“I’ve been the assistant librarian at the Santa Fe Institute for almost a decade. The iconoclastic novelist, Cormac McCarthy, has been my “office mate” across most of those years. I’m about to leave for browner pastures, and I’ll somewhat miss my anecdotal chats with Cormac about death and science and everything not-Literature, but he has given me perhaps a final one-liner. He (self-admittedly) doesn’t think there has been any serious music since Beethoven. When I played him a snippet of Zeitkratzer’s Metal Machine Music, he screwed up his face and said: “Good God! That sounds about like sticking your head in a hornet’s nest while standing in the middle of Times Square. Why would anybody choose to listen to that?”’
Tim Ramick commenting on his conversation with Rick Moody.