Conversations about Conversations

Over at rockcritics.com, I sat down virtually with Scott Woods to answer a few questions about my experience of editing Conversations With Greil Marcus:

I’ve always admired [Marcus's] mind. From the start, I loved the way he trusted his instincts that, say, Object A and Person B and Event C, no matter how disparate they are, or appear to be in conventional terms, might share something intangible, might intersect in a way that’s surprising and meaningful. Plus, he obviously gets rock and roll. As the years passed and my tastes in music and art deepened, I recognized that fewer and fewer of Marcus’s and my records and CDs overlapped. I don’t agree with everything he likes, and as someone who tends to look for art in art, not in rock and roll, I’ve been skeptical of some of his explorations, but I’ve never lost my admiration for the way he thinks, the Keatsian “negative capability” nerve of it, that he walks into dark rooms without knowing where the furniture is and may crash into stuff until his eyes adjust. I learn a lot by reading him. And, simply at the levels of sentence, paragraph, and argument, he’s a real pleasure to read, no matter what he’s writing about.

Full interview here.

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A couple of recent interviews here and here.