Friedrich --

The jazz critic Francis Davis talked with Pauline Kael shortly before she died. A version of that q&a was published online by The New Yorker (no longer available). Now Davis has brought out a more complete version of the interview in the form of a small book, "Afterglow," buyable at Amazon here. Very sweet Amazon reader reviews, by the way.

An "intellectual biography" of Kael is being prepared by the editor Susie Linfield, who writes an attack on "Afterglow" for the LA Times, here. (Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily, here, for the link.)

Sample passage (from Linfield):

Kael, like her predecessors Gilbert Seldes and James Agee, loathed the pretensions of middlebrow culture and dug the spunky, demotic aspect of American life and culture. But she never mistook trash for art; never thought it elitist (or unimportant) to distinguish the two; never put forth that there was any connection, organic or otherwise, between the widely accepted and the good.

Best,

Michael