AdamSmith

http://offthecuffdc.com/tables-morys Mory's From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to navigationJump to search This article possibly contains original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations. Statements consisting only of original research should be removed. (January 2013) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) Mory’s U.S. National Register of Historic Places Entrance to Mory's Show map of ConnecticutShow map of the USShow all Location 306 York St., New Haven, Connecticut Coordinates 41°18′41″N72°55′54″WCoordinates: 41°18′41″N 72°55′54″W Area 1 acre (0.40 ha) Architectural style Federal NRHP reference # 04001552[1] Added to NRHP January 25, 2005 Mory’s, known also as Mory’s Temple Bar, is a private club adjacent to the campus of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, United States, founded in 1849 and housed in a clubhouse that was originally a private home built some time before 1817. Originally it was a restaurant, especially hospitable to Yale undergraduates (it extended them credit), located at the corner of Temple and Center Streets, but in 1912, when the building was to be demolished, the owner and proprietor (since 1898), Louis Linder, sold it to a group of Yale alumni who moved the bar to 306 York Street and turned it into a membership club.[2] After several years of operating losses and the 2008 financial crisis, the club closed indefinitely on December 19, 2008. Although the club had an endowment of $2 million, it was depleted by this poor performance and the market downturn in 2008-2009.[3] After completion of a comprehensive business plan at the end of 2009 and progress on a fundraising effort, Mory's committed to a major renovation and a new business model in 2010. The fundraising effort and construction were completed in 2010 and Mory's reopened on August 25, 2010.[4] The building was listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places in 2005.[1][5] Membership in Mory's is now offered to all Yale students, employees, and alumni as well as members of the New Haven community with an affiliation to Yale. Membership was open to women in 1974 when the club was given the option by Governor Ella Grasso of remaining exclusively all male but without a liquor license. Yale undergraduates can join with a $15 membership fee that covers all four years at Yale. Alumni living within 30 miles of Mory's pay a $99 annual fee, while alumni living over 30 miles away pay a $49 annual fee.[6] Contents [hide] 1Traditions 1.1The Whiffenpoofs 1.2The Spizzwinks 1.3Cups 1.4Table carving 1.5Yale Political Union 1.6Special menu items 2See also 3References 4Additional sources 5External links Traditions[edit] Several important traditions are maintained at Mory's that have deep resonance with certain Yale alumni and students. The Whiffenpoofs[edit] The Whiffenpoofs, the a cappella group made up of Yale seniors who are recruited from other Yale undergraduate singing groups, sings weekly, usually on Monday evenings, in the dining areas of the club. They often perform the famous "Whiffenpoof Song" which mentions Mory's as the "place where Louis [or 'Louie'; pronounced as the latter or the French version of the former] dwells." It was through this song, which was sung and recorded by Rudy Vallee, Bing Crosby and Elvis Presley, that the Club became part of the national consciousness in the early part of the twentieth century. The Spizzwinks[edit] In 1913, four young men met at Mory's to create a light-hearted alternative to the more serious Whiffenpoofs.[7] They decided upon the "Spizzwinks," a reference to a mythical creature to which the Corn Blight of 1906 had been whimsically attributed. Cups[edit] Mory's, circa 1914 Another tradition is the ritualistic consumption of a "Cup," in which a party of members gather to share drinks of assorted colors and ingredients (usually containing alcohol, although a non-alcoholic "Imperial Cup" is available) from large silver trophy cups that look like handled urns and are passed amongst the gathered company. The cups are ordered by color, and some are based on sparkling wines, while others are based on beer. There is an elaborate ritual, including at the completion of a cup a drinking song, associated with the tradition. Cups come in many colors including red, gold, purple, blue, green, and velvet. When a member finds himself (or herself, as Mory's has welcomed women into its membership ranks since 1972, three years after Yale College) about to finish a Cup, he or she faces the decades-old challenge of "cleaning the cup"—removing all moisture from the cup by using only his or her mouth and, to finish the job, hair. Friends to the left and right are at the ready with napkins to minimize drippage during this process. While the member is finishing, and to give that member extra time to "clean the cup," his or her friends are wont to chant the Mory's Song (an adaptation, for a diametrically opposite purpose, of the Salvation Army camp song "Put a Nickel on the Drum",[unreliable source?] with the finishing member's name as the hero of the song: At the conclusion of the Mory's Song, the member places the trophy cup, upside down, on top of a cloth (or, for greater challenge due to the latter's higher absorbency, a paper) napkin, whereupon three friends place their respective hands atop the base of the cup and tap firmly. The cup is then whisked away, and the napkin is inspected for any signs of moisture. In decades past, and to date for some more conservative organizations, if the napkin were wet, then the finishing member would be forced to pay for the cup; if the napkin were dry, the member to the finishing member's left—who himself chose to forgo finishing the cup—would have to pay. (Organizations still following these rules often vary them as to the specifics: Some organizations requiring that the cost of the cup be divided among the two or three previous drinkers rather than only the immediately previous one. Some organizations exempt women preceding the "draining" drinker from having to pay, instead assessing only the man or men to that drinker's left for the cup's cost, on the grounds that a woman should not be expected to drain the cup and therefore did not forgo a clear opportunity to do so.) In more modern times, most toasting parties split the bill evenly amongst members, regardless of who fails to drain or declines the opportunity to drain a cup. Table carving[edit] Another tradition was the encouraged practice of carving the tops of the dining tables at which one sat. The carving might be simply initials or names, or, in the case of the Whiffs' table, a Pendragon rampant. Yale Political Union[edit] Since the early-to-middle 20th century, some of the parties of the Yale Political Union (particularly those on the right) have adjourned to Mory's, "as is traditional." While the parties no longer actually go to Mory's after debates as party debates have gotten longer and Mory's hours shorter over the years, the tradition of saying that a debate caucus adjourns to Mory's remains. The parties of the Union have, over time, picked up the tradition of dining at Mory's, though, particularly for weekly Friday lunches, and most hold toasting sessions there as often as two or three times each semester. Current and past club members include John Kerry, Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, Gerald Ford, John R. Bolton, George Pataki, Joe Lieberman, John Heinz, Paul Mellon, William Howard Taft, and William F. Buckley, Jr.. Special menu items[edit] There are two special menu items that brings the denizens of Mory's back to the carved wooden tables and the walls covered with trophies of the past. They are Baker Soup,[8] a potage heavy on tomato, curry, and cream and topped with croutons; and The Rabbit, a version of Welsh rabbit. See also[edit] Connecticut portal National Register of Historic Places listings in New Haven, Connecticut References[edit] ^ Jump up to:a b National Park Service (2009-03-13). "National Register Information System". National Register of Historic Places. National Park Service. Jump up^ George Washington Patterson IV, ed., The Class of Nineteen Hundred and Fourteen: Yale College (Yale Univ., 1914) pages 35, 400-403; Robert Kimball, ed., The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter (NY, Knopf, 1983) page 5. Jump up^ Bailey, Melissa. "Mory's Closes Doors". New Haven Independent. Retrieved 2012-05-07. Jump up^ [1] Archived September 5, 2009, at the Wayback Machine. Jump up^ Mary Dunne (September 15, 2003). "National Register of Historic Places Inventory-Nomination: Mory's". National Park Service. and Accompanying 18 photos, exterior and interior, from 2003 Jump up^ Zuckerman, Esther (2010-08-27). "After 20-month hiatus, Mory's is back". Yale Daily News. Retrieved 2012-05-07. Jump up^ "Spizzwinks(?) history". Yale.edu. 2007-03-23. Retrieved 2012-02-27. Jump up^ Gitlin, Jay; Gitlin, Basie Bales (2014). Mory’s: a brief history. New Haven, Connecticut: Mory’s Preservation, Inc. p. 47. ISBN 978-0-692-29954-8. Additional sources[edit] Norris G. Osborn, The Moriartys of Yale, New Haven, Yale, 1912. George D. Vaill, Mory’s: A Brief History, New Haven, 1977. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mory's

slightly different edit...

On this horrible occasion of the opportunity of Kennedy's replacement, I abjure and abandon, absolutely, everything mitigatory I have said before about Trump.

http://spectrumlocalnews.com/tx/austin/news/2017/09/20/assignment-asking-students-to-role-play-as-kkk-sparks-anger

This is the only positive. A new Dem generation with fire in the belly will launch forth. Too late to save the Court. But maybe, after one or two more election cycles, with enough spine to put the Legislative branch back into the controlling position the Founders intended it to occupy. We shall see. Maybe we have simply fallen off the edge, as so many empires have before. If so, then we earned our fate. But I think the next election cycle after this upcoming one will see a climate-change event. Think "Species extinction."

The House Was Quiet and The World Was Calm BY WALLACE STEVENS The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book. The house was quiet and the world was calm. The words were spoken as if there was no book, Except that the reader leaned above the page, Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom The summer night is like a perfection of thought. The house was quiet because it had to be. The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind: The access of perfection to the page. And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world, In which there is no other meaning, itself Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself Is the reader leaning late and reading there. Wallace Stevens, "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm" from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. Copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and copyright renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (Alfred A. Knopf, 1954)

Just genius.

PLAY Chihuly sculpture lights up Biltmore estate Katia Hetter, CNN • Updated 18th June 2018 FacebookTwitterEmail View Video 04:46 Asheville, North Carolina (CNN) — Standing on tall ladders, two workers place pieces of brightly colored glass onto a tree-like structure in the middle of a manicured garden at Biltmore. As visitors to the Asheville, North Carolina, estate gather to watch their progress, renowned glass artist Dale Chihuly's team takes the better part of a day to install "Electric Yellow and Deep Coral Tower" and "Paintbrush Tower" in the estate's Walled Garden. "Are all the pieces numbered?" asks one person after another, looking up at installation head Rick Holland and other Chihuly installers during the two-week installation process in May. No, amazingly, they are not. "Chihuly at Biltmore" is Chihuly's first major exhibition in North Carolina of his 50-year career. It's also the first time that the descendants of George Vanderbilt, who still own the 250-room home and estate through The Biltmore Company, have hosted an outdoor art exhibition in the gardens. It's also time for another first: Biltmore, the largest private home in the United States, has never hosted an evening experience in the gardens before. His descendants and the staff of the company that is now Biltmore think Vanderbilt would have approved. That's because George and wife Edith Vanderbilt championed artists on the estate -- the walls feature the work of John Singer Sargent and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, among others. And the gardens themselves are a work of art, designed by New York Central Parklandscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and featuring a statue of Diana and 34 other outdoor sculptures on the grounds. Chihuly at Biltmore Courtesy Scott Mitchell Leen/Chihuly Studio The estate, which was the creation of George Vanderbilt, architect Richard Morris Hunt and Olmsted, was opened to Vanderbilt's family and friends just before Christmas in 1895. (Vanderbilt died in 1914, at age 51.) "When George Vanderbilt was putting this landscape together," says Biltmore horticulture director Parker Andes, "he wanted a garden and grounds that his guests would enjoy." "A garden of ornament," Andes says, quoting George Vanderbilt. With the Chihuly exhibition, "we're doing the same thing today that George Vanderbilt wanted for his guests in the 1890s," says Andres. Biltmore has more than 100,000 annual passholders who explore the 8,000-acre estate, and those who were exploring the grounds during the two-week installation process in May are curious. An artist from the working classes Chihuly first shook up the art world in the 1970s, the son of a butcher/union organizer who died suddenly at age 51 (the same age as George Vanderbilt). His mother was an avid gardener, which influenced his later work, and she pushed him to go to college. Chihuly discovered glass blowing while taking a weaving class and interior design courses in college. Weaving glass panes through woven textiles one day, he picked up a pane of melted glass with a pipe and blew a little bubble, says Britt Cornett, Chihuly's director of exhibitions. "From that moment, he was hooked," she says. "He set about finding out everything he could about glass blowing." Since the early 1970s, the Tacoma, Washington-born artist has made the Pacific Northwest a center of glass art. He helped launch the Pilchuck Glass School near Seattle in 1971, and the Museum of Glass in Tacoma in 2002 and welcomed artists flocking to the area. The 1.5-acre Chihuly Garden and Glass stood at the foot of Seattle Space Needle since 2012. He made a big splash in 1996 with his "Chihuly Over Venice" project, in which many of which works were placed in and around the Italian city's canals. Now his work can be found in the permanent collections and temporary exhibitions of museums and gardens around the world. Gardens filled with glass Chihuly at Biltmore Courtesy Scott Mitchell Leen/Chihuly Studio His work is now instantly identifiable as a "Chihuly" anywhere, with his different colored blown glass evoking fauna and flora from nature and the sea. His shows, mostly installed in gardens and other outdoor spaces -- inspired by his mother's gardening -- are wildly popular and attract lots of visitors who don't normally visit the gardens. Now 76 and suffering from bipolar disorder and the effects of a 1976 car crash that took the vision in one eye, Chihuly can't do the physical labor that glass art often demands in its creation. That he hands over to his team he's collected around him since his early days. With recent shows in the Atlanta Botanical Garden, the New York Botanical Garden and now Biltmore, he creates new and modifies old designs for shows and has others do the hard labor. While he has detractors who criticize his approach and his popularity outside the art world, Chihuly has mostly championed a team approach similar to a Renaissance studio with the masters of that era. There's no doubt he's slowed down in his 70s. Biltmore CEO Bill Cecil, Jr. (Vanderbilt's great-grandson) and Chihuly's wife, Leslie -- who is president of the studio -- did most of the talking at the mid-May media preview. Asked by Leslie Chihuly if he wanted to say anything about the exhibition, Dale Chihuly said, "I'm very excited about the show, and I want to thank Biltmore for making it happen." Working without speaking So many of Chihuly's team have been working for him on those shows for more than a decade and know his process and well. That's why they don't need any of the individual pieces numbered for the 16 installations in "Chihuly at Biltmore," which runs through October 7, although the boxes are labeled. Two installers in waders slowly fill a boat in one of the Italian Garden ponds with floats, round glass objects of varying sizes, weighing anywhere from 10 to 50 pounds. A nod and a look is enough communication to agree they need to add a couple more floats before it's done. With Biltmore staff monitoring storms miles in the distance, the installers finish filling the "Float Boat" without ever speaking out loud to each other -- and later add more floats seemingly spilling into the water around it. It starts in the Seattle studio Whether the Chihuly installations are entirely new works, new configurations made from existing pieces or pieces that have been shown before, Cornett says Chihuly develops the concept first on paper. After any new pieces are made in his hot shop, the crew gathers in Chihuly's cavernous Seattle studio to build the installations and get the artist's final approval. The same crew will install the pieces on location. Then the installations are disassembled, organized into sections and packed for transport. Hundreds of cardboard boxes marked "fragile" and "glass" fill several privately contracted container trucks for this show's trip across the country. Boxes are unloaded at the 16 sites around the garden as the two-week installation process proceeds, and visitors watch as workers unpack thousands of pieces and lay them on moving blankets for their colleagues to install. Dale Chihuly Courtesy Scott Mitchell Leen/Chihuly Studio Asked many questions wherever they are installing Chihuly's work, Holland, Gerber and others know their work is part performance art. Annual passholders promise to come back, bringing guests. Although they answer questions from guests, the installers rarely speak to each other, seemingly communicating with a nod or raised eyebrow to decide if they're placed the pieces in the right places. (Yes, occasionally a piece will break. There are a few spares sent along to each installation.) The pieces have mostly been installed at the carefully designed gardens on the estate, with just one installation inside the house's Winter Garden and two placed at nearby Antler Village and Winery, where guests at the estate's two hotels and passholders often eat and enjoy a glass of wine produced on the estate. The seasons change the exhibition While Biltmore and Chihuly staffers have been talking about a show for more than a decade, the project finally came together in 2015, with the Chihuly team making its first site visit late that year. Andes and the estate gardeners worked closely with Chihuly "for a full year, discussing planting plans and locations for the installations," Andes says. Summer will give way to fall, and plant life will change the look of the work, he says. So will viewing Chihuly at night. Chihuly lighting designer Steven Cochran has been working through the night for weeks -- often alone -- to create the "Chihuly at Night" show. (It requires a separate ticket.) At night, the "Sol d'Oro" in front of the house becomes a shining globe shining in the night. The floats in the "Float Boat" become glowing balls of color. The "Pergola Garden Fiori" integrates Chihuly with Biltmore's own busts (which are believed to be allegories of the four seasons). And three Chihuly chandeliers shine on the conservatory at night. That's the job of Steven Cochran, Chihuly's lighting designer, who has to design a site-specific lighting system that withstands weather, changing plant and animal life, while making Chihuly's work look like it's lit from within. Working throughout the day and night to install and test the lighting, he's often alone in the dark when the lights come on. "One of the joys of my job is that I get to be the first person to see this at night," he says. When the lighting for a piece comes together, "it's usually late at night and I'm usually by myself. I know what people are going to be talking about." A lighting expert's favorite time of day Cochran recommends arriving just before twilight to enjoy the day's journey into night at the gardens. "I enjoy watching the changing of the light is twilight to sunset and to see the gradient of color in the sky as the artwork begins to light with the artificial lighting and takes over from the daylight as the daylight fades and the sky changes from blue to dusk, to dark, that's a really beautiful time," he says. "Of course, when you're out in the gardens, in an environment like here at Biltmore, it's magical." Chihuly at night Courtesy Scott Mitchell Leen/Chihuly Studio If you go: "Chihuly at Biltmore" is open through October 7, 2018. Biltmore Estate, 1 Lodge St, Asheville, NC 28803. Daytime admission to the estate ranges from $57-$75, including a $10 discount for advance purchase and includes a self-guided tour of the house and daytime viewing of the Chihuly exhibition. Pricing for "Chihuly Nights at Biltmore" also varies from $57-$75, including a $10 discount for advance purchase. A nighttime ticket includes a self-guided tour of the first floor of Biltmore House. The two hotels on the estate offer a variety of packages that include admission to the exhibition. http://www.cnn.com/travel/article/chihuly-biltmore-asheville-north-carolina/

A little song, a little dance, A little seltzer down your pants...

Again...I take back everything I stpudily said.. Today, and tomorrow and tomorrow, is Armageddon for our republic.

We still got the state & federal courts. Which, up til the level of the Supremes, are still pretty rational.

Some of the best sex I have had with a girl in last decade was with this rather indeed zoftig yenta who understood my delight in her -- at quite impressive velocity -- ability to sit on my lap (on the loo of course) and pee on my genitals. Better in some (not all ) ways than fucking her!

From what I can find online, this author could be the Proust of our time and era. @Lucky, many thanks.

No. She is the only person in the WH with a brain and a soul. God knows how she feels with all these electric eels entwined around her feet. I am not excusing for one second her continued 'collusion' with them. Only that at least part of what she must be thinking is: 'What the hell is the way out, without pouring more fuel on a burning fire?' Given also that she has Barron's well-being to consider, paramount for her, from all evidence. Not, I think, an equation with any rational-number answer. She has, in the end, my deep sympathy.

It did, very badly. Were you not watching?

Just direct your home health aide to continue wheeling you along in your Transport Chair, and you will see soon enough.

CULTURE 12 MAY 2011 Harold Bloom — a glimpse of the sublime The best literary criticism pays homage to writerly greatness and offers a glimpse of its own imaginIGN-UP BY HAROLD BLOOM I vividly recall, with mingled affection and amusement, my first essay written for William K Wimsatt Jr, returned to me with the ringing comment, "You are a Longinian critic, which I abhor!" Much later, gossip reached me that my fierce former teacher had abstained from voting on my tenure, telling his colleagues, "He is an 18-inch naval gun, with tremendous firepower but always missing the cognitive target." The single treatise we have from the more properly named Pseudo-Longinus should be translated as "On the Heights". But by now we are unable to do without On the Sublime, even though "sublime" as a word remains bad currency. So too is aesthetic, which Walter Pater (after its popularisation by Oscar Wilde) wanted to restore to its ancient Greek sense of "perceptive". To be a Longinian critic is to celebrate the sublime as the supreme aesthetic virtue and to associate it with a certain affective and cognitive res­ponse. A sublime poem transports and elevates, allowing the author's "nobility" of mind to enlarge its reader as well. To be a Longinian critic, for Wimsatt, however, was to flout a key tenet of the New Criticism, the tradition of which he was a fierce proponent. The New Criticism was the reigning orthodoxy when I was a graduate student at Yale. Its defining feature was a commitment to formalism. The meaning of the so-called critical object was to be found only within the object itself; information about the life of its author or the reactions of its readers was deemed merely misleading. Wimsatt's contribution to the New Critical canon includes two highly influential essays, "The Affective Fallacy" and "The Intentional Fallacy", both co-written with the philosopher of art Monroe Beardsley. First published in 1949, "The Affective Fallacy" launched an assault on the then pervasive belief that the meaning and value of a literary work could be apprehended by "its results in the mind of its audience". Wimsatt attributed this so-called affective fallacy to two of my own critical precursors, the sublime Longinus and Samuel Johnson. The New Criticism has now long since ceased to dominate literary studies. Yet the countless critical fashions that have succeeded it have been scarcely more receptive to Longi­nians. In this respect, the New Critics and the New Cynics are unlikely partners in crime. In the long Age of Resentment, intense literary experience is merely "cultural capital", a means to power and glory within the parallel "economy" that Pierre Bourdieu labels the literary field. Literary love is a social strategy, more affectation than affect. But strong critics and strong readers know we cannot understand literature, great literature, if we deny authentic literary love to writers or readers. Sublime literature demands an emotional, not an econo­mic investment. For more than half a century I have tried to confront greatness directly, hardly a fashionable stance, but I see no other justification for literary criticism in the shadows of our Evening Land. Over time the strong poets settle these matters for themselves, and precursors remain alive in their progeny. Readers in our flooded landscape use their own perceptiveness. As an aged critic, I go on reading and teaching because it is no sin for a man to labour in his vocation. My hero of criticism Samuel Johnson said that only a blockhead would write for anything except money, but that is now only a secondary motivation. I continue to write because of the hope that the voice that is great within us will rise up to answer the voice of Walt Whitman or the hundreds of voices invented by Shakespeare. The inescapable condition of sublime or high literature is agon: Pindar, the Athenian tragedians and Plato struggled with Homer, who always wins. The height of literature commences again with Dante, and goes on through Shakespeare, Cervantes, Milton and Pope. Implicit in Longinus's celebration of the sublime - "Filled with delight and pride we believe we have created what we have heard" - is influence anxiety. What is my creation and what is merely heard? This anxiety is a matter of both personal and literary identity. What is the me and the not-me? Where do other voices end and my own begin? The sublime conveys imaginative power and weakness at once. It transports us beyond ourselves, provoking the uncanny recognition that one is never fully the author of one's work or one's self. My reflections on influence from the 1970s onwards have focused on writers of imaginative literature, especially poets. But influence anxiety is not confined to poets, novelists and playwrights. It is a problem for critics as well. Poetry and criticism each in its own way involves coming to terms with the overwhelming flood of images and sensations that Pater called "phantasmagoria". Both Johnson and Pater experimented with different genres of writing, but both made their mark primarily as critics. For each, literature was not merely an object of study but a way of life. In my own judgement, Johnson remains the major literary critic in all of western tradition. Even a glance at a comprehensive collection of his writings shows the variety of the genres he attempted: poetry, biographies, essays, book reviews, lexicons, sermons, political tracts, travel accounts, diaries, letters, prayers and an invention of his own, the bio-critique in The Lives of the English Poets. Add the drama Irene (a failure) and the novella Rasselas (a grand success), and something of Johnson's restless, rather dangerous energies can be intuited. Johnson should have been the great poet after the death of Alexander Pope until the advent of Blake, but an authentic awe of Pope inhibited him. Johnson abandoned his poethood, praising Pope as perfect in judgement, invention and verbal style. And yet Johnson knew better, so far as judgement and invention were concerned: Homer, Shakespeare, Milton . . . It is not that Johnson was a Pope idolator, but a complex guilt prevented him from the stance of the strong poet that his gifts merited and demanded. Doubtless the human guilt was filial. Michael Johnson, his father, was 52 when Samuel, his first child, was born. The father kept a bookshop in Lichfield. During his final months, a melancholy man and a failure at all things, he asked his son, also given to "vile melancholy", to attend his bookstall for him in a nearby town. Johnson's pride prevented him and he refused his father, who died soon after. Exactly 50 years later, the formidable critic went to Lichfield and took "a postchaise to Uttoxeter, and going into the market at the time of high business, uncovered my head, and stood with it bare an hour before the stall which my father had formerly used, exposed to the sneers of the standers-by and the inclemency of the weather". I regard Johnson as my critical forerunner, since my life's work from The Anxiety of Influence until now seems to me more Johnsonian than Freudian or Nietzschean, a following of the great critic in his quest to understand literary imitation. I turn to Johnson on Shakespeare and Milton, Dryden and Pope, and he induces me to reflect freshly upon them and has the knack of making all four later and himself earlier, as though they were influenced by him. That particular imaginative displacement does not mark the critical work of Dryden and Coler­idge, Hazlitt and Ruskin, yet enters again with Pater and his Aesthetic school: Wilde and Yeats, Virginia Woolf and Wallace Stevens. What can be the function of literary criticism in a Disinformation Age? I see aspects of the function but only by glimpses. Appreciation subsequent to overt evaluation is vital. For me, Shakespeare is the Law, Milton the Teaching, Blake and Whitman the Prophets. Being a Jew and not a Christian, I need not displace the Gos­pels. What could a literary messiah be? When I was young, I was baffled by modernist or New Critics. So unreal now are their polemics that I cannot recapture my fervour against them. Turning 80 had an odd effect on me that 79 did not. I will no longer strive with Resenters and other lemmings. We will be folded together in our common dust. Read, reread, describe, evaluate, appreciate: that is the art of literary criticism for the present time. l This is an edited extract from "The Anatomy of Influence" by Harold Bloom, published by Yale University Press (£25) on 31 May newstatesman.com/culture

But one does understand.