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About meMick from Massachusetts. Grew up right outside Boston. Went to college in the city. Worldview is a shifting triangulation of tragicomic observer, pragmatist, and Romantic. Gets much too angry and passionate about aesthetic and literary debates. Finds a great deal of postmodern literary theory to be meretricious garbage. Would like to be passionate about American politics, but thinks the situation and intellectual climate are pretty ludicrous. Has traversed a not-unremarkable swath of western Europe, as well as Morocco. Been only to Montreal and Quebec in Canada. Was in Mexico once, but it was a bro-tastic, drunken haze. Speaks Spanish. Wants to learn French next. Mildly (or not so, on occasion) obsessed with: Boston; Buenos Aires; Catalonia and Catalan; Gnosticism; India; Ireland; the music of Bright Eyes; mystical strands of Judaism; New York City; Spain. Has literary aspirations.

About my libraryPerhaps I err too heavily toward Dead White Males, the canon, and Harold Bloom, but I find much of what is touted as ground-breaking and avant-garde is too clever for its own good and quite tiresome. If liking the best and constantly trying to figure out what defines it is elitism (Let's not forget why Oscar Wilde's taste was simple.), then I am an elitist--but only in this sense (social elitism a la WASPs and JAPs being deplorable).

Groups20-Something LibraryThingers, A Pearl of Wisdom and Enlightenment, All Things New England, Art is Life, Irish Lit, Language, Music Junkies, MySpace, Poetry Fool, Positively Not Pottershow all groups

Favorite authorsDante Alighieri, A. R. Ammons, John Ashbery, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bishop, William Blake, Harold Bloom, Jorge Luis Borges, Kenneth Burke, Albert Camus, Lewis Carroll, Geoffrey Chaucer, Julio Cortázar, Hart Crane, Don DeLillo, John Donne, William Empson, Stanley Fish, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Samuel Johnson, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Federico García Lorca, Vladimir Nabokov, George Orwell, Camille Paglia, Marcel Proust, Thomas Pynchon, Christopher Ricks, Richard Rorty, Philip Roth, Miguel de Cervantes, Will Self, William Shakespeare, Sophocles, Robert Louis Stevenson, Wallace Stevens, Miguel de Unamuno, Nathanael West, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Ludwig Wittgenstein, W. B. Yeats (Shared favorites)

Real nameMichael

LocationBoston, MA

Account typepublic, free

URLs http://www.librarything.com/profile/mghealy (profile)
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/mghealy (library)

Member sinceFeb 2, 2008

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Michael--- Enjoyed your profile, esp. the " . . . meretricious garbage . . . " phrase. Good fortune to you in your language learning, travel, & aesthetic aspirations. You might find the LT Profiles of "stephen j. chow" & "Waldstein" to be of interest. "Waldstein" writes long, well-informed book reviews which I think worth reading---in particular, his reviews of Somerset Maugham are better than any I've seen from "professional scholars". In any event, I wish you

All The Best!

---"j.a.lesen"
Glad to know thee, M. from Mass. I'm conflicted about Harold Bloom; although I often agree with his pronouncements, I assume that, were I to be around his person, I'd probably feel the need to rebel in the most adolescent fashions.

Wittgenstein? Elaborate. I'm more of a continentalist, but can see value in his writings (if not so much that of his followers).
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