American writer, critic, and anthologist of the avant-garde, introduced in Dialogue 29 through two roles. As a young McLuhan reader at The New York Times in 1967, he is the "baby boomer guy who's into concepts" to whom McLuhan reportedly explained that he supplied concepts because people need them; as an editor decades later he assembled John Cage's scattered interviews into a "table talk" that Cameron mines for Cage's offhand remarks about McLuhan. Bob frames him, half-affectionately, as a formidable New York mind he once watched raging at a utility company in small-claims court.
Across the dialogues
Enters two ways at once — as the boomer critic McLuhan "put on" with the concepts line, and as the anthologist whose Cage collection supplies the dialogue's evidence; folded into Bob's memoir of a once-sharp New York mind gone to seed
Kostelanetz is the source behind the dialogue's Cage material — the John Cage / McLuhan lunch anecdote Cameron mailed to Bob traces back to one of his books.
"And it came out of a book by Richard Kostelanetz."
His method as an anthologist — recovering Cage's remarks from sources "nobody had ever seen" (high-school newspapers, college yearbooks) and assembling them into a "table talk."
"What Kostelanetz did was he went back to a whole bunch of obscure interviews that Cage had held."
What Kostelanetz's collection surfaced — Cage's quiet self-affirmation that, in the end, he understood something McLuhan didn't, a verdict Cameron flatly rejects ("But he was wrong about that").
"he knew something that McLuhan didn't."
Bob's New York memoir — he once met Kostelanetz haranguing the judges in a civil-court dispute with Con Ed around 2005, and read it as a fine cultural mind reduced to "a nobody in the larger structure of New York City."
"that's a little side story about what happened to Richard Kostelanetz."
Connections
The young New York Times writer to whom McLuhan gave his "we need concepts" line in 1967 — a baby-boomer critic making a career of the avant-garde.
Gathered Cage's scattered obscure interviews — high-school papers, college yearbooks — into what Cameron calls Cage's "table talk."