Was Lester Bangs a good friend?
He wasn’t a good friend. He was a good friend of my sister, Georgia, he was a good friend of Greil, who is one of my closest friends. He ate dinner at my house. We had a good professional relationship based on a lot of respect on my side and to a lesser extent on his. He had bad feelings about me sometimes. I said something to him once about Flaubert and the Ivy League that he never understood. I used to complain about people who talked about literature as if it went back to “Naked Lunch” — and Lester was certainly in that category. I’d come to realize that my education had prepared me in a certain way, that it had given me a context out of which to work. Not that it made me better than him, which I think is what he thought I was saying. What I would say is that having a good general education helps you to write criticism because you understand the consensus narrative about culture — “consensus narrative” is a term my wife and I have been kicking around. You know, you understand what
