Trying to write a book review about essays in which one of our preeminent social critics, Greil Marcus, explores why he writes criticism \u2026 well, I\u2019ve already mirrored myself into infinity or oblivion. But perhaps that\u2019s a worthy task. Marcus\u2019s short in pages (87) if long in contemplation What Nails It \u2014 part of the Why I Write series from Yale University Press, based on the annual Windham-Campbell Lectures \u2014 makes an immediate claim for the ineffable dropping into a writer\u2019s noggin. He writes, \u201cI live for those moments when something appears on the page as if of its own volition \u2014 as if I had nothing to do with what is now looking me in the face.\u201d<\/p>\n
Of course, what stares Marcus in the face during his writing process leads to classics like his debut (not counting \u2014 or discounting \u2014 his journalism in Rolling Stone, Creem, etc.), Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock \u2019n\u2019 Roll Music and his second book Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century. Both drew musical murder boards that looped lines connecting unlikely persons and traditions, upending any sense of high and low culture; for just one example, 16th century insurrectionist and self-proclaimed King of New Jerusalem John of Leiden meets Sex Pistol punk Johnny (Lydon) Rotten.<\/p>\n
In What Nails It, Marcus explains his method this way: \u201cWhat I ended up doing with my life: rewriting the past, pursuing an obsession with secret histories, with stories untold \u2014 with what, to me, were deep, fraternal connections between people who never met or even heard of each other.\u201d He has a very personal reason to think\/act\/live in such a way, as this book makes clear, for his own origin story was long clouded. His bio father, Greil Gerstley, died during WWII (of all things, Herman Wouk based The Caine Mutiny on the incident) and Marcus was born six months later. It\u2019s a story that took him years to piece together, and so memory becomes a construct. As he so concretely phrases it, \u201cWe all have memories of things we didn\u2019t experience: cultural memories that have taken up residence in our minds, built houses, filled them with furniture and appliances, and commanded that we live in them.\u201d<\/p>\n
We are fortunate as his readers that his house is so well-appointed. And that his gut mainlines to his mind, for he asserts, \u201cI was a fan, writing out of fandom, out of love and betrayal.\u201d In this he is like Pauline Kael, esteemed long-time New Yorker film critic, one of his great influences, and the titular hero of the second of this book\u2019s three chapters. Marcus writes, \u201cKael made prissy critics like [Andrew] Sarris [with whom she had a very public pissing match] uncomfortable because she demanded more out of movies, out of life, than they did. She demanded everything \u2014 that is how I learned that there were no limits to what a movie or a novel or a song could say.\u201d But, in typical fashion, Marcus pushes this consideration, and his sentence, for another telling twitch, adding, \u201cand no limits on what you could say about it.\u201d That\u2019s just one more time he refuses to rest on merely a good observation; his nature is always to question further. That he has taken pop music as his subject still can shock in a world where entertainment too often equates with not having to think a whit.<\/p>\n
Instead, his career of \u201cthinking in public\u201d has left him writing out of love for a range of culture, perhaps most trenchantly about Bob Dylan, but also numerous other times he was struck by that in that moment experience of art: the blandly satiric opening of Blue Velvet,\u00a0 the paintings of Titian (another chapter title) and Pollock, the surrealist comedy of Firesign Theater, the power of The Great Gatsby, the magical montages of Murnau\u2019s Sunrise, the ever-absolutely new \u201cGimme Shelter.\u201d And few writers can take the inchoate felt and mold it into such visceral language. \u201cI had to broaden the context of music as far as I could,\u201d he writes (in this case specifically about the Rolling Stones). \u201cI had to write about photography and movies and fiction and every form of cultural speech that was feeding into the album and bleeding out of it.\u201d Note how physically he grounds this easily off into the ether idea \u2014 feeding and bleeding \u2014 essentials of living and dying.<\/p>\n
Near the book\u2019s end he claims, \u201cWhat art does, maybe what it does most completely, is to tell us, make us feel, that what we think we know we don\u2019t.\u201d Fortunately for us, Marcus eloquently sifts through all the best next questions. To do the work until he gets to the point of \u201cThat feeling of no, I didn\u2019t think that, I didn\u2019t write that, where did that come from?\u201d \u2014 something in this book he never reductively refers to as the muse even once \u2014 and then realizes, \u201cAlright, here it is, what are you going to make of this?\u201d<\/p>\n
This review originally appeared in the California Review of Books<\/a>.<\/p>\n
![\"Update:](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/G3LUAoYXwAAvcuS.jpeg\")
![\"SBART](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/8048180131393073119-e1760461509498.jpeg\")