Pauline Kael

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.

well yeah, she generally hated gay movies.

I was thinking more of its brutality and heavy-handedness. Raging Bull is a work of art, and she hated that; I'm sure she would have hated something equally brutal but minus the art.

pauline would've either hated fight club or called it 'a great comedy.'

FC is a very good black comedy, and Jaws IS pretty funny too.

Turns out I don't have a lot to say about the biography. Parts were fascinating, parts were surprisingly dull. The strength and weakness of the book is its focus on Kael's writing life. So the best part is the late 60s-early/mid 70s when movies exploded off the screen and her writing style blew up too. Kellow maintains a nice balance here between quoting reviews and cueing us into what happened in her life "behind the scenes." He did mega research yet in the end I was disappointed by the cursory treatment he gives her childhood. I'm enough of a movie buff and journalism junkie to understand why he skipped over events before she started writing but I'm also enough of a Freudian to believe that early family interaction shapes our lives. About half-way through Kellow writes, as an aside during a discussion of Kael's complex and troubling relationship with her daughter, that pauline and her two sisters were all emotionally distant from their children (according to one of her nieces). I was like, can we hear more about this please? It might explain some things. instead as the 70s turn into the 80s, the book winds down and becomes less life history and more chronicle of what movies she reviewed w/quotes. OK movies were her life and all but reading this sentence was rather ominous: "The summer of 1983 was an unrewarding time to be writing movie reviews." Of course burnout is an unavoidable occupational hazard for critics of any stripe so even the biography of a great critic has to reflect that, but I wonder if there wouldn't have been a way to render the second half of this book w/drama, narrative, anything besides "The first half of 1986 continued to bring few films that fully engaged Pauline."

Kellow shows admirable balance and restraint in dealing w/feuds, controversies and the paulette syndrome. Overall, if you're inclined to read this go ahead, you won't be disappointed. B+

"The first half of 1986 continued to bring few films that fully engaged Pauline."

oh barf. yeah, a biography really should require more than just having read her books

I'll still read it eventually, obv. But that part does sound lame.

Always think the second person is good from giving the feeling of a dream, nightmare, a ghost story.

i used to have a tape of a radio dramatization of 1984 where all the narration was converted into second-person: TEN YEARS IT HAS TAKEN YOU TO LEARN WHAT KIND OF SMILE LAY BEHIND THE DARK MOUSTACHE! O CRUEL, NEEDLESS MISUNDERSTANDING! O STUBBORN, SELF-WILLED EXILE FROM THE LOVING BREAST! BUT IT'S ALL RIGHT -- EVERYTHING IS ALL RIGHT. THE STRUGGLE IS FINISHED. YOU HAVE WON THE VICTORY OVER YOURSELF. pretty heavy stuff for a ten-year-old; i remember it way more vividly than the book.

Kellow is doing a thing at the Upper East Side B&N... tonight?... for interested NYers.

the second person V.O. worked really well in the film 'blast of silence.' really does make the film seem a little more nightmarish.

"The summer of 1983 was an unrewarding time to be writing movie reviews."

Lazy. You wouldn't know 1983 or 1986 were "unrewarding" from the quality of Kael's prose.

you would know it from the quality of some of the movies she reviewed though!

i kinda like that though. that she gave equal time and thought to a lot of stuff that came out around then that was just...terrible. nobody really even bothers anymore. to invest that much effort in deciphering hackwork.

I dunno, scott. We've discussed the singular dullness of eighties middlebrow Oscar bait but the real difference between the comedies and action movies of the seventies and eighties were the budgets.