therapy

Harold Bloom and Stephen King are not for it. Stephen King said it would 'put a hole in his bucket'. Harold Bloom said it would make him happier, but more boring, flatter, leveller, more consistent, more boring and unworthwhile, he implied, in every way. Adam Phillips is circumspect - is circumspection anything more than a refusal to 'take short views'? Can we only be interesting, valuable and creative if we're invested in fucked-up oppositions? Can we get over this addiction to binaries? Please?

"and take short views"

Finding that I was echoing Bloom without knowing it was so terribly appropriate, given the title of the first chapter of the Anxiety of Influence, "It was a great marvel, that they were within the father without knowing him". He is a bigoted, racist and a sexist man. But he is content to be Harold Bloom - and as long as he finds no-one with a more prodigious memory who is, more than him, sunken in learning, he will remain so. Characterising those who disagree with him as the 'School of Resentment' is a very clever move on his part: he needs a whole school to counter him. Aside from this it allows him not to engage with anyone. Not that a tendency toward engagement was really his problem in the first place. Nonetheless he introduced me to Hart Crane.