Molly Bloom

“Merry Christmas! the man threatened.”
― William Gaddis, The Recognitions

“There is nothing in which people more betray their character than in what they find to laugh at.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities

“I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works.”
― Harold Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life

“In sum, then a conservative tech writer offers a really attractive way of looking at viewer passivity and TV's institutionalization of irony, narcissism, nihilism, stasis. It's not our fault! It's outmoded technology's fault! If TV-dissemination were up to date, it would be impossible for it to "institutionalize" anything through its demonic "mass psychology"! Let's let Joe B., the little lonely guy, be his own manipulator or video-bits! Once all experience is finally reduced to marketable image, once the receiving user of user-friendly receivers can choose freely, Americanly, from an Americanly infinite variety of moving images hardly distinguishable from real-life images, and can then choose further just how he wishes to store, enhance, edit, recombine, and present those images to himself, in the privacy of his very own home and skull, TV's ironic, totalitarian grip on the American psychic cajones will be broken!"

E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" (The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1993)”
― David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments