New Yorker Film Critic Blogs
His Respects for CMC Professors

It was a short visit that left an impression on Richard Brody. The award-winning writer and film critic for The New Yorker blogged on Friday, Nov. 11 that "among the pleasures of my brief but action-packed stint as a guest lecturer at Claremont McKenna College last week were the meetings with the scholars who teach there."
His blog for the magazine, The Front Row, goes on to mention his encounters last week with writer and CMC professor of literature James Morrison ("whose illuminating cinema-studies seminars I attended, admiringly," says Brody) and writer and assistant professor of literature Keri Walsh who, over dinner at the Athenaeum on Nov. 2, "asked me about Mickey Rourke." The ensuing conversation ended with Brody quoting Walsh's just-published essay on Rourke (Why Does Mickey Rourke Give Pleasure?), and praising it in his online column: Keri's article blends the best of scholarship (a seemingly comprehensive familiarity with Rourke's films and with what's been written about them) with the best of criticism (imaginative sympathy fueled by passion). As a true enthusiast, she looks ahead, to the future of movies and of Rourke's career. Dare I say, in the context of an essay about an actor, that she gives a great performance? For Brody's blog in full, scroll to Wrestling with Himself.
Walsh's essay on Rourke, called "astonishingly original" by associate professor of literature Audrey Bilger, is in the Autumn 2010 issue of Critical Inquiry, available at Honnold Library. Walsh's longer study of Rourke's career will be published by The British Film Institute (BFI) in 2012.
Brody spent two days on campus as a guest of the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies, meeting with students and discussing the work of Jean-Luc Goddard. Brody's book, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, was a 2008 National Book Critics Circle award finalist in criticism and the winner of the 2009 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography.