Welcome to Greil Marcus / Letter in the Ether

The other day, rereading Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, his 1953 reimagining of The Great Gatsby in Los Angeles after the Second World War instead of in New York after the First, I came across a sentence. Chandler’s detective Philip Marlowe is trapped in a case he can’t understand, let alone define, let alone pursue, let alone do anything under the sun about. He opens the door to his office, opens the window, opens the mail, puts it in the wastebasket, tries to do anything he can not to think, but he can’t: “Inside my head thoughts stuck together like flies on flypaper.”

Stillwater, Minnesota, 2015. Photo by GM.

That struck me as the best description of writer’s block I’d ever heard, but I wondered why it seemed so sharp: I don’t have writer’s block. That reminded me of something Tom Bissell said years ago when we were on a panel together at 826 Valencia, the place in San Francisco “dedicated,” as it describes itself, “to supporting under-resourced students with their writing skills.” Tom was talking about reporting, traveling, making sense of cultures not one’s own, creating a context where what one encountered might make sense, and someone asked, “But what do you do about writer’s block?” Tom almost snapped back, not meanly, but as if by reflex: “Writer’s block is for amateurs.” And I realized that was true.

You don’t aspire to be a writer. You don’t want to be a writer. To put it that way makes “writer” a status one covets, not something one does. Writers write. You don’t choose to do it; writing, as a form of breathing, has by some alchemical process chosen you. Bob Dylan, taking about “Like a Rolling Stone,” once said that in a certain sense he didn’t feel as if he’d written the song at all, that it was as if a ghost came and gave him the song, and then went away. That’s a very romantic, for that matter Gothic way of describing what happens when anyone engages in any form of creative activity. A stroke appears on a canvas. An image arrives in a song. A combination of three words appears on a page, and the painter, the singer, the writer says, “Where did that come from? I didn’t do that. I didn’t write that. Who did? What did?” The spirit that impelled you to engage with the canvas, the melody, the page, in the first place.

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One day I was walking up a hill I used to walk every morning, a walk I hope that sometime in the future I’ll be able to do again. I was vaguely thinking about a book I had decided to write, without a shadow of an idea how. Suddenly an opening scene, all fiction, popped into my head, complete with characters, dialogue, plot, two whole pages, word for word. “Quick as thought,” the great cultural historian Constance Rourke once wrote: it took less than a second. I went home and spent the rest of the day writing it down. Then I didn’t write another word of the book for three months. That wasn’t writer’s block. It was waiting to understand the book those two pages had already sketched out, to let them tell me what word followed the last one I’d received. If writers don’t have writer’s block, they do know how to wait.

That’s what I hope this Letter in the Ether will be: a space where anything can drop down, be recognized, be named, and be pursued. In my column “Real Life Rock Top 10,” I might spend one sentence on Peter Jackson’s Beatles documentary, Get Back; that column, which has moved from place to place for well over 30 years, will now appear here, but in this forum that item might then spin itself into a thousand words on why that movie doesn’t have a clue as to why it was made or what the stuff it was made from was about. As they’ve been doing for the last six years in a feature on my website called “Ask Greil” that will now become part of this newsletter, people will write in with questions, arguments, with ideas I would never have thought of, facts I don’t know and you probably don’t either but that make both you and me feel both ignorant and enlightened at the same time—which is where writing and reading both start and come together.

I write about culture. To me that means what people talk about and how. That includes music, movies, television, the radio, books, newspapers, poetry, architecture, painting, sculpture, advertising, but also political speeches, shouts at rallies, letters to the editor, stray lines from all of those things that might say more isolated and alone than in the context that was built for them: “Inside my head thoughts stuck together like flies on flypaper.”

I first wrote for publication in 1968. There was a Who album in a record store window: Magic Bus: The Who on Tour. Great, I said to myself—the live album all Who fans had been waiting for. I bought it, took it home, found out it wasn’t a live album, just a collection of B-sides and stray tracks not good enough to go on albums. I felt fooled, so I wrote a review, sent it in to a new magazine called Rolling Stone, and two weeks later picked up the new issue and found my piece on the page. This is easy, I thought, and I’ve been doing it ever since. I’ve written nineteen books—most recently one called Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs, which came out six weeks ago—and edited five more—one, with Werner Sollors, A New Literary History of America, over two hundred 2500-word entries by dozens of writers staring with the first time the word America appeared on a map and ending with the election of Barack Obama as pictured by Kara Walker, worth all the rest, and they have their moments. I’ve written columns for Creem and the New York Times. I’ve seen writer’s fees go from more than the $2 a word the hack in Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days will write about anything for to far below the $12.50 I was paid for that 250-word Who review in Rolling Stone.

Which is to say that this newsletter will depend, to some degree that, as it rolls out, will become clear, on readers subscribing, paying a subscription fee to read some of what will appear here. Some will always be free; some will need the affirmation that a reader thinks what I do is worth paying for, however nominally.

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I have written constantly, for publication, in one form or another, for nearly 55 years. But these are, in fact, the first words I’ve written in in ten months. Talk about writer’s block: pain and a misdiagnosis and steroids and a respirator and two open-heart surgeries and 101 days in three hospitals—in one I could look out the wide windows and see where I’d grown up, the roads I drove with the top down waiting for the Chiffons to come on the radio with “One Fine Day”—will do more than block a writer, it’ll make you willing to trade the ability to walk and think more than two sentences in a row for the best two sentences you ever wrote.

Mine are these:

No failure in America, whether of love or money, is ever simple. It is always a kind of betrayal, of a mass of shadowy, shared hopes.

I wrote that in 1973, about what I was hearing in Robert Johnson. My whole life as a writer has been an attempt to keep faith with whatever it was that brought me to those two sentences. That I have the chance do that here is a great gift, and I hope it’s worth your time.

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