Ep 12: Whatever Happened to the Western Literary Canon, Part 1: Harold Bloom, etc.

Topics and mentions: Harold Bloom, the Western literary canon, fakeandywarhol.substack.com, instagram.com/fakeandywarhol, Thomas Pynchon, Ayn Rand, Gravity's Rainbow, Atlas Shrugged, reading, "the novel", schooling, education, postwar era, popular fiction, serialization, Charles Dickens, high school English class, regimented learning, The Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, Shakespeare, literature, grad school, academia, bureaucracy, teachers, liberal arts, public schools, "it's the system, man!", independent study, Sarah Lawrence College, World War II, technology, Jacques Ellul, Unabomber, autonomous development, transference, consumption, the humanities, Hamlet, Madame Bovary, writing workshops, James Joyce, Ulysses, rap, hip-hop canon, John Lydon, Johnny Rotten, Sex Pistols, universities, colleges, School of Rock, rock 'n' roll, Elvis, Kurt Cobain, Random House, Modern Library, movies, pop music, poetry, music, The Anxiety of Influence, Dante, Homer, Virgil, Andy Warhol, How To Read And Why, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Genius, George W. Bush, Nietzsche, Jane Austin, The Western Canon, Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Foucault, postmodernists, Derrida, identity politics, media, mass media, New York Times Review of Books, literati, Western tradition, T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, epic, culture, mythology, undercommunication, Claude Levi-Strauss, grand narratives, Star Wars, Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, Edmund Spencer, The Faerie Queene, The Tempest, Midsummer Night's Dream, genre fiction, HCE (Here Comes Everyone), Virginia Woolf, Fabian Socialism, overcommunication, artificial habitat, specialization, history, Hard Times, Scrooge, Four Quartets, civilization, philosophy, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, creative writing, imagination, Freud, psychoanalysis, Wilhelm Reich, Edward Bernays, Bruno Bettelheim, advertising, propaganda, mass psychology, group psychology, Civilization and Its Discontents, The Future of an Illusion, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Guattari, interiority, stream of consciousness, modernism, the internet, television, Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, Emily Dickinson, film, comics, Endgame, William Faulkner, intertextuality, masterpieces, Dave Bautista in Blade Runner 2049, Infinite Jest, masterworks, sci-fi, science-fiction, Philip K. Dick, Fight Club, American Psycho, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, The Simpsons, hipsterism, American literature, sensitivity, depression, oversensitivity, Mark Fisher, seductive sadness, Nirvana, Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, Moby-Dick, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, the Beats, William S. Burroughs, Queer, Junkie, The Naked Lunch, drugs, Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, counter-culture, Black Spring, hipster nonsense, Thanos, Jack Kerouac, On the Road, culture industry, To Kill a Mockingbird, Cormac McCarthy, The Road, No Country for Old Men, Blood Meridian, Americana, Bob Dylan, American folk music, New York City, The Distributist, "fake all the way down", Leo Tolstoy, Paradise Lost, Aldous Huxley, "the permanent revolution", Proust, brand names, consumer culture, interpellation, Don DeLillo, White Noise, socialism, democracy, Walt Whitman, Democratic Party, RollingStone, MTV, frat boys, Republican Party, neocons, capitalism, Obama, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, thought crime, culture heroes, Luke Skywalker, Captain America, Milan Kundera, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez, Bill Clinton, 1984, George Orwell, Hillary Clinton, working class, New York Yankees, sportsball, NPCs, Ronald Reagan, Michael Jackson, Superman, Spider-Man, Green Arrow, Patrick Leahy, superhero movies, Super Bowl, NFL, Marvel, television broadcasts, communists, guilt-tripped children of the bourgeoisie, "Josephine t