Probably my favorite piece of reader feedback is the following, which I received in response to a controversial (and lengthy) essay on Tolkien that I published in 2001 at HollywoodJesus.com:
You, sir, are a long-winded fool.
Well, I can certainly pontificate with the best (or worst?) of them. I have opinions on a great number of things, some of them fairly well-informed. And I have a lot of crackpot (read: not paranoid) theories, too.
But one thing I don’t think: that I’m right about everything I think (even though I very often appear to be, sometimes presciently so). As a film critic, I am given to reminding my colleagues (and anyone else who will listen, frankly) that it’s much easier to write a good review than to make a bad film… implying, of course, that critics shouldn’t take themselves (or their opinions) nearly as seriously as they do. So, for nearly as long as my blogosphere memory goes back (oooohhh… all of ten years!) I’ve often thought of using the following tagline at the various sites I’ve hung my shingle:
But what the hell do I do know?
So now I have, with a slight orthographic (perhaps even semantic) alteration. I hope you enjoy… and don’t take the opinions you might state here any more seriously than I take mine.
Greg Wright
June 2012