the craft of acting...communicating with great clarity and passion. Arthur Bloom proves to be Jefferson's equal in this area.

While the first quarter of the book moves slowly, the momentum picks up and the picture of Jefferson emerges with contradictions, frailties, strengths and more. His life spanned from the days when actors were denied burial in a church (Jefferson's view of religion is colored by this, another delightful contradiction), to the days when, at the end of his life, successful actors had risen to be honored men in society. By focusing closely on the life of Jefferson, Bloom indirectly captures the evolution of theatre in America.

Although one wishes for more information on the relationship between Edwin Booth and Jefferson, and for more details about Jefferson's relationship with his children, it is difficult to fault the author. Jefferson's life was so long, and there is so much to cover that one is grateful for the amount of compelling detail Bloom is able to present. This biography will stand as a cornerstone for future works on Joseph Jefferson and the American Theatre. "Joseph Jefferson: The Dean of the American Theatre" is as innovative and compelling as its subject. Who could have imagined that the real life of Joseph Jefferson was more engaging than the story told in his autobiography?

Joyce and Reality: The Empirical Strikes Back by John Gordon (Irish Studies: Syracuse University Press) Joyce was a realist, but his reality was not ours," writes John Gordon in his new book. Here, he maintains that the shifting styles and techniques of Joyce's work are a function of two interacting realities-the external reality of a particular time and place and the internal reality of a character's mental state. In making this case Gordon offers up a number of new readings: how Stephen Dedalus conceives and composes his villanelle; why the Dubliners story about Little Chandler is titled "A Little Cloud"; why Gerty MacDowell suddenly appears and disappears; what is happening when Leopold Bloom stares for two minutes on end at a beer bottle's label; why the triangle etched at the center of Finnegans Wake doubles itself and grows a pair of circles; why the next to last chapter of Ulysses has, by far, the book's highest incidence of the letter C; and who is the man in the macintosh.
Gordon, whose authoritative "Finnegans Wake": A Plot Summary received critical acclaim and is considered one of the standard references, revises-and challenges-the received version of reality. For instance, Joyce features ghost visitations, telepathy, and other paranormal phenomena not as 'flights into fantasy' but because he believed in the real possibility of such occurrences.
This book is what Hollywood would call a prequel to my earlier "Finnegans Wake": A Plot Summary. There, I set out to show that for all its verbal arabesque, Joyce's most perplexing work nonetheless maintained its author's lifelong commitment to his own brand of realism, to the mimetic rendering of a world in which real things happen, in chronological succession, according to laws of cause and effect. That phrase "his own brand of realism" requires some explaining, which is where this book comes in. I am undertaking to explore, through Joyce's work leading up to Finnegans Wake, the evolution of Joycean reality and the Joycean strategies for expressing and dramatizing it.

i chose this book for school because it was a short & easy read; i fell in love with it because, like few school books, i could relate so deeply to the main character. Edna Pontellier wakes up from a life in a dream and fights for self and independence- a struggle that anyone, especially adolescents, can identify with. I can't emphasize enough how beautiful and moving Chopin's prose is. Reading it was pure pleasure, and when self-realization and introspective thought comes along with that, you know the book is a winner.

I felt that this book was extremely well written. I enjoyed the entire book from start to finish. I liked how Kesey used McMurphy to make all the characters stronger, and I really liked when the Chief finally broke his silence. I felt that was very important, and it showed that McMurphy had a positive effect on the people around him. I enjoyed the end of the book when the Chief escaped by throwing the control panel through the window, a seemingly impossible feat. When he smothered McMurphy it made sense because McMurphy would have never wanted the nurse to get the better of him, he'd rather be dead. I rank this book a 5 and i would recommend it to any reader who enjoys to read.

It is a shame this novel is out of print, because this novel brings to life Henry VIII's forgotten queen, Jane Seymour.

Though this novel takes liberties with history, saying Jane was Anne's cousing when the two were not related and having Anne and Jane be on friendly terms when they never were, this is still one of the best glimpses an author has provided into the life of the elusive Queen Jane Seymour. The novel by Frances Clark was boring and Pour the Dark Wine was more about her family than Jane.

This novel focuses solely on Jane herself. It commences with her leaving Wolf Hall, her family home, and coming to serve Queen Anne. The first half of the book deals with Henry courting Jane and convincing her to become queen. The second half deals with Jane's short reign. Though she never wielded any political power the way Catherine of Aragon or Anne Boleyn did, Jane Seymour was very important in one vital way-her restoration of Mary Tudor to Henry's graces. Had Jane not done this, Mary would likely not have become queen.

The portrait evoked here is that of a sweet, simple girl who became Queen of England by a stroke of luck. Often overlooked by writers, this book is one spectacular exception. If you can find this book, buy it! Along with The Tudor Rose by Julia Watson, this is the best novel about the forgotten Queen Jane!

Lo Ch'in-shun (1465-1547) was virtually the first Chinese thinker to make strong steps towards a modern understanding of the world, and Prof. Bloom places Lo's achievements in terms that Western philosophers can understand without violating the original, Chinese sense of his thought.

This book contains the pertinent opinions in laser surgery for different vitreo-retinal conditions. It also contains results for the different trials done in ophthalmology. (DRS, ETRDS, CVOS, MPS etc) Very informative for ophthalmology residents, general ophthalmologists, retina fellows and specialists.

This is a surprisingly entertaining book, written through the eyes of an entrepreneur who established Europe's very first laundromat, and went on to successfully run one of the UK's largest laundromat groups.This is a must for anybody with an interest in social history, providing a thoughtful insight into the massive changes in society in the post-war period.