Movie reviews are for people who might watch the movie; book reviews are for people who won’t read the book.
Feb 212023
Seeming
Religion, art, taste, and other delusions.
Feb 162023
A man can be judged by what he is supposed to have said.
Feb 092023
Visconti’s The Leopard is to movies what the first Velvet Underground record is to music: almost no one sat through it, but everyone who did became a director.
Feb 072023
Stage plays, no matter how well done, always remain faintly ridiculous.
Jan 202023
The knottiest problem in contemporary etiquette is what to say about your friend’s bad art.
Jan 192023
Some of what you say should not sound like something you would say.
Jan 062023
Poetry and music continuously raise expectations in the listener. What is too conventional caters to them exactly; what is too unconventional does not cater to them at all.
Dec 302022
The life to be mined from art is not the artist’s but one’s own.
Dec 052022
Always consume your friends’ favorite art. It might be good, and if it isn’t, you can absorb yourself endlessly in wondering why they like it.
Nov 102022
Children’s literature posits a compact between author and reader: though the reader may look like a frog to all the uncaring world, the author knows he is a handsome prince, and it can be their little secret. Harry Potter is children’s literature. So is Confederacy of Dunces.