Word: blurbissimo
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This attack is somewhat ironic coming from Epstein, a professor at Northwestern University and editor of The American Scholar (the voice of Phi Beta Kappa), but Epstein's prose is refreshingly free of academic cant. In fact, he attempts to puncture the diseased, pseudo-critical language he calls "blurbissimo"--swollen with hyperbolic vacuity and written more or advertisements than reviews...
...Irving Stone found out with such bestsellers as Lust for Life (Vincent Van Gogh), The President's Lady (Rachel Jackson) and Love Is Eternal (Mary Todd Lincoln). In the present fictionalized life of Michelangelo Buonarroti, Author Stone has transcended himself; The Agony and the Ecstasy raises blurbese to blurbissimo...
Such questions, of course, pale beside blurbissimo writing. This is Michelangelo painting the figures of the Sistine Chapel ceiling: "Each one had to be pushed out of his artistic womb, pushed out by his own inarticulate frenzied force. He must gather within himself his galvanic might; his burgeoning seed must be generated each day anew within his vitals, hurtled into space, projected onto the ceiling, given life everlasting. Though he was creating God the Father, he himself was God the Mother ... on his lonely truckle bed high in the heavens, going through parturition to deliver a race of immortals...
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