Vautrin

Yeah, I remember there was a lot of discussion when his book came out. He described a wild night spent with a drunken Spencer Tracy. Well, the drunken part is believable, but the rest seemed more fantasy than truth. I think he was mostly exaggerating to a great degree. He might have been a bit player with some low level clients, but that's probably about all.

I don't think Slade have ever been nominated. Whut Are They Thinkin'?

If one wanted to be nasty you could call T. Rex a one-hit wonder. Lots of hits in the U.K., not so much in the U.S. Slade a band which came right on the heels of T. Rex had the same history--very big in the U.K., not so in the U.S.

While T. Rex were very big in the U.K. in the early 1970s, they never had much success in the U.S. One hit single, Get It On and that's about it. I don't think they ever had a platinum album here. That says nothing about their eligibility for the HOF, only that they were never very popular here. I like Kraftwerk, though the Tour de France album sucks, though not big time.

I was just wondering why someone who was able to recite quite a lot of poetry from memory would than go to the extreme of saying he could recite the whole of Shakespeare and Blake. It's at the point when someone will say to their friend C'mon buddy, quit it. I doubt he could even recite the whole of Blake's Jerusalem. Whatever the reason, in his later years Voltaire had a very negative view of Shakespeare. James was a 19th century novelist, not a 16th century playwright, even if he tried his hand at writing plays and failed miserably. So I don't see much comparison between the two. I never thought of Shakespeare as a God in any sense of the word and don't think he belongs in a category all to himself. I like Chekhov as much as Shakespeare.

That's the impression I get from the little I have read about him. He's entitled to his views on the subject, but he's just one voice among many.

Yes, if one wanted to call people who in general support the capitalist system, then they would both be capitalists, and that definition is likely more widespread than the narrower one.

Randy's nose has been up Trump's rear so many times I wouldn't trust it in a smell test.

If one is using a narrow definition of a capitalist as the owner of a business who hires workers and seeks profits, neither Warren or Sanders is a capitalist.

True, Bloom was not a Jackie Collins, but advances are all about the hoped for popularity of the book. If it's brilliant and sells, so much the better. If it's not brilliants and sells, that's okay too. Just as long as it sells. It just seems rather silly for an often very serious man like Bloom to make such claims when they serve no purpose. Reciting the whole of William Blake. Why even bother to make such a ridiculous claim, unless it was meant as a joke, which it doesn't seem to be. Oh well. Well, most of the writers mentioned in the Western Cannon, at least in the short list, are pretty much the usual suspects that most literary folks would likely mention. No writer is universally liked or within some flaws, including James. IIRC, Voltaire did not have a very high opinion of Shakespeare. I don't see a "false note" in James, at least no more so than in other writers. I will say that his detailed and acute psychological examinations aren't everyone's cup of tea and besides literary judgments are mostly subjective anyway.

She was beaten up but I don't think she ended up hanging in the apartment. If she did, she certainly deserved a better fate.

I guess lucratively pompous at least. Authors get large advances for the belief their book will be very popular. I don't think being brilliant or not brilliant is much of a factor. Whatever one might think of Bloom's literary theories and opinions, he was much smarter than Peterson, but then who isn't? I read the NYT obit, very informative. The writer hints that Bloom only named one book of Updike's, The Witches of Eastwick, on his expanded canonical list, as possible payback for Updike's torturous comment. Who knows. There were a few things in the NYT's obituary that might come under the heading of exaggeration if not actual pomposity. Bloom claimed he could read and understand a 400 page book in one hour. Okayyy. He also had a photographic memory and said he could recite the whole of Shakespeare and Blake. That would make a great bar bet. I have no doubt that Henry James, torturous or not, is firmly ensconced in the literary canon.

He defended his view of literature from people with different views of literature. It's not like Bloom owns Western literature. I don't think the Western Canon is in any need of defense. People will still be reading it on their own or as part of an educational curriculum no matter what. I think the idea of a canon is somewhat unusual because it consists of literature that is far apart in geography, time, and content. There's nothing wrong in bundling these works altogether as the Western canon, but I read books primarily as individual works not as one part of a canon.

I don't even remember what time I had to get up, probably around seven. My mommy would come upstairs and get me up. Sometimes she even actually said Time to rise and shine. Pow, zoom, striaght to the moon Alice.

From what I recall there were a couple of wiseguys, but I didn't think of them as having much of a superiority complex.