Fonts

Is this some Jewish thing?

-Simon Garfield

-Edward Mendelson

The latest tranche (a troika) of books received from Barnes and Noble included The Shadow of a Great Rock by Professor Harold Bloom of Yale. (Professor Bloom keeps promising that whatever is his latest book will be his last. (He keeps breaking his promise.))  Professor Bloom uses something called “Stempel Schneidler” font in this book.

-Harold Bloom

There’s some Freudian thing going on here too. Mendelson says he became obsessed with fonts when his wife got pregnant. Garfield has the look in the eye of someone who has taken too many amphetamines, and Bloom’s gifts to humankind include The Story of J, wherein he posits the psychologically revealing hypothesis that parts of the Bible were written by a woman.  

To be a Jewish male in America is to be female dominated and sexually frustrated.

“What’s Jewish foreplay?”  “Twenty minutes of begging.”  (ba-da-boom)

“How do Jewish women get crows feet around their eyes?”  “You want me to suck whaaat?”

In this female superior position the Jewish male writhes in the agonies of impotence.  Here’s the first instance in Bloom’s latest (last?) book where the reader encounters the distinctiveness of the S.S. font:

What is that thing at the end of the sentence, Sanscrit?  Hebrew?

No, it’s the medical symbol for male impotence:

Soft, shriveled, limp.

Compare with the symbol for virility:

Strong, straight, erect.

Harold Bloom, Edward Mendelson, and Simon Garfield reduce discourse to the level of infantile goo-goo, gah-gah, genital-pointing obsession. They impoverish the attainments of human civilization. They need to stop writing until they visit a whore house.

Image: Harold Bloom in dramatic ecstasy.