Wednesday, March 24, 2004
This will be too brief, due to a recent and severe lack of free, and exhaustion-free, time. Between the normal five classes per day (including the new creative writing elective, which is going very well) and coaching varsity softball, I've additionally been suckered in to run a middle school soccer clinic for 13 school days, since their sports season was cancelled for various reasons and replaced with 4 mini-clinics. So my whole day from 7a.m. to 4:30 is literally jammed with stuff. Plus there's film society (one of the activities I enjoy running most), the Scribblers creative writing magazine to get off the ground (we have a Spring issue to put out), I've just been "asked" to be the dramaturge for the musical (a sci-fi spoof), fiancee stuff (another favorite but still time consuming) and love, dorm duty, weekend duty, academic saturdays, etc etc.
BUT
I could not fail to blog about the recent Harold Bloom/Naomi Wolf "scandal" that did not exactly take the media by storm in the last couple weeks. Basically, a former student of the Yale snob/genius literary critic Harold Bloom who is now a recognized feminist author has publically admitted that Bloom made a pass at her in 1981 during a dinner meeting to discuss her poetry portfolio. There was some amontillado involved, he touched her, she vomitted, and he left. She did not report the incident for years, and only went public after a recent yearlong battle with Yale administrators to determine if her claim, or others, against lecherous faculty had ever been followed up and if consequences had ever been levelled. Not necessarily for her safety but for the safety of other women. Her account, as published in New York Magazine is worth examining before you get into the cavalcade of severe backlash.
Basically, as many columnist have noted, nobody bought her posture. "So what?" is the attitude many are taking. "Leave the old man alone, you're already a successful novelist." (Bloom is in ill health at 80). One journalist, Celia Farber, wickedly wrote
I keep a close watch on my cultural windmills, and I can tell you categorically that a few years ago, this story would have had them spinning furiously, unanimously, in favor of Wolf. Bloom would have gotten about as much sympathy as Chiang Kai-Shek alone in a dark alley with an angry mob of Red Guards. The imperative would have been simple: Kill.
Not so this time. She added
I spent the whole week reading essays, reports and blogs. Stories about the story. Be they left or right, pro-feminist or contrarian—they all had a tone of sober repudiation
So, things have apparently changed. Somehow, between Sex and the City and Bridget Jones, some of the weaker pillars of feminism are falling in the public square.
It was great to watch one of my senior students follow this story (he alerted me to it) since he is extremely lazy but was nonetheless interested enough in what we read about Bloom in last term's elective (about multiculturalism and American literature), how he's a raging anti-cultural studies snob whining at how colleges have been poisoned by politics and agenda (feminist studies, latin american studies, queer theory, etc..). It's quite a bunch of ripe coincidence and irony.
More later....
BUT
I could not fail to blog about the recent Harold Bloom/Naomi Wolf "scandal" that did not exactly take the media by storm in the last couple weeks. Basically, a former student of the Yale snob/genius literary critic Harold Bloom who is now a recognized feminist author has publically admitted that Bloom made a pass at her in 1981 during a dinner meeting to discuss her poetry portfolio. There was some amontillado involved, he touched her, she vomitted, and he left. She did not report the incident for years, and only went public after a recent yearlong battle with Yale administrators to determine if her claim, or others, against lecherous faculty had ever been followed up and if consequences had ever been levelled. Not necessarily for her safety but for the safety of other women. Her account, as published in New York Magazine is worth examining before you get into the cavalcade of severe backlash.
Basically, as many columnist have noted, nobody bought her posture. "So what?" is the attitude many are taking. "Leave the old man alone, you're already a successful novelist." (Bloom is in ill health at 80). One journalist, Celia Farber, wickedly wrote
I keep a close watch on my cultural windmills, and I can tell you categorically that a few years ago, this story would have had them spinning furiously, unanimously, in favor of Wolf. Bloom would have gotten about as much sympathy as Chiang Kai-Shek alone in a dark alley with an angry mob of Red Guards. The imperative would have been simple: Kill.
Not so this time. She added
I spent the whole week reading essays, reports and blogs. Stories about the story. Be they left or right, pro-feminist or contrarian—they all had a tone of sober repudiation
So, things have apparently changed. Somehow, between Sex and the City and Bridget Jones, some of the weaker pillars of feminism are falling in the public square.
It was great to watch one of my senior students follow this story (he alerted me to it) since he is extremely lazy but was nonetheless interested enough in what we read about Bloom in last term's elective (about multiculturalism and American literature), how he's a raging anti-cultural studies snob whining at how colleges have been poisoned by politics and agenda (feminist studies, latin american studies, queer theory, etc..). It's quite a bunch of ripe coincidence and irony.
More later....
