Living against everything: an interview with Mark Greif
I imagined it as a principle of method. I don’t think it’s a particularly surprising or new method in the long tradition of scepticism for the sake of truth and self-knowledge. But I imagined it quite physically. You know this figure of the gold prospector who must bite into the nugget that he finds to see whether it’s really gold or fool’s gold? There certainly is a great deal of fool’s gold in circulation at the moment. But you couldn’t call the book ‘Bite Everything’. I imagined the principle would be in some way to press up against the things people depend upon, to see if they really hold your weight. To see whether the things that everyone seems to admire are actually worthy of admiration, and whether the things that everyone vilifies are genuinely villainous. There was some degree of wishing to tweak the nose, too, of a particular kind of book which gets written now. There seems to have been an acceleration of purely attitudinising or opinionating books — ‘against t
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