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Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No, Tinto bird.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is bookworm.

You know, recently Harold Bloom died.

He was a figure of extraordinary controversy, because under other circumstances,

he would have been just another professor, but he was the professor

who was defending the Western canon, as he called it,

which meant that he was talking about

Shakespeare and Milton,

and of course his great love Shelley,

he studied how these writers in the canon influenced each other. He wrote a book called The Anxiety of Influence.

He really became the writer of our time talking about that tradition.

Now let's acknowledge that tradition is rarely taught in the university the way it was in the generation of Harold Bloom.

I had the pleasure and I would say the generation of Harold Bloom. I had the pleasure, and I would say the honor, of

talking to Harold Bloom at his own apartment in New York. I will say that I disagreed with him

about many things. When we aired these interviews, people wrote in, yes.

Harold Bloom was an elitist?

...