GD: What is he, would you say?

MC: I’d say he’s a really great journalist. The first McPhee book I read was A Sense of Where You Are.  It’s a portrait of young Bill Bradley, this basketball star at Princeton.  At first I just loved the information about jump-shots and set-shots and didn’t notice the quality of the writing, the way he could move from personal anecdote to omniscient reportage, from past tense to present and back, from encyclopedic information to one liners. I mean, he wrote a book called Oranges, which is just about oranges and manages also to be awesome.  Maybe that’s the closest thing to an essay that he’s written.  I finished it and I was sure he was asking a question, but I didn’t know what it was. Which leads me to the scene in Jeff in Venice where Jeff says that the best way to get an interview to “masquerade as a chat” is to “act like a complete numbskull.” And sure enough the interview he conducts concludes with the interviewee asking, “Do you smoke grass, Jeff?” What are the chances we can end on that note?  Substituting Matthew for Jeff, of course.

GD: Do you drink chamomile, Matthew? 

MC: With milk and honey, please.

GD: I haven’t smoked grass in a year.  What happened is that in this country there was that grass that we used to smoke that was so fantastic and great fun and really creatively useful and then it got turned into skunk.

MC: Skunk?

GD: Real screaming heebie-jeebie stuff.  As I understand it, there are two aspects to grass—I’m not sure of the chemistry of it. There’s the giggly aspect and the paranoia.  With skunk, they’ve fantastically increased the head fuzz and toned down the giggly. If you were a teenager making beer, what would you do?  You’d brew it as strong as possible because you want to get fugged up.  This skunk has so dominated the market that it has forced out the other stuff.