Your other book, Closing, also has a little sweet note for me. I (who am not an academic)had the opportunity some years back to give a substantial piece of my mind to some of the really heavy hitters from fashionable academia. Audience included Stanley Fish, Henry Louis Gates, and other hot names. This was not a deal where the audience members could just ask a thirty second question but were allowed to take the floor for a few minutes and have at it. It happened that my time came shortly after somebody had trashed Closing of the American Mind and quite misstated its contents. By chance, I had just read it so I was able to get right in that dude's face with very precise commentary on that book...got me off to a good start and gave me confidence. Really, it was a rare thing for someone like me to get a good public shot at these cats. I did real good, polite but bold, and pulled no punches. Went right after them on race-obsessed victimhood thing, among other things.
Closing is a timeless book, and I had the chance to question Bloom about his disastrous take on rock music, when he addressed the audience at Convocation Hall at the University of Toronto. He said that in the 1950s smoking was a substitute for sex or a quick fix as rock music is today. I didn't know what he meant by that or how smoking could possibly affect liberal education (for good or bad) but I said that the Cyclops throwing a rock at Ulysses was the same aberration of nature as rock music in his estimation and he was taken aback. I gathered that he privately came to the same conclusion but was shocked that somebody else could have. I think he was thinking about Mick Jagger... but all told I think his book hits more home runs (excuse the sports analogy) than most books about culture.