Naomi"Beauty Myth" Wolf, last in the news for charging Al Gore like a million bucks for telling him to wear earth tones, is accusing literary heavyweight (really--even his"boneless [?] hand" is heavy) Harold Bloom of making a creepy and awkward pass at her two decades ago. She was a senior at Yale. He was her professor. He brought"a bottle of Amontillado" to her apartment. (A flask of Amontillado? You've got to be kidding me. I guess that like Montressor, she likes her revenge served cold):

The next thing I knew, his heavy, boneless hand was hot on my thigh.

I lurched away. “This is not what I meant,” I stammered. The whole thing had suddenly taken on the quality of a bad horror film. The floor spun. By now my back was against the sink, which was as far away as I could get. He moved toward me. I turned away from him toward the sink and found myself vomiting.

I find the very last part of that story hard to credit, unless there was a lot more booze involved than she's letting on.

Then again, hmm. Maybe she's on the level.

I don't think I'm suggesting sexual harassment is no big deal if I say it's really not very iron-jawed-angel for Ms. Wolf to be typing breathlessly about this incident twenty years after the fact. But it probably is pretty tasteless for me to recount the first thing I thought when I read this story: there should be a Page Six or an US Weekly aimed at the pseudointellectual class, recounting the pecadillos of academics, jurists, authors, and suchlike creatures. I'd read it daily.