There is at least one living celebrity that I would like to know, assuming I had a magic wish granted to me by a genii: Ian McKellen, the actor who played Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings. I don't really know much about the Shakespearean actor, other than he is one of the few out gay men in Hollywood and has had a great career. That he played Macbeth implies depth and profundity, which no doubt came in useful during his LOTR gig.
Gandalf is one of my favorite characters of all time. I can't but think of him as a role model for what I would like to become, if I could. The magic helps, naturally, but he is always saying wise things that speak to the heart.
Tolkien was a great writer. I don't know why literary critics put him down, but perhaps it is because they come from an academic environment, where the analytical faculties are favored to the exclusion of all else. They judge literature using left-brain criteria. Such critics miss the point of art. They would be better off as proofreaders. Being a good critic means knowing the human animal--what he is and what he can be. There must be a bias favoring writers that really get it, whether or not their prose conforms in every respect to established conventions. An analyst concerns himself with details, but the details of the parts are inferior to the sum of the whole. Critics need to get off their high horse once in a while. Just because something is wildly popular does not make it bad.
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