A.O. Scott lauds Mr. Roger Ebert in the NY Times today; Ebert hasn’t died, of course—he’s just leaving his TV show and focusing on writing after a grueling years-long fight with cancer of the salivary glands has left him unable to speak—but the piece has a faint but unavoidable eulogistic feel. Scott gets at one thing that it too-infrequently appreciated about Ebert:

For his loyal readers Mr. Ebert’s resumption of reviewing (April 1 happened to be the 41st anniversary of his debut in The Sun-Times) is a chance to pick up an interrupted conversation. For those who labor beside or behind him in the vineyards of criticism it is an incitement to quit grousing and pick up the pace.

Not that any of us could hope to match his productivity. Nor could we entertain the comforting fantasy that the daunting quantity of the man’s work—four decades of something like six reviews a week, as well as festival reports, learned essays on classic films and the occasional profile—must entail a compromise in quality. As A. J. Liebling said of himself, nobody who writes faster can write better, and nobody better is faster.

Indeed, Ebert’s output always has been prodigious. His other secret is something subtler: a lack of dogma  that carries with it an implicit willingness to change his mind. On those infrequent occasions when he did, in the critical sense of the term, err—denouncing, most deliciously, “Blue Velvet” on its release—you can see him, in later pieces, grappling with the critical problems such films raise. You can also see him pointing out, quite perceptively, that even the film’s supporters weren’t really making the case for it.

Finally, the great variety of the work Scott notes includes one special pleasure—Ebert’s accounts of the shot-by-shot analyses of films he occasionally holds with film students. They are hard to dig up on his own web site, but here’s one, for “Pulp Fiction,” I found elsewhere on the web.