And one page later:
And another twenty-seven pages later:
David Markson, from This Is Not a Novel (2001).
I found two likely sources for the claims about Bloom’s prowess, if that’s what it was, as a reader.
From Radio Open Source (2003):
By his own account, Harold Bloom has lost a step or two at age 77, after major heart surgery. His reading rate is not what it used to be, he says. In his early thirties, the basic Bloomian reading speed with a serious text was 1000 pages an hour; it might be less than half that today.From The New York Times:
Harold Bloom once described himself as a “monster of reading.” He claimed he could read — really read — a 400-page book in a single hour.Bloom’s claims make me think of something I had on a page about how to do well in courses that I taught:
Consider what the poet Ezra Pound says about reading literature: “no reader ever read anything the first time he saw it.” Or consider this exchange between Oprah Winfrey and the novelist Toni Morrison: “Do people tell you they have to keep going over the words sometimes?” “That, my dear, is called reading.”“Writer” is a character in the novel. So “Writer’s arse” = “my arse.”
Related reading
All OCA David Markson posts (Pinboard) : Harold Bloom (1930-2019) : The kitchen shink¹ (A Bloom misreading) : “Transumption is the trope of a trope”
comments: 4
Efficiency in reading is only for newsprint and screens. I often think of a writer, Jeanette Winterson, who would spend an afternoon looking at just two paintings. She wrote: "Art, it its making and in its enjoying, demands long tracts of time. Books, like cats, do not wear watches."
“Books, like cats, do not wear watches”: that’s great! If I were still teaching, I’d share her words. They remind me of something Richard Wollheim wrote about looking at paintings.
I like your link to taking time to look. I remember spending a long time on a bench looking at a huge painting of I Perseus at his wedding turning Phineas and his gang to stone. Next to me an artist was spending a long time sketching parts. She told me a passer by had passed her a nice note, and I told her I had just realized that the painter had put in a proscenium arch to the whole scene. Then she said, "The red bit (top corner) could be a curtain." I would not have noticed the arch if I had not spent the time.
Nice! There’s a story about some artist pointing out how a blue patch in someone’s painting really made the painting — another example of really looking.
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