What Nails It

Why I Write

by Greil Marcus

From a celebrated critic, a heartfelt and adventurous reflection on the art of writing about art
 
“Essential for fans of Marcus and fruitful reading for anyone reflecting on the mysteries of art.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
 
“Writers write. They can’t help it. They can’t not.” In this spirited book, the revered cultural critic Greil Marcus explains his compulsion as a yearning for fun, for play, and, most of all, to discover—to feel the moment when a creation speaks in its own voice.
 
Marcus reflects on over half a century spent honing the art of attention—from his California childhood, overshadowed by mystery and silence surrounding his father’s death, to his discovery of the critic Pauline Kael, to a confrontation with a sixteenth-century painting in Venice. Through it all, he invites readers to join him in exploring the revolutionary power of what it is, why it captures us, and how it forces us to confront what we think we know and who we think we are. Art challenges us to see the world differently, Marcus argues, and the role of the critic is to enact this perspective.
 
Funny and poignant, What Nails It is a tribute to the indispensable art of criticism by one of its greatest practitioners.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Memoir

104 pages, Hardcover

Published August 27, 2024

About the author

Greil Marcus is an American author, music journalist and cultural critic. He is notable for producing scholarly and literary essays that place rock music in a broader framework of culture and politics. In recent years he has taught at Berkeley, Princeton, Minnesota, NYU, and the New School in New York. He lives in Oakland, California.

Reviews

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Most explanations of art are meant to exclude a lot of people, and raise up the people who are doing the explaining.” Not Greil Marcus, though, and we’re all the better for it.

[Jackie Sunday · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s 9 a.m. I put the clothes into the wash and start to read this book. An hour later, I hear that it’s done and I’m close to the last page. It doesn’t take long – maybe an hour to process the three parts. And yet, his words will stay in my mind for a very long time.

Greil Marcus admits he has an unusual first name. It came from his father, Greil Gerstley, whom he never met. When his mother was pregnant, his father, an Executive Naval Officer, was sent on a mission and ended up in the Pacific. The Admiral William Halsey insisted that the USS Hull during WWII would bluster through a wicked typhoon. Over 400 men didn’t survive including his father. The ones that managed to make it told stories afterwards and that’s how Marcus learned about his biological father. His mother, Eleanor Gerstley, remarried a lawyer and he was adopted.

Throughout the book, the author remarks on music, art and films from the past. I remember the 60s and loved the energy in the world with the music and lyrics. Marcus takes us there as a critic submitting articles for the Rolling Stone magazine and others. He was right in the middle of it at Berkeley with protests over the Vietnam war and free love. Those of us that lived during these times remember it well. When we hear a song from Bob Dylan or a number of others, it takes us to the changing world. That’s what Greil does. It takes us back to the days of meaningful lyrics.

There have been influences in his life that have moved him forward from his college days at Berkeley onward. He devoted one part to Pauline Kael, a film critic from The New Yorker (1968 to 1991). He said she made a lasting impression on his career. He noted that she didn’t praise the films but rather focused on where the film went wrong, where it fell short, where there were compromises, and where it cheated. She looked at the strengths and flaws.

The third and final part he titles: Titan. I grabbed my phone to Goggle it. He was referring to the art: Assumption of the Virgin which is a profound piece painted in 1515 to 1518. The image is of a group of Apostles looking up at the Virgin Mary who is rising in heaven towards God. Marcus compares this to the modern art piece by Jackson Pollack, Alchemy, when he poured cans of house paint all over a large piece of canvas to create a million-dollar abstract.

Greil Marcus is now 79 years old with a lot of life stories to share as a music journalist and cultural critic. He says, “Those tiny critical events can generate a transformative power that reaches you far more strongly than it reaches the person next to you, or even anyone else on earth.” He has created a collection of thoughts and it’s up to readers to take note of the words or let them pass by.

My thanks to Yale University Press and NetGalley for allowing me to read a copy of this advanced book with an expected release date of August 27, 2024.

[Nikolas Mavreas]

Pioneering rock music critic Greil Marcus has been writing tirelessly for almost as long as the name "rock music" has existed. His new book attempts to explain just why he’s done so.

You can read the rest of my review on Open Letters Review:
https://openlettersreview.com/posts/w...

[Brian Shevory · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you to Yale University Press and NetGalley for providing me with access to the latest book of essays by one of America’s preeminent cultural critics, Greil Marcus. I was very excited to find this book since I’ve read several of Marcus’s other books, and always appreciate his perspective on topics ranging from music to films to politics and history. Interestingly, this book is brief and contains 3 separate essays, all interrelated to the topic of art and criticism. I also found that based on some of the other books I’ve read, this was one of the more personal reflections, as the 3 essays all dealt with topics related to Marcus’s personal experiences. I also think that the middle essay, that focused on the Marcus’s discovery of the film critic Pauline Kael, presented the kind of shift in criticism that Marcus experienced as he moved from the college/academic critical perspective to the idiosyncratic and more self-expressive connections that Kael helped to make popular with her film criticisms. However, the first essay was also incredibly powerful. Marcus reflects on his father, who he never really knew. Sadly, Marcus, born Greil Griestly and named after his father, lost his father to WWII in a terrible Naval accident in the Pacific. It is an incredible story. Marcus makes an interesting connection with the opening scenes of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, sharing that the kind of wholesome portrait of America is not always what it seems, and while it didn’t seem like his father’s heroics during WWII were hidden, it did seem like the events of the ship’s sinking were covered up due to the incompetence of the ship’s commanding officer. This experience also left Marcus to wonder about his identity, but also recognizing that had his father never died in the war, he wouldn’t have his siblings and possibly his own family. I really enjoyed learning more about Pauline Kael and Marcus’s personal connection in the 2nd essay. I’ve heard a lot about her, and it’s kind of interesting to see that shift and recalibration about the possibilities of writing, criticism, and art that Marcus experienced moving from Berkeley to the editorial staff of Rolling Stone. His experience reading Kael’s writing allowed him to shift his conceptions of what criticism could be and how critics often bring in their own humanity and experiences to truly feel the art—not just objectively (and somewhat coldly) analyzing it from a distance. I’m not sure if there is some kind of separate term for this kind of criticism, but I understood what Marcus meant, especially when you spend 4 years (or more) learning about theorists and critics, trying to emulate their thinking and developing a kind of theoretical application that tries to apply scientific principles to art. Kael and Marcus seemed to delight in the emotions that art can evoke, and making this a key aspect of their criticism is important to remember what makes art so necessary in our lives. This shift in criticism also leads into the final essay that focuses on Marcus’s experience with Titian’s painting The Assumption of the Virgin in Venice. More than just an analysis or personal reflection on the painting itself, Marcus uses Titian’s work as a kind of springboard to reflect on all of the qualities that Titian’s works shares with other art, even those considered low art (music, comics, pop art, film). He also makes reference to the enduring quality of the Rolling Stones Let it Bleed, and how listening to this album at different points in his life, he is able to hear different elements of the art and experience different emotions each time. I loved how this essay tied up the other points he makes about the self and art, and how it’s important to not only analyze art, more it is even more necessary to feel and appreciate art, recognizing it’s power to move and challenge us, to help us experience new emotions or resurrect old emotions that we haven’t felt for some time. Whether it is film, painting, sculpture, or music, great art has the power to move us in unique ways—not just allowing us to feel, but also providing us with new thoughts and pathways to creativity. This was a short, but great read, and I look forward to re-visiting these essays soon.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher Yale University Press for an advance copy of this look at why certain people need to share their inner thoughts with others, be it fictional, nonfictional, polemic, or personal.

One question I know that a lot of writers get asked, probably to the point of exhaustion are where do writers get their ideas from. Harlan Ellison had a pretty good answer, Schenectady. A question that should be asked, mainly by other writers is one that I have always wondered about. Why does one write? What makes a person sit and write on paper of type on a computer, or even speak aloud to some program thoughts that fill their heads, about people, places things unseen, or even critical events of today. Greil Marcus would answer, "They can’t help it. They can’t not". Greil Marcus has been writing about music, art, movies, culture, America, ideas and much more for a very long time. In What Nails It, Marcus has created a book that is part memoir, part confessional, part thank you, but all Greil Marcus.

The book starts with a man in flux, going from sure that his time had passed to being offered a job teaching in a position that he never thought he would have. This gave Marcus the time to think, to discuss events and ideas with people, honing his skills in something that he didn't even know existed. Until Marcus found it. Marcus was making a little bit of money writing reviews for the Rolling Stone, and Marcus after bad mouthing the reviews section was given a job overseeing it. This again taught him much, until the violence of Altamont became to real, and he moved on. As time moved on so did his ideas of writing. A childhood of not knowing his father, who died 6 months before Marcus was born, had taught him that history was important, even if it had to be changed. This gap in his life inspired him to write about the lost stories, the meanings of songs, and lost bits of Americana. Reading Pauline Kael, the movie critic who wrote eventually for the The New Yorker taught Marcus about criticism, and how to write it. To feel the art, and not approach it from a mental place, but a more visceral place.

I have long enjoyed Greil Marcus and his writing, but I think I might enjoy this most of all. There is both an intimacy, and a lot of practical writing, techniques that will speak to many writers. The writing is very good, brisk and sure, but tells a full story, and an inspiring story at that. Reading about him finding out about the death of his father is pretty brutal. And yet beautiful. One can see that spending one's life with few people sharing information about one's own father, and his death, not in war, but because of two commander's vanity, would effect a person. Make one not content with the story shared, but the story that really happened. And that one would go deep to find it.

I enjoyed this book quite a lot. I have read a lot of the author's works and have enjoyed them, and the writing also. This though was not only enjoyable but inspiring. Recommended for writers who need a boost, or for writers who want to know why they can't stop thinking of words, situations, or ways to discuss the beauty they still see in the world.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Inspiring and dang-near life-affirming to see someone whose been at his game for so long still have so much passion to look inward about the why and the how of the art of critical cultural review. In doing so, Marcus shares fascinating stories about his own father, his love of David Lynch and Pauline Kael, his evolving relationship with religious art. A lesser writer could easily drop references like these (not to mention others like Ginsburg's "Howl", Bonnie and Clyde, and Pennies From Heaven) and seem as if he was trying to spike the level's on some personal snotty cool-o-meter, but Marcus is careful to portray the exact opposite, going so far as to suggest that anyone who dares to question the legitimacy of any emotional response to any work of art might be, um, a fascist? It's Marcus's downright spiritual level of investment in the subject matter that makes this one a must-read-again-soon kind of read.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Bob Dylan quote, suggesting that perhaps a ghost actually wrote "Like A Rolling Stone," and a Mike Bloomfield quote about how music has to move him, brilliantly bookend Marcus' credo that has something to do with insisting that the art which matters - music, film, paintings, etc - whether encountered in a museum or on the radio, transports, transforms and transfers the viewer/listener to a new, previously unimagined or realized place. It may even be a place that's a mystery to the very creator of that art. And the critic's role is to nudge others to that place. By plumbing his own (and some others') responses to art and attempts to be the nudge, he totally nails it.

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Greil Marcus’s What Nails It is a short tome that peels back some of the mystique on the process of criticism: it's provisional, jumpy, full of doubts and secretly having plenty of fun with its marks.

Nominally it’s a sliver of a volume from Yale’s Why I Write series, expanded from his Windham-Campbell lecture. In practice it’s more like a pocket origin story for one of the most distinctive critical voices of the last fifty years. What comes through as we read is the constant sense of Marcus trying to work out, sentence by sentence, what on earth he’s been doing all this time and why he still feels compelled to do it.

He begins with biography, but in Marcus’s case biography is already half ghost story. His father, Greil Gerstley, died at sea in 1944 when the destroyer USS Hull sailed into a typhoon; Marcus was still in the womb. His mother refused to talk about this for years, not even telling him his father’s name. That silence becomes one of the book’s key motors. If your life starts with a missing story, it’s perhaps inevitable that you develop an obsession with “rewriting the past, pursuing… secret histories, with stories untold,” as he succinctly puts it.

From there the book fans out into three main lines of influence. The first is memory itself – not just the patchy personal kind but what he calls “cultural memories,” second-hand experiences that move in and furnish your mind. One of the defining scenes is his encounter with Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin in Venice. He arrives already armed with the usual prejudices about “serious art,” then finds himself ambushed by the painting’s sheer physical force: the reds, the upward drag, the sense that the whole church has been rearranged around it. The episode is less about suddenly liking Renaissance painting and more about having his private taxonomy of “art / not-art” blown up. Marcus being Marcus, he treats this not as a conversion but rather as a data point: another example of how a work can talk back to us, insisting on its own terms.

The second line is Pauline Kael, to whom he devotes the middle stretch of the book and who clearly functions as a kind of critical north star. He writes about reading her in his twenties and feeling shocked by the totality of her engagement – the way a review of a trashy thriller could balloon into an essay about American desire, politics, class. What he learned from her, he says, was that there are no limits on what a film (or song, or novel) can say, “and no limits on what you could say about it.” That last clause is crucial. You can feel him taking permission from Kael not just to respond, but to respond extravagantly – to braid Johnny Rotten to a 16th-century Anabaptist, to hear American history echoing in Elvis outtakes and basement tapes.

The third line is his own long term status as a fan. Marcus started out by “writing out of fandom, out of love and betrayal.” He’s suspicious of the tidy origin anecdote – the one killer line or album people cite as having “made” them a writer or musician – and instead describes a more muddled accumulation: stray songs on the radio, classroom humiliations, glimpses of books on other people’s shelves. Part of the book’s charm is watching him push back, gently, against the myth of the single turning point. Art, in his telling, worms its way in by a hundred side doors.

All the while, his joy in writing – and, just as importantly, his need to write – comes through almost embarrassingly clearly. He describes the urge as a mix of curiosity and play, the desire to “feel the moment when a creation speaks in its own voice.” That might sound airy, but the examples are concrete: following some half-heard phrase in a Dylan song down a rabbit hole of American prophecy; realising, halfway through an essay, that what you thought you wanted to say isn’t it at all. The book becomes an argument that criticism is itself a kind of art-making, with its own surprises and wrong turns, rather than a tidy after-the-fact judgement.

Because this is Marcus, there’s a fair bit of leaping between epochs and forms – rock ’n’ roll, Kael, Titian, Herman Wouk, punk, the Windham-Campbell stage. Reviewers have noted that he can “jump across epochs, art forms, and songs in a single bound”, and that’s very much what he's getting down to here. Rather than “how to be a critic”, you're getting more a map of this writer’s obsessions, scribbled in the margins of a lifetime’s work.

What Nails It is over almost as soon as you’ve settled into its rhythm. You get snapshots rather than a full autobiography: a father-shaped absence, a few key books and paintings, some thumbnail accounts of the writing life. There are moments when you may wish he’d lingered a little longer, especially on the nuts and bolts of his method – how he knows when a wild associative leap is earned, for instance, and when it’s just showing off.

Marcus has spent half a century insisting that popular art deserves to be taken as seriously as anything in the canon, and this book shows the emotional stakes under that insistence. It’s a modest, slightly sideways memoir of how a person builds a life around paying radical attention – to movies, to songs, to paintings, to the stray lines that stick in the mind for reasons you won’t understand until you try to write them out.

And in that writing out, we try to nail the essence, capture it, bottle it and pass it on to share.

[Timothy Swartout · Rating 5 out of 5]

In which our intrepid critic describes why he writes in the most compelling way possible. Thoughtful at all times and also revelatory in its explanations of cultural criticism as necessary and justified and, conversely, probably not either of these.

[James G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sweet, succinct book. I just love Greil Marcus. I’m not even sure I agree with him all the time. I just like that his writing exists, it’s good, and he’s Bay Area. I just dig him. I’d like to have a long talk with him, and some day I might.

[Glenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

As always, throught-provoking, informative, fascinating. Interesting to learn how he was influenced by Pauline Kael.

[Tim Belonax · Rating 4 out of 5]

Respectable reflection on why this writer writes. If you need a little “pick me up” in your process, this could be productive procrastination.

[John Schorg · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a short but worthy read. Its primary impact comes in reminding you of the experiences and people that helped inspire you when writing.

[Rex Fausett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seriously good. A library book but I might buy a copy. Highly recommended.

[Timothy Hoiland · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Nearly everything I’ve written is based on the conviction, the learned belief, that there are depths and satisfactions, shocks and revelations, in blues, rock ‘n’ roll, detective stories, movies, and television, as rich and profound as those that can be found anywhere else.”