See the article in its original context from August 28, 1988 Section Page Buy Reprints View on timesmachine TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. THE BAR IN THE AUDITORIUM lobby at the University of Antwerp was crowded with scholars in baggy suits, itinerant students, assorted hangers-on. There were also a few prosperous-looking older men, who turned out to be childhood friends of Paul de Man - the focus of an international conference held last June at the university. You wouldn't have known from the sessions listed in the … [Read more...] about The Case of Paul De Man
Christopher kimball
Colossus Among Critics; Harold Bloom
See the article in its original context from September 25, 1994 Section Page Buy Reprints View on timesmachine TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. IN EARLY SUMMER, I PAID TWO VISITS TO Harold Bloom, the eminent literary critic famous for his prodigious intellectual energy. On both occasions, he seemed intent on staging a deathbed scene. Collapsed on a reclining armchair, brow furrowed, mouth sour, the 64-year-old Bloom looked worse than pained. "The battle is lost," he whispered. "These resentniks have destroyed the canon." … [Read more...] about Colossus Among Critics; Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom: An Uncommon Reader
At the age of 80, with almost 40 books behind him and nearly as many accumulated honors, Harold Bloom has written, in “The Anatomy of Influence,” a kind of summing-up — or, as he puts it in his distinctive idiom, mixing irony with histrionism, “my virtual swan song,” born of his urge “to say in one place most of what I have learned to think about how influence works in imaginative literature.” Influence has long been Bloom’s abiding preoccupation, and the one that established him, in the 1970s, as a radical, even disruptive presence amid the groves of academe. This may surprise some who think of Bloom primarily as a stalwart of the Western canon, fending off the assaults of “the School of Resentment” and its “rabblement of lemmings,” or as a self-confessed Bardolator, swooning over “Hamlet” and “Lear.” Not that Bloom abjures these subsequent selves. There is much canon fodder in this new book, along with reaffirmed vows of fidelity to Shakespeare, “the founder” not only of modern … [Read more...] about Harold Bloom: An Uncommon Reader
Coming Home to Pot Roast
MINNEAPOLIS — Pot roast was one of the first dishes the chef Gavin Kaysen learned to cook, if you can call it cooking. The recipe he used as a teenager growing up in Bloomington, Minn., a Twin Cities suburb, required no culinary training. “I’d just Crock-Pot it,” Mr. Kaysen said. He then mimicked the act of pouring packaged beef stock into a slow cooker and grinned. Mr. Kaysen had just slid a more technically advanced pot roast into the oven in the open kitchen at Spoon and Stable , the restaurant he opened here in late 2014 to much anticipation. “I can’t wait for that gravy,” he said. Northeasterners cook Yankee pot roast . Jewish brisket and most beef daube in New Orleans are pot roast by other names. But to many who grew up in America’s heartland, pot roast tastes and smells of home. Comprising little more than a large cut of beef (chuck roast is common), onions, root vegetables and braising liquid, pot roast has none of the meddling influence of haute cuisine. … [Read more...] about Coming Home to Pot Roast