Russians are spectacularly shitty people.

Walt Whitman's 200th anniversary was yesterday. So I went looking and I found this, on Yale's Harold Bloom (from 2011 - OK, it's not the most scholarly source):

https://wwd.com/eye/people/the-full-bloom-3592315/

Excerpts:

...The critic considers Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to be enormously important, and he says, “I teach both of them all the time. I find Dickinson blindingly, bewilderingly difficult. I always end up with a headache after teaching her for two hours.…After Shakespeare, she has the most original mind of the poets writing in the English language.” Whitman, he notes, “reinvented poetry, not so much the outer form, which doesn’t count for much, but the way he puts himself into the poem. The tactile intensity of it is astonishing. In his poem, ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,’ he all but literally reaches out to you and hugs you.”...

...He was upset in 2003 when the National Book Award gave a special award to Stephen King. “But Stephen King is Cervantes compared with David Foster Wallace. We have no standards left. [Wallace] seems to have been a very sincere and troubled person, but that doesn’t mean I have to endure reading him. I even resented the use of the term from Shakespeare, when Hamlet calls the king’s jester Yorick, ‘a fellow of infinite jest.’...

...He teaches undergraduates exclusively; they have been selected from a large group of applicants to his two courses, limited to 12 each, one on Shakespeare and one on poetry. He chooses them by having them write three or four pages in an hour about why they want to take the class — “not about me.”

He has not taught graduate students for years. When he’s asked why, Bloom dilates on the academic battles he has had: “I had to fight my way through in the Yale English department. I started teaching here full-time in 1955. But with the exception of two remarkable men, my thesis advisor, Frederick Pottle, and the dean of Yale College, William Clyde DeVane, I couldn’t get along with people in the department. They all believed that T.S. Eliot was Christ’s vicar on earth. Every time you wrote something or said something you were supposed to genuflect to the sacred Eliot. Now the sacred Eliot, in his own hallucinatory way, is not the world’s worst poet. But he’s an awful literary critic and one of the most vicious anti-Semites of all time. So I had quarreled incessantly with the Yale English department, and I finally couldn’t bear it any more.

“I’m tired of being accused of being an elitist, which simply means that one wants people to read what’s worth reading and write in a proper response to it,” he adds. “I thought that the function of a critic was to read accurately and plainly to propound what one had apprehended. I wasn’t aware that there was going to be this cultural inundation.” He was accused of being racist or sexist because he didn’t believe that a poem had merit “simply because it was written by an African-American, a Hispanic or an Eskimo transvestite.”...

(Me: I'd say it also has to do with his shortage of praise for those female or minority writers whose work HAS in fact stood the test of time with critics. Praising just one or two doesn't cut it - especially since he's willing to praise LIVING white male writers, not just those who lived centuries ago.)

...In 1977, Bloom went to the then-acting president of Yale, Hanna Gray, who later became the president of the University of Chicago, and told her that if he wasn’t named a professor of “things in general,” he would leave the university. She went to the Yale Corporation, and it was done. In 1983, he was named a Sterling Professor of the Humanities, and in 1985, he won a MacArthur Fellowship. After a time, Bloom noticed that, since he had “taken a ferocious stand against political correctness in the academy,” his recommendations for graduate students ended up being “the kiss of death,” and he stopped teaching them.

It is difficult to understand why someone like Bloom, who is so devoted to literature, so funny and just plain interesting, would be greatly disliked. But his opinions tend to evoke strong passions. He also has very vivid views on politics. For one thing, he is quite disappointed with President Barack Obama. “We had high hopes for Obama,” he says. “I’m afraid he turns out to be a Chicago pol. He doesn’t have much fight in him.”

“It all started with that absolute dreadful creature Ronald Reagan,” he continues. “It was Reagan who came along and persuaded the whole nation that it was all right to be selfish, that it was an American virtue to be selfish. And all of these Tea Party-ites wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been for Reagan as their trailblazer...."
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I also wish I get more details on what Bloom considers to be racist and what he doesn't - and WHY, given what he said in 2003. From the "Literary Ramblings" site:

"...Frighteningly, Bloom takes aim at the expansion of the canon that has taken place in the last thirty years. He bemoans that a teacher 'spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist', and that this is ‘insufferable’, though he was not at the seminar in person and is only relying on hearsay. Even if this were true, to take the time to examine the attitudes of an author and the influence those attitudes might have had on his literature is a perfectly legitimate intellectual exercise and can indeed provide insight into literary analysis. If Bloom is uncomfortable with conceding that a poet he admires might have referred to Americans with African heritage as baboons only exemplifies the ways in which America and Americans refuse to confront their barbaric past..."
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But, from "Walt Whitman put on trial for his 200th birthday" by Peter Crimmins:

"For others, Whitman was an outsider shunned by the literary establishment of his time, who turned poetry into a personal confirmation on the most grand scale. Many poets who came later, including Langston Hughes and Margaret Walker of the Black Arts Movement, revered Whitman as a hero."

So, if Bloom was complaining that a 19th-century white person could be both racist and anti-racist, he really should have admitted that. Just because MOST white people of that time had attitudes that would be considered awful today doesn't change the fact those attitudes were awful.

Well.. Pride month has started. Please share this pic once companies start giving rainbow colours to their logos:

https://i.imgur.com/lVUA6II.png

A large number of Chinese Twitter accounts are being suspended today. They “happen” to be accounts critical of China, both inside and outside China

https://twitter.com/YaxueCao/status/1134607732718407680

Compelling new innovation! You can't hear the terminal Lounge television unless you download the app!

Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty,....

A large number of Chinese Twitter accounts are being suspended today. They “happen” to be accounts critical of China, both inside and outside China

It's not a very big step from "speech that is offensive to specific groups" to "speech that is offensive to 'the people' in general." At some point, both "must be banned" for the protection of all.

When the unions sic the cops on you for doing the job They are supposed to do:

https://twitter.com/nowthisnews/status/1133818541650538496