Word: bloom
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Many of these interludes are enchanting. Morrison has few living peers at evoking both the particulars and the sensuousness of scenes, whether they be the bloom of an unexpectedly lush cotton crop or the arrival of spring on city streets: "What can beat bricks warming up in the sun? The return of awnings. The removal of blankets from horses' backs." Even her ventures into the mystical come furnished with details: "The music the world makes, familiar to fishermen and shepherds, woodsmen have also heard. It hypnotizes mammals. Bucks raise their heads and gophers freeze...
...very old friend of mine, and I did borrow some things from Stanley, who was notorious for writing his books on Milton while watching American football or baseball. But Morris Zapp is a kind of typical; figure, who has been "identified" with other academics--Leslie Fiedler or Harold Bloom or whatever. And it pleases me, because he is a representative type--and Stanley has rather encouraged the likeness, I think. On the whole, I'm very careful not to portray people--I don't write romans a clef, though Small World is often read...
...reader in their chronic gloom. While the backdrop is one of complaint, cryptic exchanges -- "That again? Are we rehashing that again?" -- are enough to remind us of the women's litany. Their oppressive unhappiness is artfully offset by the vitality of the three youngest Townes, who, like flowers that bloom in urban sidewalk cracks, fight for life...
...denigration of D.W.M.s (Dead White Males). Robert Wood, who is Henry Luce professor of Democratic Institutions and the Social Order at Wesleyan University, argues for balance. "In the past five years, we have generally had two counsels on curriculum, and they're both wrong. Allan Bloom ((The Closing of the American Mind)) and others basically say, 'Don't read anything after the Age of the Enlightenment.' Then we have our present multicultural movement saying every culture should be explored. We need some consensus on this. What we should do is concentrate on how to train competent Americans...
...better to opt for information and conjecture and the exhumation of all theories. Let a hundred flowers bloom, even if some of them are poisonous and paranoid. A culture is what it remembers, and what it knows...