Crazy Uncle, Sure, But Dirty Uncle?

Never thought I'd find myself citing Lloyd Grove in this blog, but apparently Manhattan is abuzz with anticipation for Naomi Wolf's forthcoming New York article claiming Harold Bloom sexually harassed her when she was his student at Yale 20 years ago. He's picking up from Rachel Donadio, who broke the story yesterday. He leaves out, though, her implicit speculation that Bloom may be the unnamed professor Wolf claimed (in her memoir Promiscuities) fondled her inner thigh in an at-home teacher-student conference. (Sources close to Bloom, who will speak to nobody about this, describe Wolf's allegation as "a vicious lie.")

It's totally unsurprising to see Camille Paglia--who pretty much serves for public intellectuals the same function the entire American Idol triumverate of judges serves for pop culture, namely to act as a receptacle for self-aggrandizement, cattiness, and washed-upness (well, I think it's a word)--choosing to share her two cents with Grove by blaming the alleged victim, railing at Wolf for wearing "a pair of flimsy see-through orange harem pants, scarcely obscuring black panties" in front of a reporter once. Paglia also rants to Donadio at length in ways that increase my (admittedly unfounded, and somewhat uncivil) suspicion that what's really bugging her is that people stopped paying attention to Sexual Personae to talk about The Beauty Myth when it came out.

This controversy, however, may end up forcing me to revise my nine-year old opinion of academia's favorite crazy uncle, which used to be, "Harold Bloom has no agenda, except to get everybody to stop BUGGING him so that he can go back to his room and read Milton for the thirty-seventh time." And that "the academic community is a pack of clowns and vultures waiting for Harold Bloom to pitch over and die so they can squabble over his legacy," but Paglia's reinforcing that one for me yet.