At Children's Voices: The Holocaust and Beyond: Eighth Annual Powell-Heller Conference for Holocaust Education

Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, on my mind as a choir at the Friday morning holocaust conference session goes ooh, ooh, to warm up and get tuned to sing at the Remembrance and Reflection.   The morning sessions have been reading to themselves.  In a gym with many round tables students from junior highs, high schools, and colleges have combined to be Fran Sterling’s Anxiety of Influence “swerve” from the precursor diaries by children who lived during the holocaust.  They have read to themselves.  One passage has been about Kristallnacht.  In this, Fran Sterling has acted to be a Return of the Dead, as described by Harold Bloom, in which the artist brings, once again, the precurser to the reality.  And then the lights were lowered, and there was candlelight.

The Anxiety of Influence is not about the psychological state of stress that is our first idea of Anxiety.  It is about writing as behavior.  As we wish to express an idea and have illumination from an earlier training, we do not repeat our earlier training, we “swerve” and choose an accelerated expression.  And my blog entries that are diary entries by nineteen-year-old piano accompanist Linnea Gord (who became my mother) are expressions of the idea of her hand-written and typed diaries.  And I can “swerve” and place her trip photographs with them.

So that study of writing is in my thoughts today.   The crowd of young people in the gym truly read the diary selections to themselves, at the round tables together.