Saturday, April 30, 2016
Well hey, Greil Marcus' Real Life Top Ten is back! In his Paris Review interview James Thurber relates an anecdote about Harold Ross which I think of every time I read anything by Marcus:
I once wrote a piece called “The Beast in the Dingle” which everybody took as a parody. Actually it was a conscious attempt to write the story as [Henry] James would have written it. Ross looked at it and said: “Goddamn it, this is too literary; I got only fifteen percent of the allusions.” My wife and I often tried to figure out which were the fifteen percent he could have got.I'm doing pretty well if I get 15% of any given piece of writing by Greil Marcus; sometimes I think he is actually making 75% of it out of whole cloth, a sort of avant garde experiment in criticism, like Nabokov's Pale Fire.
// posted by Bill @ 3:09 PM 
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