I don’t actually disagree with Bloom’s focus on aesthetics. I do believe there is more to literature than aesthetics, but I do feel that the lack of respect or interest in literary beauty is part of the reason such a vast amount of utter crap is being published. However, where I must part ways with Bloom is when the notion of beauty becomes confined to the opinion of the elite few. This is an aesthetic point, not a political one: I see Bloom’s vision of what makes “true literature” as infuriatingly limited and… well, you see, at first I wrote conservative, but that’s not even it. It’s just limited to one sort of writing, the equivalent of an art critic saying “only Cubism is true art.”

I see no problem with people finding beauty in the kind of convoluted writing exemplified by someone like Pynchon; personally I find that this type of writing is too artificial, too constructed for my tastes. Like a television comedy so obsessed with its own punchlines that it forgets to have characters, I tend to feel that many modern novels forget or forgo storytelling (which is seen as a kind of dirty word) to present us with intricate but somewhat lifeless sentence constructions, which I don’t find to be aesthetically pleasing. This last part is essential, because many commenters immediately jumped to the conclusion that I’ve never read anything, I’m an illiterate lout who simply doesn’t want to be challenged, etc. I simply don’t think that verbosity and nested sentences equal beauty (or genuine complexity of any kind).

I also shouldn’t oversimplify this; I don’t want all writing to be simple and accessible. There are plenty of works that I enjoy that are quite complex on a verbal and structural level; but I believe that such complexity must be artistically justified, and in many modern novels it is either dogma or ego.

Now, specifically as to the work of J.K. Rowling, I cannot pick out a particular passage (partially because my wife is asleep and going through our overburdened shelves would be noisy). But that doesn’t really matter, because I don’t believe that good writing consists only (or at all) of writing impressive sentences. Comparing which writer can write the prettier sentence is not only childish, but pointless, because there are other aspects to writing which cannot be so easily compared, such as structure or flow. One of the many things I find so remarkable about Rowling’s writing is precisely how it flows – not the individual sentences, but what the sentences do together as a whole. Every time I read one of her books, I get an intense sense of pleasure, pleasure at the words and names and the mellifluous way they run through my mind while evoking all kinds of images and emotions.

This is tied up with content, though; you can’t just separate the way a story is told from what the story is about. The moments, the gentle irony often employed by the narrator, the characters, the places, the allusions, all of it is interconnected, and all of it together gives me both intellectual and aesthetic pleasure of the highest order.

The same could be said of one of the most remarkable moments I’ve ever seen in a book, which comes in the seventh and last Harry Potter book. I don’t want to accidentally spoil it, but I’m referring to the use of an expletive by an older character in a particularly tense situation. I find that scene remarkable because aesthetics and content work together perfectly: in the context of extremely tragic events, there is an upsurge of emotion in a character, and that emotion is expressed as clearly as it has ever been by anyone with language that is not only appropriate to the moment, but so completely unusual in the stylistic context of the book that it stands out in stark relief. It’s a harrowing moment executed with impressive skill, and done so using only a few words. Sometimes art really is doing less, not more.

That’s it from me for now. More when I find the time to go into this properly.

[The previous paragraph took it for granted that you agree that Rowling has entertained many people.]

Some meditations:

Let’s demystify the CANON. The Canon is obviously a meaningless list. I think Bloom acknowledges this to a point, but it is reflective of some sort of truth in many of the works listed. The fact that we still read an epic anonymously written 1000 years ago (Beowulf) or that we read the ancients, and a number of them at that, flabbergasts me. It’s a beautiful thing really, that after wars, changing geography, sociological shifts, technological breakthroughs that alter the very fabric of our societies, we still have time to listen to what some writer had to say a few thousand years ago, and we can still feel the courage, the wonder, the insight, the life of it all. It still feels new.

Snobs and populists aside, most of us read either to be edified or entertained, but when a book smacks you upside the head and edifies you in a way that has little to do with “knowledge” per se, it’s a powerful feeling that most of us have trouble explaining, but leave that to the critics, or not. Whereas fashions on what’s entertaining and what’s important to know change with the aforementioned historical changes, it’s the powerful works that usually last. That’s why there’s a canon. But it’s meaningless because if the book listed doesn’t smack you upside the head with a wondrous new paradigm, if it doesn’t work for YOU, then it’s not in YOUR canon, if such a thing can be conceived. In fact, why not? In reality, that’s all it can ever be. High culture and low culture are ideological lenses. The authors of some of my favorite works, Ulysses and The Waste Land (although I don’t much like Eliot’s other poems), would laugh at the distinction. There’s a difference between having discriminating taste and fashioning your taste towards discriminatory attitudes. The first one shows thought, the second lack thereof.

Originality is real, but it has more to do with being original than being different. Some writers who are afraid of scrutinizing themselves and their world resort to faking originality, and while academic types are sometimes fooled, something in the primordial nature rejects this as a plea for attention and nothing more. Being original, means being the origin. It’s how the greatest writers write the most formidable material and make it all seem like child’s play because it IS natural. It comes naturally when the origin is one’s self.

And since when is there anything wrong with pop? Pop is the common language of our generation. After Warhol, things DID change, and, to the native of pop culture, it is a very developed field full of intertextuality and real meaning for real people. Pop music has its heroes, too. It has Dylan and Bowie and Rotten, even Lil Wayne. Sure, none of these have produced anything close to Shakespeare or Homer, but let’s remember how many years of oral tradition led to Homer’s breakthrough. Today our oral tradition is recorded and mass-produced. It is not inconceivable that one day masterpieces will arise from our pop culture. I used to think pop was doomed to the dustbin until I saw two large Rauschenberg pieces in a forced visit to a museum. That smacked me upside the head.

But remember. It’s all play. It’s not make-believe, as King said in the article you posted. I think play is something different, something more gratifying than fantasy for fantasy’s sake, not that King or Rowling are either. I’ve read only one King, Shawshank, which I’m told is not a representative piece, and I’ve read the first three Potter’s, which, where play is concerned, get the job done. Play is when reality becomes more real if not just because you’re inventing it. The harder you play, the more it wraps around your day to day life, your thoughts, your existence, the deeper it gets. Mr. Insight himself, Prince Hamlet, was he not just a player?

These are all seeds, some more for my own understanding than for any other purpose, but I’d be happy to start a discussion based on them. That’s all for now.

didn’t read most of them but I will try to offer my wholly uninformed opinions.

On the subject of art as a dieing art.
I would say art seems as alive as ever to me, simply overshadowed by the huge about of (what I would call) non artistic but often more poplar media.

The one thing I do sort of agree with Bloom is with popular “art”. I have absolutely no respect for what the average Joe likes, it is probably a bad idea to ignore something simply because it is popular but I cannot say that I do not think less of something if it is.

I have never read king, but have read all of Rowling and would say she is very talented, and the best I have ever read, at creating easily enjoyable and readable books. Regardless of if she has deep hidden meanings in her books or not, their is a place for easy reads in literature and she deserves respect.