Nov 092011
From a NYRB piece about Pauline Kael:
Crowds rearranged themselves when Kael entered the room, literally and figuratively. She had an almost talismanic belief in the validity of her first response to a movie (she never saw it twice)
Which I suppose is fair enough, since very few of her audience would see it twice, either. Still, it’s a little different from what used to be the basis for critical judgement worth contention. I was schooled to think that to know a text practically by heart was the basis for any serious conversation about it. This implies, in its turn, that some texts are much more valuable than others . . . A lost world? Not quite: the people who keep it up are the devotees.