If you were making a list of things that irritate Dawn, you might include this bright orange, quarter-page advertisement in the New York Review of Books, which Tom read aloud to me while I was rolling out pie crusts:

In two separate lectures, distinguished literary critic Harold Bloom will speak about his own impact and intellectual biography. The first lecture will focus on his readings of Whitman. The second will focus on his readings of Shakespeare.

Lecturing about one's own impact? Just a touch of hubris here, don't you think? What would we do, we mortal readers, without HB to tell us how to comprehend Whitman and Shakespeare while also explaining why he's indispensable to the functioning of our lower-order intellects? And I thought Helen Vendler was bossy.

This kind of advertising copy makes me glad to be holed up in the woods with my books, far, far away from the loud-mouthed literary critics and whomever they pay to write this stuff.