Word: bloom
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...defense of multiculturalism frames Gates' on-target attack on the right. The second essay, "The Master's Pieces," opens with a scathing assault on former Secretary of Education William Bennett and cultural critic Allan Bloom '56, chargins that they "symbolize for us the nostalgic return to what I think of as the 'antebellum aesthetic position,' when men were men, and men were white, when scholar-critics were white men, and when women and persons of color were voiceless, faceless servants,...filling brandy snifters in the boardrooms of old boy's clubs...
Gates actually agrees in a sense. In "Integrating the American Mind," he says "Allan Bloom is right to ask about effect of higher education on our kids' moral development, even though that's probably the only thing he is right about." In fact, this sentiment is at the core of the central programmatic tenet of Loose Canons--that we must create an educational system that fosters "a civic culture that respects both differences and commonalities." This will be a system "that seeks to comprehend the diversity of human culture" since (and this is the Gates mantra) "[t]here...
...this sense, then, "[v]ulgar cultural nationalists...like Allan Bloom or Leonard Jeffrey...are whistling in the wind." Whether they falsely assert Anglo-American culture as universal (a la Bloom) or "lay claim to the ideal of 'blackness' as an ideology or a quasi religion, totalized and essentialized into a protofascist battering ram supervised by official thought police" (a la Jeffries), they fail to ready the young for the world they will face...
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...