There were all the notes my girlfriends and I passed throughout junior high, along with all the goofy poems my first boyfriend paid his friends to write and passed along to me as his originals.

Such behavior is closer to that of a blowhard who may be insecure in his own abilities, but is certain of one thing — his own brilliance.

And it was not uncommon to hear otherwise well-read men confess to an ignorance of Hawthorne or Melville without embarrassment.