LETTERS
Sirs:
Pauline Kael has infonned me
that the Channel
13
program that
was my source for saying "she ex–
aggerated purposefully about
Last
Tango
because she believes part of
her critical role is to overpraise
works she thinks are merely good
or very good" so that they will be
more widely seen, was edited from
a longer interview in which she
specifically refused to talk about
Last Tango.
She says further that,
whatever the impression given by
the edited interview, she does not
believe in either purposeful exag–
geration or self-conscious over–
praise as a critical method and
stands by everything she originally
wrote about the film.
I
have also
learned that Andrew Sarris, Rich–
ard Schickel, and John Simon did
not know, when they were being
interviewed separately about
Last
Tango,
that they would be recast
as foils to Ms. Kael by the Chan–
nel
13
editing room.
I
apologize to
Ms. Kael for perpetuating this
false impression about her critical
beliefs. My general remarks about
the cultural effect of film review–
ing and the role of expectation in
our appreciation of individual
films of course still stand.
Leo Braudy, New York, N.Y.
Men in Exile
edited by Norris and Springer,
an anthology of creative
.. writing by inmates of the
~
oregon state penitentiary
Oregon State Univ. Press
PO Box 689
$8.75
Corvallis, Oregon 97330
NOTES
( ColltilllLed f rom
p.
336 )
STADE is working on a book, The
Forms of Popular Fiction. . . .
ERICA JONG has published
two
books of poetry, and her novel
Fear of Flying was just put out
by
Holt.... PAUL ZIETLOW is pro–
fes sor of English at Indiana Uni–
versity and husband of the Presi–
dent of the City Council of Bloom–
ington. He is the author of
Mo·
ments of Vision: The Poetry of
Thomas Hardy, forthcoming from
Harvard in March.. . . RICHARD
HOWARD teaches a seminar at
Yale "Against SeH-Express ion."
His
newest critical book, Preferences.
will
be
out from Viking in Janu–
ary. ... EDITH KURZWEIL is a
sociologist living in New York. She
teac hes at Hunter and Montclair
State Colleges. . . . GEORGE
LEVINE heads the Livingston
Col–
lege English Department. He spent
t he summer trying with o;nly mod·
erate success to distinguish Water·
gate from Gravity's Rainbow....
MICHAEL GOLDMAN's latest
book is Shakespeare and the Ener–
gies of Drama, from Princeton....
CLARENCE BROWN translated
Selected Poems of Osip Mandel·
stam with W. S. Merwin, published
by Atheneum.... DAVID CAUTE's
The Fellow Travellers is from Mac–
millan. Joseph Brodsky's poem
"Aeneas and Dido" (PR 2/1973) is
included in his Selected Poems
(translated by George
L.
Kline)
scheduled ror Nov,ember
by
Harper
&
Row.
