LR: You've said in the past that all art is repetition.That Mark Smith, England's last great poet, and this year's album hasn't been listened to enough. The new Grinderman's quite good too. Plus, with the vinyl, you get a band, kitted out as Achaean warriors, poster.
TMcC: Yeah: Joyce's "commodius vicus of recirculation" . . . Or Mark E Smith's three Rs: repetition, repetition and repetition . . .
LR: I'll drink to that. It's like a never-ending transmission that can't be switched off.
TMcC: The transmission thing is important. There's that Kraftwerk song, "I am the receiver and you are the transmitter", or however it goes. One way of thinking about art, or the novel, is that the writer is the transmitter, the originator: I have something to say about the world and I'm going to transmit it. But this isn't how I see it, I see it as exactly the inverse: the writer is a receiver and the content is already out there. The task of the writer is to filter it, to sample it and remix it – not in some random way, but conscientiously and attentively. This is what Heidegger says about poets: to be a poet is to listen before speaking; it's first and foremost a listening and not a speaking. Kafka said it as well: "I write in order to affirm and reaffirm that I have absolutely nothing to say." Writing, or art, is not about having something to say; it's about aspiring to a heightened state of hearing.