KISSING TO BE CLEVER:

This year marks the 20th anniversary of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind—and it is the intention of the Manhattan Institution’s Center for the American University (CAU) to give Bloom’s work the re-examination it deserves.

On October 3rd, we will be hosting a commemorative conference entitled, “The American Mind: Opening or Closing?”, in which various scholars will give their views on this subject. However, the future of the American University depends not only on professors, but also on thoughtful undergraduate and graduate students. For this reason, we have established the Bloom Essay Contest to hear student’s views. We invite students to submit essays of 1,500 – 2,000 words on Bloom’s work and its relevance today. Of the essays submitted, a winner will be selected and awarded a $1000 cash prize.

more (essays due 9/19/07)

Closing is one of the few books I’ve re-read several times since freshman year. It was genuinely (and very much against my inclination!) amazing.

If you think you know what it’s about, but you haven’t read it, I can almost guarantee you’re wrong; I’d class it with Donna Tartt’s Secret History and Maggie Gallagher’s Enemies of Eros, not with [stuff] like Tenured Radicals. Over the years it’s helped me understand John Paul II’s personalism (my post on “the nuptial meaning of the mind” was Bloom-influenced) and obviously influenced my senior essay on eros in Nietzsche.

Ridiculously Bloomian things I wrote in college: “Democracy and Poetry” (a.k.a. All These Useless Semicolons); “Those Are Pearls That Were His Eyes” (eros and education–much much shorter). These are miserably undergraduate in every respect, but I can’t help feeling fond of them, and perhaps posting them will increase my humility. The cicada shouldn’t be too ashamed of its brown locust-shell, lest it get above itself.

Anyway, I’d be shocked if an essay endorsing my take on Bloom came anywhere near that thousand-dollar prize. I tend to think that Closing, like Reflections on the Revolution in France, is a book both knit to its political moment and valuable primarily for its insights into pre-political matters of aesthetics and love.

But I won’t be able to forget that Bloom anecdote I heard first in the New York Times Book Review–“Returning to lecture at Cornell University after 20 years, Allan Bloom tells us, he was faced with a student banner–a bedsheet unfurled that read, ‘Great Sex is better than Great Books.’ ‘Sure,’ retorts Bloom, ‘but you can’t have one without the other.'”