Word: homers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...team 11-0. Sunday: Series evened with a 1-0 squeaker, thanks to fine pitching by Hiromi Makihara. Tuesday: Giants win in freezing weather. Fans guzzle 3,000 bottles of hot sake to keep warm. Wednesday: A 12-inning thriller. Lions win 6-5. Series tied. Thursday: Grand- slam homer by Giants pinch hitter Koichi Ogata, left, helps clinch a 9-3 victory. Saturday: Giants win 3-1 and clinch the Series for the 18th time...
Walcott, the Nobel-winning West Indian poet whose 8,000-line Omeros hijacked Homer to the Caribbean, here packs the major events of the Odyssey into three brisk hours and still has room for his voluptuous metaphor making and severe truth telling ("What are men? Children who doubt"). After a slow start, in which stilted heroic attitudes virtually define Bad Regional Theater, Odysseus appears, in the burly, assured person of Casey Biggs, and the play takes off. Mythology can be fun when Circe is a sassy dominatrix, the Sirens are mermaids out of a Bette Midler show, and Helen...
...Austen, Whitman, Dickinson, Dickens, George Eliot, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Freud, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Borges, Neruda, Pessoa and Beckett. This grouping, Bloom's elite among the elite, holds few surprises: an obligatory academic obscurity (Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa), four women and a majority of D.W.E.M.s. (Bloom gives canonical status to Homer and the major Greek dramatists and philosophers but does not discuss their works at any length because his interests focus on authors who came later. A line must be drawn somewhere, but leaving out the classical foundations of Western written culture may strike some as harsh...
Bloom's view of literature as a ceaseless agon between challengers and titleholders is interesting and, in some instances, true. Virgil obviously had an eye on Homer when he set out to write The Aeneid, just as Dante and Milton had Virgil in their sights when they embarked upon The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost. But Bloom cannot prove, on aesthetic or any other grounds, that all the writers he deems great shared the motives he ascribes to them. By the time he gets to a discussion of Emily Dickinson's poetry, he has grown so vexed at the absence...
...Joyce dealt with that pesky, overbearing Shakespeare, particularly when Harold Bloom is ready with shorthand answers in The Western Canon. Why then, in this distraction-besotted time, read demanding, imaginative literature at all? On this topic, Bloom is uncharacteristically tentative. "Reading the very best writers -- let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy -- is not going to make us better citizens." And: "The study of literature, however it is conducted, will not save any individual, any more than it will improve any society." While discarding these schoolmarmish fallacies, Bloom's Common Readers are also advised to forget about picking up literature...