The author of this jam-packed treasure trove has been a film critic at the New York Times since 2000 and is also professor of film criticism at Wesleyan University. As if these platforms weren’t enough, he’s now written a book about the tangled worlds of films, books, music, paintings and criticism, dragging in Aristotle, Pope, Plato, Matthew Arnold, Isaiah Berlin and millions of others — but not, alas, my former next-door neighbour, the wonderfully controversial Brian Sewell.
Crammed in alongside George Orwell’s ‘All writers are vain, selfish and lazy’ and H. L. Mencken’s ‘Literature always thrives best in an atmosphere of hearty strife,’ the author’s own views often hit hardest. ‘Music,’ he tells us, ‘is to art what its cousin mathematics is to science.’ The Hollywood studios are ‘hotbeds of corporate greed’ and newspapers ‘have been swamps of mendacity and corruption from the start’. ‘Our creativity,’ he believes, ‘originates in anguish and longing’ — and education ‘has a soul-killing effect on art’.
He’s even better on the thorny issue of finding fault and bestowing praise, and jokily dismissive of us weirdos, slobs, snobs, scolds and losers — his words — who do these things to earn the occasional crust.
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