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Mar. 24th, 2009 02:34 amI've calculated I did my main Borges readings at c. 17, c. 20, 24, c. 28 and now 32. Might be room for even spacing there, depending on which months. Strange how he becomes a habit, like junk food, or perhaps a passion (as witness the diagrams strewn around notebooks here) - strange also how you do burn out on him. I think I leave him more fondly each time.
Not that I've left him yet, just onto the prose. Bloom relies on Borges' points, phrases, anecdotes even more extensively, and less consciously, than on Eliot's - which he's mostly internalized to destroy. The note of personal disappointment, maybe even ambivalence, comes up when he writes of Borges sometimes, too. Can't think where else it ever does.
Bloom should absolutely do something like Borges' Personal Library project. Though that would take some cachet. How amazing that Borges once had that cachet.
My father handed me Labyrinths when either he'd gone into a bit of a posthumous eclipse or the telegraphy of the literary world eschewed my braces. Felt like a personal discovery, like the Beatles did a year or so later (hard to believe now, but they were played absolutely never in my childhood - I knew McCartney only as the Ivory guy). But pretty much everything is a personal discovery at that point. No matter what the source, you don't have enough context on you for the gift to be anything but itself at that age.
My apathy toward school and fairly consistent avoidance of lit. classes, then dropping out entirely, meant almost everything was a pure discovery. The authors sent me to each other, or the movies sent me to them, or they were next to each other in the Nortons or smaller anthologies. Ignored introductions and footnotes too, on fierce principle. No wonder I fell so hard. I've resolved to ignore the official course descriptions next year and largely teach literature, but worry that I'll never be able to reproduce that.
And Bloom ruined it! With him came context - what he provided, what I now didn't mind reading because I had his running start, what was needed to try to fight him. And inevitably I started to open books where I had some notion of what they were supposed to be. (Either that or I turned 24, just as bad.) And now what books do I not have notions of? Doesn't always matter, but often enough does - why read this when I'd read those? I've run to other sources, in reaction, but they're wrong. Take me somewhere okay, sure, fun, sure. But limited, derivative, drab. Closest thing to wrong Bloom's ever been is somewhat confused about Engine Summer.
I'm what you get with Bloom in place of college, you could maybe say, but that couldn't have happened if I hadn't gone native in the books already.
---
I was very annoyed with Borges at first but couldn't stop. Like with Stevens. Like with who else? Dickinson, though it amazes me to say so. I was hostile to her till one day when I read her for hours and she did those things to my head she'd explained she would. I think the resistance was about rhyme or something amazingly inconsequential like that - not to Stevens or Borges, that was their attitude, how they were slanting my world. Haughty contempt was my default approach to new books, or anyway poems. I'm not sure that's indefensible, depending on porosity. Plays I gave myself up to, tv-trained.
But like with who else? Or, rather, who else has won through to where I can't even criticize, just contemplate what they might know still beyond me. Bloom, Stevens, Borges with four year demurrals, Dickinson. Shelley I never fought for one second (is my story). Blake I was skeptical about until full immersion. Once dry, I was again skeptical. Maybe Whitman...surely Emerson. I was initially annoyed by Faulkner and Joyce (never Woolf), but the walls came down in time. Beckett has earned my respect and attention against tough odds. Hardy I think I could love - if I read some more.
Not that I've left him yet, just onto the prose. Bloom relies on Borges' points, phrases, anecdotes even more extensively, and less consciously, than on Eliot's - which he's mostly internalized to destroy. The note of personal disappointment, maybe even ambivalence, comes up when he writes of Borges sometimes, too. Can't think where else it ever does.
Bloom should absolutely do something like Borges' Personal Library project. Though that would take some cachet. How amazing that Borges once had that cachet.
My father handed me Labyrinths when either he'd gone into a bit of a posthumous eclipse or the telegraphy of the literary world eschewed my braces. Felt like a personal discovery, like the Beatles did a year or so later (hard to believe now, but they were played absolutely never in my childhood - I knew McCartney only as the Ivory guy). But pretty much everything is a personal discovery at that point. No matter what the source, you don't have enough context on you for the gift to be anything but itself at that age.
My apathy toward school and fairly consistent avoidance of lit. classes, then dropping out entirely, meant almost everything was a pure discovery. The authors sent me to each other, or the movies sent me to them, or they were next to each other in the Nortons or smaller anthologies. Ignored introductions and footnotes too, on fierce principle. No wonder I fell so hard. I've resolved to ignore the official course descriptions next year and largely teach literature, but worry that I'll never be able to reproduce that.
And Bloom ruined it! With him came context - what he provided, what I now didn't mind reading because I had his running start, what was needed to try to fight him. And inevitably I started to open books where I had some notion of what they were supposed to be. (Either that or I turned 24, just as bad.) And now what books do I not have notions of? Doesn't always matter, but often enough does - why read this when I'd read those? I've run to other sources, in reaction, but they're wrong. Take me somewhere okay, sure, fun, sure. But limited, derivative, drab. Closest thing to wrong Bloom's ever been is somewhat confused about Engine Summer.
I'm what you get with Bloom in place of college, you could maybe say, but that couldn't have happened if I hadn't gone native in the books already.
---
I was very annoyed with Borges at first but couldn't stop. Like with Stevens. Like with who else? Dickinson, though it amazes me to say so. I was hostile to her till one day when I read her for hours and she did those things to my head she'd explained she would. I think the resistance was about rhyme or something amazingly inconsequential like that - not to Stevens or Borges, that was their attitude, how they were slanting my world. Haughty contempt was my default approach to new books, or anyway poems. I'm not sure that's indefensible, depending on porosity. Plays I gave myself up to, tv-trained.
But like with who else? Or, rather, who else has won through to where I can't even criticize, just contemplate what they might know still beyond me. Bloom, Stevens, Borges with four year demurrals, Dickinson. Shelley I never fought for one second (is my story). Blake I was skeptical about until full immersion. Once dry, I was again skeptical. Maybe Whitman...surely Emerson. I was initially annoyed by Faulkner and Joyce (never Woolf), but the walls came down in time. Beckett has earned my respect and attention against tough odds. Hardy I think I could love - if I read some more.
