Bloom Books

As a New England gardner based outside Boston, I found the prose enjoyable but the recommendations had little relevance to local needs.

If only I lived on Bainbridge Island....

This book complements in a minor way but does not supersede Wilder's FRAGRANT PATH or WILSON's FRAGRANT YEAR.

I must be getting old. Why would I choose to read this book? But I did. Not only that! I recognize all the people it refers to and the comments about the works of GO strike me as just the sort of reaction I would have myself! It makes me want to know how old Harold Bloom is. Perhaps I am becoming too familiar with Harold Bloom and I am beginning to think as he teaches me! If so, who are the THOUGHT POLICE? Harold?

This is Orwell reconsidered and it rings true. It even has me thinking about reading some of GO's things again.

I bought this book on recommendation (thanks a lot, Bob). This is not the book you want to buy if you've already had success in journalism (I'm a freelance magazine and newspaper writer).

I found most of the examples to be what I had already learned in school and just by taking various workshops. A lot of his samples are "duh" to those of us who are looking to deepen our writing skills.

This book of modern critical views provided thought-provoking insight to many, in fact nearly all, of Chopin's literary works, including her many short stories and two novels, the most critically acclaimed being The Awakening. The book helped me to look at Chopin's work with more respect and a totally new perspective and understanding. However, since I have not read all of Chopin's works, some of the analyses were difficult to comprehend, seeing as I had no background for assimulating the information into something coherent. All in all, the novel is a worthwhile read if one is interested in the wonderful works of Kate Chopin.

Feng Jicai's accounts of the Chinese Cultural Revolution are the best that I have ever read and can be found in "Ten Years of Madness" and "Voices in the Whirlwind". I require his work for my course on Modern China. Unfortunately, this book seems to suffer from translation problems that might have been avoided if a more experienced translator had taken on the project. It is still a tale worth reading if merely to remind us of the unpredictability of life and as an addendum to Feng's other works on the Cultural Revolution. I believe that Feng never intended this book to be listed as a book for children.

This book is beautiful, and the artist has been through a lot in her young life. I think it's AWESOME how far she has come in just 12 years of life. I wish I could go that far in my own life. However, I've seen better. If you want to be AMAZED read "Guided By Angels" by: Amanda Dunbar.

Growing up being picked on by a bully because he was 'smart,' Rigby of Pocatello, Idaho, led an upsetting and sad existence. The Sixties were hard on everyone but, most particularly, the sensitive, bright young students during the turmoil which was forced into their existence. No one could escape the horror. Not only was it devastating emotionally and mentally, but physically as well. Rigby had to endure numerous beatings by a dumb neighbor boy from a wealthy family. Money is not everything in this life. It won't buy you scruples, intelligence or morals. You may inherit the iltellect part from your parents, though it is possible to overcome poverty by appreciating good teachers at school and church. You have have to learn the ethical part of life from church, but watch out for the hypocrites who don't practice what they preach.

Rigby's family were overly religious and placed him in a Catholic school where he clearly did not fit in. Like me, he left home at seventeen to spread his wings and learn about the world outside his small existence. Now is the hour to right wrongs, not keep repeating the same old practices. When you pick on someone you think is not your equal intellectually or in status, you only demean yourself and your parents, who should have taught you some principles. If you haven't learned it by the time you're in your forties, it's almost hopeless to think that you will ever change.

The hymn as sung by Ernie Ford, "Now Is the Hour" refers to your entrance into heaven. If you've been a hellion on earth, don't expect God to forgive and forget your transgressions at the last minute. In San Francisco, Rigby found a whole new world deficient in morality. Needless to say, young Rig had a lot of transition in store to grow into a new being full of hope for his future. It's not my choice for a son to go for his coming-of-age regeneration.

All small towns are not like Pocatello (we lived in a good one at a Methodist college), and no other state is like Idaho. He was lucky to have left behind an unhappy childhood young enough to change for the better into a fulfilled adult. He was very lucky. Some men refuse to grow up and learn that equality and tolerance for others who are different is necessary to get along with others. When their "hour" comes to face St. Peter at the Pearly Gates, they will have to account for how they treated their fellow man or woman. We all reach that reckoning in the end. For some, it's a new beginning.

"A Polylogue on 'Penelope' & Cultural Studies" (U. of Wisconsin, 1994), gathers twelve articles by various literary critics exploring the ultimate chapter of James Joyce's "Ulysses." Kathleen McCormick surveys the reactions to Molly's chapter over the past century, from outrage to awe, from shock to praise, and finds that each decade reflects in its reception the unsurprising fact that the social mores, intellectual currents, and scholarly understanding of Joyce's bravura eight sentences and thousands of words that provide Molly with her scripted thoughts provide a mirror into the changing attitudes of earth mother or shameless hussy that have polarized much of 20c response to her performance. Pearce follows with a brave if awkward attempt by a "male feminist" to transcend the "male gaze" to scrutinize how we look at Molly, especially if male critics, even as his essay is inevitably, like Joyce's, framed by such a gender-constructed and linguistically daring but role-bound limitation.

The performative aspect of Molly's recital provides its own "star turn," what Joyce proffered as the 'clou', the closing act to bring down the curtain after Poldy went to bed, inverted next to her, and his own narrative ended with a big (or small?) black period. Cheryl Herr's analysis confronts the chapter as Molly's "period piece" with the multiple meanings this phrase carries. Herr, building upon her work in the 1986 'Joyce's Anatomy of Culture,' emphasizes the staginess of the drama-- which is not a stream of consciousness in its pauses addresses to the audience, role-playing, and although a monologue, it is a text and a speaker aware that the chapter plays with the melodramatic conventions of 1904 Dublin.Therefore, Molly acts out her role, yet she speaks her lines while holding back total revelation. Herr even argues that Molly's menstruation, seemingly the undeniable sign of the character's female self, remains in Joyce's portrayal "playacting." We can never truly know Molly, Herr insists. Mrs Marion Bloom sticks as an Irish citizen and a woman, to a "script forced on her." (78) Inside, she holds her secrets, keeping her interior feelings hidden from their external expression in the closing pages of Joyce's exploitative media.

Kimberly Devlin follows by contrasting masquerade with mimicry, as if Marilyn Monroe were set alongside Madonna the singer for contemporary analogies. Devlin argues Molly's closer to Ms. Ciccone in her willful appropriation. Carol Schloss raises the issue of colonialism with marriage, Susan Bazargan explores the Gibraltar aspects of Molly's memories, and Brian Shaffer employs Bakhtin. These three essays lack the inventiveness of Herr's contribution, but remain organized, cogent, and of interest to cultural studies scholars.

Joseph Heinenger nears Herr's earlier work in contexts within which Joyce placed the novel by examining advertising language of the actual products peddled which Molly uses; Jennifer Wicke matches this with a dense, rather theoretically dependent article that enters the realm of consumption and the place not only of Molly but ourselves as consumers of these works. This essay, by the way, finds in the second ed. (2005; reviewed by me also on Amazon) of the Cambridge Companion to James Joyce a counterpart in Wicke's longer piece on this topic; similarly, Garry Leonard-- another fine contributor to the CCJJ, on Dubliners-- here in Pearce's collection provides a spirited Lacanian look at the erotics of shopping, display, and performance. I particularly liked his close reading of Molly's decision not to return her "laddered" stockings before she meets Boylan as an example of pre-coital as opposed to post-coital shopping!

The book closes with Margaret Mills Harper on drapery in both the Odyssey & the chapter, and Ewa Zietek's ambitious study of technology, memory and "the female body." Again, while some essays, notably Herr & Leonard, stood out from the rest for their vivacity, this remains a solid anthology of in-depth investigations of Molly's enigmatic, shape-shifting, and fittingly masked and webbed persona(e).

Dated a bit by references to the Real Roxanne, Imelda Marcos, and "Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous," nevertheless the ties that continue to be made to the media of a century ago employed by Joyce and that through which you read my comments today show that Molly indeed transcends the time and place that she ineluctably remains tied to so vividly for us a century hence. She is part of the "transparent showcart" Bloom ad man imagined with "two smart girls" rolled through Dublin, hawking yet another cultural studies artifact to sell to us.

Description from the book back cover:

Ronald Hayes, a successful solicitor now in his sixties, returns to Old Garth, the house in Sussex where he had lived with his second wife, Flower, and their daughter Adele. But the house brings back unwanted memories of his life with Flower and the disturbing psychic 'voices' she used to hear, as well as much happier recollections of his first wife Amanda, the only true love of his life.

The cover is a grotesque animation. A woman stands naked and exposed. Her mouth is lipsticked, her nipples enlarged, and she wears stilletos. But her face is crudely etched, and she has no hair. Her head is at an angle so that only eye is visible and the lid is a slit. A man twice her size stands looking at her but with his back to us. He is as hidden as the woman is open. He wears a raincoat, his feet tiny under the bulk of his body, a sign of his small endowment. His nose is overdrawn like the woman's lips and her breast closest to him. His mouth is open but thin-lipped, totally without any sensuality. There is something even apelike, primitive in the roughness of the figures of the sketch. The image is humorless and bleak in it's limited view of sexuality.
This collection of 11 essays aims to create a dialogue between the sexes, but even the introduction recognises that this is not easy given the inherent historically opposing views men and women have on the topic. Men take a classically objective stance to pornography, distancing themselves from involvement, and satisfied by the fantasy. Women are socially constructed to be appalled by pornography, since it's objectification disempowers them. They see the act of sex as expression of love and when love is not represented, it becomes a surrender, as in the way losing their virginity is an act of subjugation. The "cum shot", a moment of climactic liberation for the man, is said to be a psychological return to the passive mother of her milk, which is perhaps pushing the metaphor too far. While most of the essays concentrate on film pornography, a few touch on literature. Mike Woolf reveals that the pseudo-liberation of titles by D H Lawrence and Henry Miller, ironically encages their new sexual expression in obsession/compulsive neurosis. Avis Lewallen finds Angela Carter's revisionist fairy tales equally trapped by stereotypes. And Alison Assiter declares, that romantic Mills and Boon fiction is porn for women, with heroines objectified but with an erotic pleasure that compensates for the patriarchal oppression of their real erotic lives. Anthony Crabbe argues that sex films are made to prevent people (read - men) from "enlarging their sexual horizons". He provides an interesting account of Linda Lovelace, who in her biography admitted that her film career was an extension of her being a prostitute. This may be evidence to support the definition of pornography as the debasement of women, but it denies the notion of pornography as instruction, something which Lovelace's notorious Deep Throat can take credit for. What is interesting is that men are thought to be drawn to sex films as an alternative to actual sex, since they can peak much quicker than women, and a real encounter requires more effort if he aims to satisfy his partner. Maggie Humm questions the limited feminist scope of the male "gaze", claiming that verbal language is ignored. She makes no distinction between porn and mainstream movies, and cites Klute as an example as directed by a man. The voice of Bree, a prostitute, is used to extend the representation of her sexuality in her scenes with a therapist, in Bree's sessions with her clients, and via a tape recording used by the killer. Humm also cites Penthouse's Forum column which allows for greater explicitness than the poses of the magazine's photographs.
Since the authors of these pieces present themselves as staunch intellectuals, probably to ward off the intellectual illegitimacy of their subject, the writing itself tends to the humourless and highbrow. However like any collection of essays, one is able to pick and choose from a variety of voices, even if the conclusions remain disappointingly similar.