Literary World Agog Over Bloom Announcement

Professor Harold Bloom's announcement that he is considering inclusion of popular humor columnist Andy Borowitz in the nextedition of his book The Western Canon has set off a literary firestorm.

The furor seems to center on Bloom’s high-brow status as Yale Professor—his Western Canon examines Shakespeare and other great writers—and Borowitz’s roots as a TV sitcom writer. They do seem like an odd couple even though Borowitz’s humor is published in The New Yorker. Critics from the New York Times and The New York Review of Books are picketing Bloom’s office at Yale, or they would be if they could find their way out of town.

When pressed for comment, Professor Bloom said: “Let the lemmings jump over the cliff. Borowitz is too deep for them. It is clear the anxiety of influence is operating in their fevered ramblings.”

Or that is what it sounded like he said. Fellow professors admit Bloom is brilliant, but note his pronouncements tend to be obscure even to literary scholars. But within hours of the original announcement Professor Bloom appeared to be backing away from his plan to include Borowitz in The Western Canon.

Insiders close to the story believe Bloom went over the edge and off his rocker when he claimed Emily Dickinson paid him a late-night visit.Informed sources-they had drinks with the above insiders--said Dickinson appeared in a ghostly white dress just as the Professor was getting ready for bed.Ms. Dickinson wasted no time in telling Bloom that she was a poet, not an intellectual. She noted that the Professor prized intellect and imagined that the writers he admires are as subtle as he.

She was further displeased that Bloom claimed to get headaches every time he taught a certain poem of hers (No. 761), which repeats the word "blank" about eleven times. Dickinson said she had been having a "bad hair" day when she wrote the poem. She thought she had tossed it in the wastebasket, but her busybody relatives found the discarded poem. She further told the addled Professor that he was giving himself headaches to no purpose. And just before she disappeared, she cryptically remarked, "The rose is out of town", a line from one of her poems.

Speculation among those close to the story was that Bloom was so distraught that his close reading of Dickinson was wrong, or just plain dumb, that he went around the bend to left field. He then took up of the cause of Andy Borowitz's canonization. Bloom has been keeping himself scarce since his private séance with the Belle of Amherst.

Borowitz supporters are dismayed that their hero will not, after all, be included in The Western Canon. One still hopeful fan was quoted as saying: "Well, there's always the Nobel Prize."

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