Albert Goldman

I'm your host, Jared Ernest, and today I'm speaking with Lucy Sont.

Sont is a longtime contributor to the Review, beginning with her essay, Relic, published in the December 17, 1981 issue, which takes on an unscrupulous biography of Elvis by Albert Goldman, and which we talk about in this conversation.

But our primary focus is an incendiary essay that came out the year before, called The Perils of Pauline by Renata Adler, which takes to task the beloved and long-standing film critic Pauline Kael, analyzing her collection When the Lights Go Out, of her film criticism from 1975 to 1980.

The Perils of Pauline was published in the August 14th, 1980 issue of The Review and And I'm happy to say that next week's episode will be a reading of it in its entirety by the actor Holland Taylor.

And I think that that actually... positions criticism and the critic in a slightly different place than other forms of criticism.

And because your own writing has had so much to do with popular culture or low forms, quote unquote, low forms of culture, I wonder how you related to Adler's argument and how it related to some of your own criticism when you started writing about things like really trashy biographies of Elvis or John Lennon for the review.

Well, I mean, first of all, beyond popular culture or whatever, I've got to say that the two reviews I wrote for the review of Albert Goldman, the Elvis piece that was my very first piece in the magazine, And then a few years later, the one on John Lennon.

But Lennon especially, I was deeply, deeply instructed by Bernard Adler's argument.

Well, I

think you've probably been reading Albert Goldman's book, The Lives of John Lennon.

Yeah, that's a very jaundiced and spiteful book.

Okay, okay.

...

I know that Dave's big thing was that after Albert Goldman's book came out, uh, in 1981, he really wanted to do something to rebut that and sort of be an answer to that.

And so Elvis-

Yeah