Pauline Kael

i love mailer though and can't stand capote.

There's plenty of good novelist-critics. Here's four:

Henry James
D.H. Lawrence
V.S. Pritchett
Gore Vidal

i remember william goldman having a column somewhere in which he was clowning bad scripts. this was around the time he adapted 'dreamcatcher'.

itt i list people i love and hate

also: Woolf

theres a lot of mnstrm criticism written by novelists! lost of reviews of novels in the NYTRB and the NYRB are written by novelists

gore vidal is not a great novelist, though. i feel like gidal skews critic, james skews novelist, d.h. lawrence is godawful. i never read any pritchett. most people are better at one than the other. the things that make a good critic make it hard to write a novel, i think.

but yes, lots of people do it.

zadie smith is trying to make a career out of being a novelist/critic

woolf is a really good example.

zadie smith is a terrible critic. v promising novelist.

i am fascist, also.

salman rushdie writes some criticism iirc.

nick tosches?

gore vidal is not a great novelist, though.

Totally disagree but then again we don't agree on Lawrence's worth either.

some really technically singular writers like nabokov and tolstoy end up writing pretty blinkered criticism (maybe because all their analytical energy goes into working on their own specific craft rather than fairly observing other people's?) although it's always fun to read.

i prefer zadie smith as a critic than as a novelist but i've only read white teeth

umberto eco

tolstoy trying to tackle l.a. confidential was an awkward match

nabokov is a good example. tolstoy was a crazy man. his criticism is hard to take seriously.

some really technically singular writers like nabokov and tolstoy end up writing pretty blinkered criticism (maybe because all their analytical energy goes into working on their own specific craft rather than fairly observing other people's?) although it's always fun to read.

James is one of those; he had no patience for anyone who didn't ponder the same questions of form. On individual writers he's almost insane. But give him the space to write at length about the novel's possibilities and he's one of the best theorists.

what about poet-critics

Alfred i will fight you about everything you are saying!

not as awkward as nabokov's densely allusive 211-page takedown of reds xxxp

the poet-critic thing is a thing. allen grossman iirc.

ts eliot

what about poet-critics

Oof. The list is very long! Off the top of my head:

Dryden
Wordsworth
Baudelaire
Eliot
Heaney
Hecht

i am turning this into a thread where i look at books on my shelf and write down the names of the authors

yeah i give poetics people a wide berth but a lot would say there's no distinction between being a poet and a critic. whatever that means.

tom clancy

paul muldoon has a great book of poetry lectures that function as critical essays

jason elam

J. Cole.

wow, u guys have made this thread a deeply uninteresting catchall.

jason elam, poet-critic-novelist-journalist-football player-truthteller

sorry dr. morbs i think that was my fault

Dr. Morbius, critic-boxer-baseball fan-troller.

the thread's a logy, uninteresting catchall; reading it, you feel your eyes closing.

haha blimey why are all these hornets out their nest? it was my fault as usual, i ruin morbs's life regular as clockwork

Kael discussions hijack 5% of all film threads; about time she got her comeuppance.

ts: poet-critics vs. warrior-poets

brian de palma is a novelist/critic

/sexgod

i enjoy spender's crit and auden's crit. i like auden as a poet, but i've never read much spender poetry at all. he had a couple of lit crit books that i really enjoyed (kinda like how i enjoy ned rorem's books on music, but never listen to ned rorem music). still want to read leslie fiedler's sci-fi someday. never read wilson's semi-famous novel.

re Spender: World Within World is one of the odder memoirs I've read.

Forty pages into the biography. Amazing stuff I never knew: Kael was great friends with De Niro's mother (Virginia Admiral) going back to her Berkeley student days, and that when Admiral left De Niro Sr., she took up with Manny Farber.

forty pages left over here, will try for an epic (old-school ILX) post when i'm done

wow that allan barra essay is sycophantic and then some

Looking forward to that.

the thread's a logy, uninteresting catchall; reading it, you feel your eyes closing.

― occupy the A train (difficult listening hour), Saturday, November 5, 2011 2:36 PM (Yesterday)

You're reading the advertisement: an offer like this isn't made every day. You read it and reread it. It seems to be addressed to you and nobody else. You don't even notice when the ash from your cigarette falls into the cup of tea you ordered in this cheap, dirty café.

Fight Club must have more second-person narration than any film ever (I can't even think of another one that uses the second-person voice), and I suspect/hope Kael would have hated it.

This is a great thread. I've got a tentative interview set up with Brian Kellow once I finish his book; I plan to print out this thread and ask him about a number of the issues raised here.