As for Jazz, the Bud Powell discussion lit me up. From the first time I heard him, I have been confident that his music is just this side of devine. His style of playing: hands turned in, incessent humming, and the neglect of left hand technique, coupled with the utter beauty of his playing coming through, just leads me to believe that the music is simply passing on it’s way throw him from the sublime.

Of course, maybe Bud Powell was just a screwy Junkie, and Bloom is a talky old jewish man, but I think brilliance is a better explanation.

Mystical dance, which yonder starrie Spheare
Of Planets and of fixt in all her Wheeles
Resembles nearest, mazes intricate,
Eccentric, intervolv’d, yet regular_
Then most, when most irregular they seem,_
And in thir motions harmonie Divine
So smooths her charming tones, that Gods own ear_
Listens delighted.

John Milton, Paradise Lost
Book 5

Eccentric meaning moving in an orbit that circles a point other than the main center earth; this eccentric center itself moves around earth, its planet describing a complicated spiral pattern. Eccentrics were modifications of Ptolemiac cosmology introduced to account for apparent anomalies in celestial motion.

Whitman speaks to the sea as a phantom in the night, as one who though knowing himself to be part of the universe and activated by desire, yet feels himself a still unspecified part, and feels a still unspecified desire. It was no personal and eccentric longing that made Whitman feel his kinship for the sea, but rather a feeling that both of them shared in some cosmic and elemental passion. On the beach at night alone, he had become aware of a vast similtude which interlocked all. All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets, all distances of place however wide, all distances of time, all inanimate forms, all souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in different worlds, all gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes, all nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages, all identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe, all lives and deaths, all of them past, present, future, this vast similtude spanned them, and always had spanned them and compactly hold and enclose them.

The Brother in Elysium, pp. 123-4 (reprinted in Vectors and Smoothable Curves)

I don’t really mind Bloom’s airs, his curmudgeonly take on contemporary academia, the sometimes pointless and improbable self-aggrandizing claims (1000 pages an hour, etc.– remember the Woody Allen joke about speed-reading War and Peace), his occassionaly precious pronunciamentos. And I do I often disagree with him — not that I’m competent to, but I do anyways. But I find most of my perhaps over-weening misgivings redeemed by his great enthusiasm and advocacy for so much that is incontestably good. Listen to him read Wallace Stevens’ The Auroras of Autumn and you’ll never forget it. So, many thanks as ever for another wonderful set of shows.

Still, as I say all of this, Bloom gives a lot. I should keep quiet and be a student.I am going to pull out my Hart Crane to those poems knowing a bit more about him. Thank you.

on to Vendler…..