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Seventeen years after her last book and ten years after her death, Pauline Kael's name is hard to avoid right now if you read culture magazines or blogs. That's because of three books that came out in October: The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael, edited by Sanford Schwartz and published by The Library of America; Brian Kellow's biography Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark; and James Wolcott's memoir Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York, which includes, apparently, lots of material about his friendship with Kael (before they had a falling-out after he published a sharply critical, even vicious, essay on Kael's acolytes in Vanity Fair in 1997).

I haven't read Wolcott's memoir, but I've been reading around in Kellow's biography and I'm familiar with almost everything in The Age of Movies. It was Kael's 1,291-page retrospective collection For Keeps from 1994 that made me into a fan of her writing when I was an idealistic, ignorant kid studying playwrighting and screenwriting at NYU, and though my opinions about her have changed a bit over the years, she's part of my psyche, her presence inextinguishable, like a crazy aunt.


I hadn't gone back to For Keeps for a while, probably not since I wrote about Kael, Susan Sontag, and Craig Seligman's book about them in the fall of 2005. I know a lot more about film history and theory now than I did then, and then I knew more than I did when I first picked up For Keeps from a library and began to make my way through it. (I also read bookstore copies. I vividly remember sitting on the floor of Shakespeare & Co. in New York one night and reading through it until the store closed at, I think, midnight. Eventually I got a remaindered copy at St. Marks Books, the copy I have here beside me now.)

I was a fan of Kael before I knew her name. Until high school, the only movie reviews I'd ever encountered were ones on Siskel & Ebert. But when I was a freshman in high school, a friend told me about The New Yorker, which his family read religiously. I started making weekly trips to the library to read it, and it was there that I read these words:

There's nothing affected about Costner's acting or directing. You hear his laid-back, surfer accent; you see his deliberate goofy faints and falls, and all the closeups of his handsomeness. This epic was made by a bland megalomaniac. (The Indians should have named him Plays with Camera.)

That was from one of Kael's last reviews, her December 17, 1990 take on Dances with Wolves. I almost memorized that review -- enough so that I remember reciting that part of it to my U.S. History class in the fall of 1992 in one of those moments of self-righteous, childish nerditude that defined my adole

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