‘From their name—the intentional ‘au’ sound with the rest mashed in a jumble on a keyboard—to the music that Sean Booth and Rob Brown create, the music of Autechre can leave you alternately baffled, rebuffed, and astonished. Ever since their inclusion in the genre-defining Artificial Intelligence compilation from 1992, the Manchester duo’s sound remains singular in the canon—not just of cutting-edge electronic music, but in a section of outer space that few other artists ever venture towards, much less wholly inhabit.

‘Some 30 years on, Autechre remains peerless. Yes, you can pick out thrilling bits of dance music’s heritage in their productions: electro, hip-hop, ambient, drum & bass, video game music, experimental, trip-hop, industrial; but the only true constant is change. Where you enter an Autechre track is never where you exit it. To listen is to wander into a wormhole. Like a dancefloor set atop a mudslide Autechre makes music that feels visceral and cerebral, concussive and ethereal. That dynamic fluidity makes for a catalog that feels deliciously paradoxical: It can feel cryogenic one moment, whimsical the next. Your first few times diving into their music might be frustrating, but then it suddenly opens up, a hermetic world rendered warm and welcoming.’ — Andy Beta

 

Autechre Site
Autechre @ bandcamp
Autechre @ Warp
Autechre @ Spotify
Autechre @ Soundcloud
Autechre @ Discogs

 

_____________
freulaeux (2016)
‘freulaeux evokes images of cold cityscapes bathed in neon, of driving aimlessly through a jungle of skyscrapers, of sitting in the backseat as a little kid with your head against the glass, feeling the cold on your skin, watching the droplets of rain cascade down the window, seeing the buildings flash by anonymously. It evokes in me a profound sense of emotional nostalgia and comfort, but with also an inescapable tinge of unease. There is a tension here between those feelings, the former evoked by the pads and the latter by the beats, that works perfectly in translating to song that feeling of experiencing wistfulness, nostalgic longing, the comfort of the familiar but also the cruelty of its distance from the present.’ — Ryley Atkinson

 

____________
Cipater (1997)
‘Cipater opens with and is driven by a beat that has an incredibly tactile feel, specifically evoking the splintering wood of the crank on some medieval device, a clunk and a push forward with each iteration. Though quickly joined by a bouncing, bass-y melodic counterpoint and washes of ambience hanging, layering overtop, it is the development of this beat that is the core focus of this track. The beat eventually catches up with itself, eats itself, and then re-emerges in a new form in the track’s second half, with these staggering melodic tones brushing atop it and pushing it into some new, wondrous place. It’s as purely exciting and surprising as any moment in the duo’s entire 90s output, and as such it represents the zenith of that era, and really of everything they would do up until the mid-2010s.’ — Ryley Atkinson

 

______________
VI Scose Poise (2001)
‘I often like to think of Confield as IDM’s Kid A moment, where the sonic toolkit of a band that had been consistently pushing themselves to more progressive, ambitious arrangements was almost entirely upended for something altogether more unfriendly, even volatile, but breathtaking in its beauty and somehow also feeling, retrospectively, like the most logical next step and the best possible one.’ — Ryley Atkinson

 

______________
Surripere (Draft 7.30 (2003)
‘Surripere lingers in a calm but vaguely tense mode for three minutes, lulling you into a false sense of security before the malfunctions begin, at first subtle with the intrusion of cut-up metallic sounds, before suddenly the track halts and these violent punches of squelching sound enter to break up the progression, tearing at it, pulling it apart by the seams, somehow managing to disrupt it entirely without losing the core rhythmic focus.’ — Ryley Atkinson

 

______________
foldfree casual (2016)
‘foldfree casual feels, in the most plain and direct of visual terms, like witnessing the birth of the universe. These rich, luxurious pads that stretch and sing are one of the most purely emotive and captivating textures in any piece by Autechre. Eventually, these crinkling, distorted warbles that sound like robotic birdsong join them: a new universe that began with light now features matter, solid objects forming, dotting the space that the light fills, complicating the simple, anchoring the space. And then, the most dramatic shift, the beginning of the formation of worlds: these objects collide, smashing into each other, fracturing and breaking apart. Gravity collides them repeatedly, again and again, til gigantic masses begin to form, masses that one day will support life. The intrusion of the shuttering sounds that represent these collisions, and the way that they juxtapose against the soft, serene beauty of the central shimmering chords, is among the most beautiful combinations of sound that Rob and Sean have ever crafted.’ — Ryley Atkinson

 

______________
Garbagemx (1995)
‘Across 14 minutes, the Garbage EP opener spins an increasingly manifold web of sounds that, like the best tracks on Tri Rep, eventually develop a symphonic feeling as they all dance across each other and interlock in unison. It even teaches you how to listen to it, if you pay attention, starting from one simple looping element and gradually introducing more, some percussive, some ambient, and some purely textural, across its lengthy but never less than fascinating runtime.’ — Ryley Atkinson

 

__________
r cazt (2020)
‘SIGN’s closing track sees the particularly dazzling pads that decorate the album in full focus here, rippling across the track as they have across many of its songs, but with a notable difference. Here, they have a distorted, longing quality that makes them feel like they are fighting to exist. They emerge from a deep, bassy bedrock like they are thrashing for air in the mix, and they continue to do so throughout the track; the lack of conventional development from that template is what makes it so affecting.’ — Ryley Atkinson

 

______
e0 (2018)
‘This is a circling, repetitive, but constantly gripping piece that is among the most straightforwardly breathtaking in the history of electronic music.’ — Ryley Atkinson

 

______________
latentcall (2016)
‘Its heaviness, its shifting rhythmic textures, its propulsive grooving, its propensity to include walls of deafening but crisp noise, and washes of enormously beautiful, resonant ambience … all of these are out in full form on latentcall, which clatters, bangs, and pulses forward with a danceable, abrasive groove, before suddenly, halfway through, completely disintegrating into near silence.’ — Ryley Atkinson

 

______________
bladelores (2013)
‘The most majestic, richly huge Autechre track up to this point in their career (but not beyond it…), the staggering bladelores manages to balance being a stunning achievement in seasoned sound design and also one of the more conventionally accessible tracks of this period of the duo’s career, consisting of a straightforward, heavily reverbed but gripping beat that does not undergo any subversive deconstruction but blissfully progresses skyward, searching toward the heavens in concert with a slowly building wall of ambience and sympathetic echoes of itself. It’s an absolute feast for the senses, a true “holy FUCK” moment the first time that you hear it.’ — Ryley Atkinson

 

___________
Cichli (1997)
‘If you were to ask me to name the best track to play to someone who has never heard Autechre but wants to get a sense of what their music does without being too overwhelmed, this would be one of two that I recommend. It is the early centrepiece of the stunning Chiastic Slide, their best album of the 90s era despite what anyone else might tell you.’ — Ryley Atkinson

 

_______
X4 (2020)
‘X4 immediately stands out as one of the most propulsive, even fun pieces the duo have released in years. It opens with this propulsive kick beat, gripping melodic tones, and absolutely serrating noise bursts that slice through the track like a robot surgeon’s arm gripping a hundred scalpels and going berserk. Around four minutes in some of the backing textures and the scraping fall away and the track gets heavier, darker, moodier, though no less propulsive. The constant forward motion evokes a chase scene through a darkened night, and around five minutes in, quite dramatically, a lot of the heaviness just falls away, but the floor is still there, so it’s like looking down and seeing the stars instead of a road.’ — Ryley Atkinson

 

______________
elyc6 0nset (2016)
‘If you asked me to highlight the single most difficult piece of music that Autechre have made to date, despite that being a relative question that is kind of meaningless the more you interrogate it, I’d nevertheless point you pretty quickly to elyc6 0nset. This is the 27-minute behemoth of Elseq, the longest track on that record and one of the most texturally unfriendly, unwieldy mammoths of the duo’s entire catalogue.’ — Ryley Atkinson

 

________
Bine (2001)
‘More than almost any other song Autechre have released, this feels random, frighteningly so — foreboding ambience hangs in the backdrop but modulates wildly throughout in tone, and the central ‘beat’, if you could call it that, sounds panicked, frightened, but totally erratic, winding and sprinting around the mix and searching for a way to ground itself, except with each step it puts forward suddenly three more feet are sprouting from each toe and wriggling in different directions.’ — Ryley Atkinson

 

___________
violvoic (2018)
‘It is one of the most texturally singular and idiosyncratic tracks in Autechre’s entire catalogue, consisting of sounds that clearly evoke a thick, purring pool of oil or tar, some kind of viscous and dense fluid from which there is absolutely no escape once it has you in its grasp. For much of its first half, the fifteen-minute track lingers in a straightforward rhythm filled with these sounds, but then the real fun begins. In one of the most satisfying builds of any Autechre track, the entire piece collapses to near silence five-minutes in, and then slowly, gradually rebuilds itself, piece by piece, slowly eking up the tension moment by moment, adding a new percussive thum and gently easing the tempo upward, in a tense and thrilling build that had my heart skipping beats, sweating with anticipation, until finally, in the track’s glorious closing minutes, the building monstrosity falls into this utterly disgusting, crunching groove, a staggering release of tension that represents Rob and Sean at the absolute height of their creative powers.’ — Ryley Atkinson

 

____________
all end (2018)
‘As the capstone finale of the eight-hour NTS Sessions project, it feels as though it is the thing the entire release had been building towards. Frankly, it feels like the thing their entire career arc had been working towards. Sure, it foregoes the complex, shuddering, ever-shifting rhythms for walls of thick, pillowing drone, but even in this respect it is the most nuanced, detailed, and rich creation they have ever released. As any fan will be quick to tell you, beneath what initially appears to be a singular wall of noise is endless melodic variation, buried detail eking its way toward the surface and then receding into the chasm. It is like listening to every piece of music ever made at the same time.’ — Ryley Atkinson

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Oh, David, you’re a huge person, vast in so many respects. It’s going to be very hard for a while necessarily, but keep in mind your importance not only to people who love and value you like me and others here, but to the world that seriously needs your mind and personal input and presence. Deep down, I know you know that. Love, me. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. Look forward to your Substack thoughts. Jeff gets all the credit for you being in there, and for me being in there too. ** Bill, Hi. My understanding is that the thematic of the Bookworm book is that all the people interviewed are dead. My understanding is also that there will be further volumes. Fog, sigh, how sweet. Nothing but blazing sun and mug here. ** T. J., Script for an audio project. That’s interesting. What is it? My next project after the film is finished is an audio-only novel that’s already written and that I’ll be making with Zac. My friend Joel works on/with Midjourney 24/7 these days and speaks of almost nothing else. He puts his work up on social media too. I can totally understand the fascination. Another reason I wish I had instagram, but I just don’t want to start because I’m too busy already. But drat. I sure would love to see those pez dispensers. You don’t launch them anywhere else? I do like Diane Williams. I just read her upcoming book ‘I Hear You’re Rich’, and I loved it. She’s terrific. ** Charalampos, Hi. I don’t think I did a Bookworm for every book of mine, but I’m pretty sure I was on the show more often than any other author, very lucky me. I think reading ‘The Marbled Swarm’ in Paris would be ideal. But read the English language version. The French translation apparently doesn’t quite work right. Clementi is one of my greatest heroes. I’m restoring the blog’s Pierre Clementi Day, coming up. Don’t worry about the rejections. When I used to submit poems to journals, my rejections to acceptances ratio was about 100 to 1. ** Mark, Hi, Mark. Cool. I will let you know when I’m in LA. Current plan its to go in October to show Zac’s and my film to the cast and crew and do as many Halloween haunted houses as humanly possible. I’ll check out ‘Twilight Man’. Looks fascinating. The ‘Frisk’ movie is just dreadful. That movie made me not want to have my novels adapted into feature films ever again. It’s dumbass. Your chapbook is still in my immediate future aka as soon as I get some pressing work/shit done. Great about the new collection! You sound excellent. ** Kettering, Hi. If we weren’t legally tethered to said guy, we would not be working with him for absolute sure. I think I feel the pink vibes, but it’s very hot here, so everything feels kind of pink. I’m pretty ruthless privately in my own head when I read, but I’m also hugely aware that I have particular tastes and interests, so I try not to think my ‘high standards’ have wisdom or authority outside my own search for what I want. I don’t ever think of myself as a substantial person. Ghost is closer. Iow, I know what you mean, of course, but I guess I think what makes great writing great involves much more than hard work. It’s very mysterious shit. I mostly just feel lucky that the stars aligned in my case to a degree. What you’re saying and the way you’re thinking is very valuable to you, and it’s nothing but interesting to read and think about. If that makes sense? I think I actually aspire to write noise, but of a very particular kind maybe. Anyway, write on, it’s a pleasure. My toes are taking their ‘sweet’ time returning to nonentity status, like toes tend to do, I guess. Bon, loveable day. ** l@rst, Hi, buddy. Sweet, man, about all the great stuff you’re doing. Respect galore. And that lake, needless to say. I hung out with Richard Meltzer a couple of times when I did readings in Portland. He was so extremely sweet. I was surprised. Sure, 5 tiny questions, absolutely, thank you, man! Keep on! ** Cody Goodnight, Hi. I’m suffering in hot weather, but ok otherwise. Same old. Supposed to cool down in a couple of days. Your taste in film, and in music too, has an amazing and exciting range. ‘Baby Jane’ -> ‘Cross and Whispers’ = psychedelic. Day and night of days and nights to you. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hey, Ben. Okay. ‘The Cleaning Lady’ is locked into my imminent schedule. Thank you for the tip, pal. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yes, Ges Gesch’s globes, lest we forget. Happy for your ultimately great weekend. Mine? Not too much, mostly working and dealing with film-related crises. Zac gets back from out of town tonight, so editing will start eating my days again. Foot fetish is so huge these days, at least in the S&M set. Bigger than Puppy, bigger than ABDL. I can’t say that I totally understand that, but why not. Love giving dogs the ability to eat chocolate, G. ** Misanthrope, Yay about your mom. She’s 80, that’s so up there. Not a huge ton happening over here at the moment either. ** chas, I’m happy your nose or, I guess, sinuses were reasonable. What a beautiful thunderstorm description. And ace on your short story. Anime is so rich. Writers should let it tip their balances a lot more often, I think. Oh, hm. In, like, 1981, the artist Don Bachardy, who was Christopher Isherwood’s boyfriend, asked me to sit for him and painted my portrait. He made me look like a cute teen idol, which I didn’t, you know, look like. He said afterwards he didn’t like it, and I think he must have trashed it because it’s never shown up anywhere. I can’t say that I liked the painting but I liked looking like a teen idol. And this painter Larry Stanton painted a couple of paintings of me and a couple of my poet friends in the early 80s. Those still exist. Unless I’m blanking out, I think those are the only times I was ‘immortalised’ by an artist. You ever been painted or sculpted? I will endeavour to do my very best today knowing you will too, and … how did we do? ** Bernard Welt, B-ster. That’s right, you went to school with Michael, I don’t why I always forget that. It’s not such an odd, unimaginable thing. You’re in London! The poet Colin Self lives in Edinburgh. I can’t think of anyone else there you might know. Diarmuid’s wedding sounds both kind of wonderful and kind of horrifying in a kind of ‘Midsommar’ way. He’s such a hippie! But at least he namechecked you. Nice. Of course, to me a Brokeback Mountain musical sounds like just about the most horrible thing one could possibly imagine. But hey. Was it? These baby pigeons who were recently brought to life in a nest near my window are drowning out the boon and novelty of hearing my name in your voice. Drat. I’ll try saying ‘Bernard’ really loudly in about 1 1/2 minutes, so perk your ears. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. I’ve been given to understand there will be more volumes in the Bookworm book series, how many, I don’t know. Probably depends on if this one earns its keep. I haven’t seen ‘Coma’. I’m not even sure it was released here. It must’ve been. I think there is more possibility that our new film could get some kind of limited release, but very limited, if so, and, yes, given the state of American film theaters there that you’ve described, it seems doubtful. Hope springs eternal, though. The film theater/release situation in Paris is still relatively nirvana-like. The Greta van Fleet ‘singer’ dude came out as queer recently, didn’t he? ** Jeff J, Hi, Jeff! Thank you again so, so much. Two of the books’ endings are vexing now? That is a tough situation. Uh, hm. I’m sure I have had a torturous time with novel endings, but I’m blanking on when and which at the moment. Still haven’t seen ‘Asteroid City’. It’s getting ridiculous. ** Nasir, Hi, N! Oh, sure, I know that feeling. Hm, if there’s some level of excitement in you that causes you to power through the questionable piece and finish it, I guess go for it. It might just a mood that’s the problem? I will share thoughts on the TDP track, which I haven’t managed to cue up yet. Ideally today. I keep going back and back for years to this track ‘Rome Plows’ by Drive Like Jehu because it’s like audio crystal meth to me. Maybe it’s something similar. I may be villainous, although I don’t really think so, but I’m pretty sure I’m not evil. Pretty sure you aren’t either. I have good instincts. ** Darbzaroni, Your new name makes me hungry. I’m ok. It’s hot, but I’m ok. Oh, I picked up this hitchhiker guy, he pulled a knife on me and demanded to drive my car, and he drove around with me as a hostage for about 11 hours picking up his friends and doing drugs and smashing my car into things, and then he stopped to buy drugs, and one of his friends who didn’t realise I was a hostage asked me how I knew the guy, and I told I didn’t and that I was kidnapped, and he said, ‘Fuck him. Give us rides home, and you can go’. It depends on the flight, the route, and what time of day you fly. I mean, flights aren’t cheap, but they’re not always insane. Daniel sounds like a serious trip. Well, if nothing else, this stint in your life is certainly giving you colourful stories you can tell people forever. That wasn’t a crazy rant or even a rant, I don’t think, although I don’t know the dictionary definition of ‘rant’. It’s true I have no idea what you look like. It’s kind of nice becoming friends with someone knowing it’s not possibly influenced by how the person looks. Not to say I wouldn’t be interested to see your face, of course. Now we’re already friends, so why not. ** A, Hi. Karaoke? What’d you sing. I’ve never done that. Never will. I don’t get drunk, so it doesn’t seem possible. Nulick still has that ‘plastic teen son’? I guess he’s a good ‘dad’. Beautiful week to you too, buster. ** Okay. Today I made you a gig featuring some of my favorite tracks by the amazing and seriously fucking genius duo Autechre. Accept it as a gift please. See you tomorrow.

Illustration by Art Spiegelman

 

**

 

“The best reader in America.”
– Norman Mailer

“Michael Silverblatt’s voice has been described as “so hypnotic, so compelling, that it apparently has prevented people driving on the LA freeways from committing acts of road rage.” What those drivers are listening to, more likely than not, is Silverblatt in conversation with an author. He hosts Bookworm, a thirty-minute interview program on the Los Angeles public radio station KCRW that has been one of the last bastions of serious literary conversation for a mass audience.” – New York Review of Books

“Michael Silverblatt is a better reader than any writer deserves. He teaches his listeners something writers often forget, that books enter human lives and change them, if not for the better in any usual sense then for the broader, for the opportunity any book presents to be encountered, welcomed or rejected, as an articulated vision, something that can be pondered at length, satisfyingly. A book recruits the sensibility of the reader. It is much more than casual encounter with another mind that our own minds are made for. Michael is one of those luxuries civilization from time to time affords itself, a voice who can say that its strange works are wonderful.” —Marilynne Robinson

“Silverblatt is a passionate reader. He’s read one’s entire oeuvre and remembers it better than one does oneself. With him be warned: you might have the unfamiliar experience of thinking new thoughts, of making original connections, of seeing your own writing from a fresh perspective.” – Edmund Wilson

“Each interview ranged far from the precipitating occasion as Silverblatt brought his considerable curiosity to questions of style, tone, language, structure, aspirations, and inspiration. Widely read, knowledgeable, and thoughtful, he elicited candid, detailed responses from his guests….A warm celebration of creativity and the writing life.” —Kirkus Reviews

“The anthology cements Silverblatt’s legacy as a literary steward who’s welcoming and respectful of his listener’s intelligence.” – Vulture

“Bookworm reminds me that reading centers my life, and Michael Silverblatt’s words remind me that great books (and great conversations) are never finished, even when one turns the final page.” – Chris Via, Los Angeles Review of Books

 

**

 

Editor’s Note
by Alan Felsenthal

With over three decades of KCRW’s Bookworm, how to even begin narrowing down a selection for print? As this book’s organizing principle, Michael and I decided to let the voices of the past guide us in our choices—the glorious voices of the dead. We began with our sense of the burden of the past, voices that will never be heard again and that will only be dim intuitions of evidence of what it was like to live in an age defined by its writers.

These conversations present an interviewer who’s come fresh from an immersion in the writer’s work with no one’s point of view but his own. There’s no school of thought or theory that these interviews represent. Instead, they encompass the voice of someone who loves to read struggling mightily to keep up with the new work of authors who are constantly emerging, coming to be loved, and who deserve the attention of an informed interviewer.

Michael does it without maps, without predetermined questions. He lets the conversation go where it chooses to go, or wants to go, or needs to go, until it becomes part of the ebb and flow of possibility between two human beings who are generating respect for and interest in one another. He does not regard himself as a literary critic, but rather as a reader, whose charge is to put into words the qualities he loves in what he’s read.

Bookworm practices the guest-host relationship as the ancients did— where hospitality was the sacred right of any guest. The show doesn’t exist to humiliate or insult writers. It doesn’t say that these are the only writers, or even the best writers. These are the writers with whom Michael held a deep kinship and understanding. In many cases, these writers became his close friends beyond the show, and Michael has said that they taught him not only how to read their work but how to live.

Most of these conversations were conducted face-to-face in the studios of KCRW in Santa Monica, California. A few took place over the phone or at the home of the author. The conversation with John Berger is the only one that was not aired on KCRW; it was filmed, thanks to the Lannan Foundation, at Berger’s home in France, and can be viewed online (lannan.org).

You can listen to these conversations through KCRW’s extensive Bookworm archive (kcrw.com). We’ve tried to stay as close to the audio as possible with these transcripts, and we’ve noted things that would be obvious to the listener but not the reader.

The history of Bookworm is too long and varied to be represented in one volume. May this selection lead you to listen to more shows and to seek out the books that will change your life.

 

**

 

Michael Silverblatt, host of KCRW’s Bookworm, the nation’s premier literary radio program, has been bringing writers and readers together in close company for more than three decades. Gathered together for the first time in print, these conversations span years, revealing not only the quality and character of the writers, but also the special relationship that Silverblatt developed with them during their lifetimes.

Bookworm: Conversations with Michael Silverblatt gathers interviews with some of the most influential luminaries of our time:

 

John Ashbery
Bookworm show link: https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/bookworm/john-ashbery-2

 

John Berger

 

Octavia Butler
Bookworm show link: https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/bookworm/octavia-butler-1

 

Joan Didion
Bookworm show link: https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/bookworm/joan-didion-1

 

Carlos Fuentes
Bookworm show link: https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/bookworm/carlos-fuentes-3/carlos-fuentes

 

William H. Gass
Bookworm show link: https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/bookworm/william-h-gass-the-tunnel

Toni Morrison
Bookworm show link: https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/bookworm/toni-morrison-beloved

 

Grace Paley

 

W.G. Sebald

 

Stephen Sondheim
Bookworm show link: https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/bookworm/stephen-sondheim-finishing-the-hat/stephen-sondheim-finishing-the-hat

 

Susan Sontag
Bookworm show link: https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/bookworm/susan-sontag-2

 

David Foster Wallace
Bookworm show link: https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/bookworm/david-foster-wallace-infinite-jest

 

**

 

INTERVIEW WITH W.G. Sebald
2001: Austerlitz

MS: I’m honored to have as my guest W. G. Sebald, the author of some of the most important prose writing of the century, including the novels Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and now Austerlitz. The prose has the breaths and cadences of poetry, and I wanted to begin by asking, were you influenced by German poetry?

WGS: No, not at all by German poetry. The influence came, if from anywhere, from nineteenth-century German prose writing, which also has prosodic rhythms that are very pronounced, where prose is more important than, say, social background or plot in any manifest sense. And this nineteenth-century German prose writing even at the time was very provincial. It never was received outside Germany to any extent worth mentioning. But it’s always been very close to me, not least because the writers all hailed from the periphery of the German-speaking lands, where I also come from. Adalbert Stifter in Austria. Gottfried Keller in Switzerland. They are both absolutely wonderful writers who achieved a very, very high intensity in their prose. One can see for them it’s never a question of getting to the next phase of the plot, but that they devote a great deal of care and attention to each individual page, very much the way a poet has to do. What they all have in common is this precedence of the carefully composed page of prose over the mechanisms of the novel that dominated fiction writing elsewhere, in France and in England, notably, at the time.

MS: When I started reading The Emigrants, I was thrilled to encounter a kind of sentence that I had thought people had stopped being able to write, and I felt great relief at its gravity, its melancholy, but also its playfulness, its generosity. How did you find the way to reinvent such a sentence?

WGS: It’s not of this time. There are hypotactic syntax forms in these sentences that have been abandoned by practically all the writers now for reasons of convenience. Also because simply they are no longer accustomed to it. But if you dip into any form of eighteenth- or nineteenth-century discursive prose—the English essayists, for instance—these forms exist in previous ages of literature, and they simply have fallen into disrepair.

MS: The wandering that the prose does, both syntactically and in terms of subjects, reminds me a bit of my favorite of the English essayists, De Quincey: the need, in a sense, to almost sleepwalk, somnambulate from one center of attention to another, and a feeling in the reader that one has hallucinated the connection between the parts. This I think is among the loveliest qualities, especially in the new book, Austerlitz.

WGS: Well, certainly, moving from one subject, from one theme, from one concern to another always requires some kind of sleight of hand.

MS: I was struck in the opening of Austerlitz by the way in which the narrator moves from a zoo, from the—what is it called?

WGS: The Nocturama.

MS: The Nocturama. It’s a structure for animals that are awake only at night. And before long the train station to which he returns becomes the double for the zoo. The eyes of certain thinkers become the doubles for the intense eyes of the nocturnal animals. Then the train station recalls a fortress, and there’s a gradual opening out, an unfolding of structures and interpositions. The speaker might well be the person spoken to, by virtue of this logic. And it extends with, it seems to me, an invisible referent—as we go from the zoo to the train station, from the train station to the fortress, from the fortress to the jail to the insane asylum, the missing term is the concentration camp.

WGS: Yes.

MS: And always circling is this silent presence being left out but always gestured toward. Is that correct?

WGS: Yes. I mean, your description corresponds very much to my intentions. I’ve always felt that it was necessary above all to write about the history of persecution, of vilification of minorities, the attempt, well-nigh achieved, to eradicate a whole people. And I was, in pursuing these ideas, at the same time conscious that it’s practically impossible to do this; to write about concentration camps in my view is practically impossible. So you need to find ways of convincing the reader that this is something on your mind, but that you do not necessarily roll it out, you know, on every other page. The reader needs to be prompted that the narrator has a conscience—that he is and has been perhaps for a long time engaged with these questions. And this is why the main scenes of horror are never directly addressed. I think it is sufficient to remind people because we’ve all seen images, but these images militate against our capacity for discursive thinking, for reflecting upon these things. And also paralyze, as it were, our moral capacity. So the only way in which one can approach these things, in my view, is obliquely, tangentially, by reference rather than by direct confrontation.

MS: It seems to me, though, that, in addition, it is the invisible subject as one reads the book and one watches moths dying or many of the images. It’s almost as if this has become a poem of the invisible subject, all of whose images refer back to it, a metaphor that has no statement of its ground, only of its vehicle, as they used to say.

WGS: Yes, precisely. You know, there is in Virginia Woolf this—probably known better to you than to me—wonderful example of her description of a moth coming to its end on a windowpane somewhere in Sussex. This is a passage of some two pages only, I think, and it’s written somewhere, chronologically speaking, between the battlefields of the Somme and the concentration camps erected by my compatriots. There’s no reference made to the battlefields of the Somme in this passage, but one knows, as a reader of Virginia Woolf, that she was greatly perturbed by the First World War, by its aftermath, by the damage it did to people’s souls, the souls of those who got away, and naturally of those who perished. So I think that a subject which, at first glance, seems quite far removed from the undeclared concern of a book can encapsulate that concern.

MS: I notice in the work, in particular in The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz, the tradition of the walker. I’m thinking of Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker, and thinking, too, that it was once beautifully common for a prose writer to write what he sees on his walk. In fact, the naturalist Louis Agassiz said that Thoreau used to bring things to him in the laboratory at Harvard and that the things Thoreau picked up by accident were never less than unique. It was necessary for a writer to develop an eye. And it seems to my ear that the rhythms here have to do a great deal with the writing of entomologists and naturalists.

WGS: Yes, the study of nature in all its forms. The walker’s approach to viewing nature is a phenomenological one, and the scientist’s approach is a much more incisive one, but they all belong together. And in my view, even today it is true that scientists very frequently write better than novelists. So I tend to read scientists by preference almost, and I’ve always found them a great source of inspiration. It doesn’t matter particularly whether they are eighteenth-century scientists—Humboldt—or someone contemporary like Rupert Sheldrake. These are all very close to me and people without whom I couldn’t pursue my work.

MS: It seems that in Austerlitz, even more so than in the other books, there is a ghostly prose. Dust-laden, mist-laden, penetrated by odd and misdirecting lights, as if the attempt here is really to become lost in a fog.

WGS: Yes, well, these kinds of natural phenomena like fog, like mist, which render the environment and one’s ability to see it almost impossible, have always interested me greatly. One of the great strokes of genius in standard nineteenth-century fiction, I always thought, was the fog in Bleak House. This ability to make of one natural phenomenon a thread that runs through a whole text and then kind of upholds this extended metaphor is something that I find very, very attractive in a writer.

MS: It seems to me that this book is truly the first to pay extended stylistic respects to the writer who, it’s been said, has been your mentor and model, Thomas Bernhard. I wondered, was it after three books that one felt comfortable in creating a work that could be compared to the writing of a master and a mentor?

WGS: Yes, I was always, as it were, tempted to declare openly from quite early on my great debt of gratitude to Thomas Bernhard. But I was also conscious of the fact that one oughtn’t do that too openly, because then immediately one gets put in a drawer which says Thomas Bernhard, a follower of Thomas Bernhard, et cetera, and these labels never go away. Once one has them, they stay with one. But nevertheless, it was necessary for me eventually to acknowledge his constant presence, as it were, by my side. What Thomas Bernhard did to postwar fiction writing in the German language was to bring to it a new radicality which didn’t exist before, which wasn’t compromised in any sense. Much of German prose fiction writing, of the ’50s certainly, but of the ’60s and ’70s also, is severely compromised, morally compromised, and because of that, aesthetically frequently insufficient. And Thomas Bernhard was in quite a different league because he occupied a position which was absolute. Which had to do with the fact that he was mortally ill since late adolescence and knew that any day the knock could come at the door. And so he took the liberty which other writers shied away from taking. And what he achieved, I think, was also to move away from the standard pattern of the standard novel. He only tells you in his books what he heard from others. So he invented, as it were, a kind of periscopic form of narrative. You’re always sure that what he tells you is related at one remove, at two removes, at two or three. That appealed to me very much, because this notion of the omniscient narrator who pushes around the flats on the stage of the novel—you know, cranks things up on page three and moves them along on page four, and one sees him constantly working behind the scenes—is something that I think one can’t do very easily any longer. So Bernhard, single-handedly, I think, invented a new form of narrating which appealed to me from the start.

MS: It’s not only a new form of narrating, it’s a new form of making things stop in space. Because the Bernhard works are often composed in one long paragraph, sometimes in one long sentence, if I’m not mistaken. The effect is of a dream, of being spoken to in a dream, and your attention can’t help but flicker in and out. You can move back a page or two and discover very careful links of the chain. But the intensity has been so nonstop that it’s almost as if it breaks the mind’s attempt to hold it in a chain.

WGS: Yes, it is that. Bernhard’s mode of telling a tale is related to all manner of things, not least the theatrical monologue. In the early book that bears the English title Gargoyles and in German is called Die Verstörung, the whole of the second part is the monologue of the Prince of Salla, and it would make a wonderful piece on the stage. So it has the intensity, the presence that one can experience in the theater. He brings that to fiction.

MS: I’ve been very amused because critics of your work in America seem to be bewildered by its tone, and I don’t, in fact, find its tone bewildering. I think they are unfamiliar with it because of its tenderness, a tenderness brought to bear on subjects that have usually compelled indignation, scorn, and, certainly in Beckett and in Bernhard, a huge and glittering kind of contempt and scorn. Here it really has the quality of—am I wrong here?—of infinite care taken in listening to speakers who are not being reviled in the slightest.

WGS: Yes. I don’t know where it comes from, but I do like to listen to people who have been sidelined for one reason or another. Because in my experience, once they begin to talk, they have things to tell you that you won’t be able to get from anywhere else. And I felt that need of being able to listen to people telling me things from very early on, not least, I think, because I grew up in postwar Germany where there was—I say this quite often—something like a conspiracy of silence (i.e., your parents never told you anything about their experiences because there was, at the very least, a great deal of shame attached to those experiences). So one kept them under lock and seal. And I, for one, doubt that my mother and father, even amongst themselves, ever broached any of these subjects. There wasn’t a written or spoken agreement about these things. It was a tacit agreement. It was something that was never touched on. So I’ve always—I’ve grown up feeling that there is some sort of emptiness somewhere that needs to be filled by accounts from witnesses one can trust. And once I started—I would never have encountered these witnesses if I hadn’t left my native country at the age of twenty, because the people who could tell you the truth, or something at least approximating the truth, did not exist in that country any longer. But one could find them in Manchester and in Leeds or in North London or in Paris, in various places, Belgium, and so on.

MS: I find it almost spooky how frequently these critics—I guess expecting the austerities and harshnesses of certain postwar prose—don’t see that this is characterized by tenderness, bewilderment, horror, infinite pity, and a kind of almost willed self-mortification. That is, I am willing to hear and place great acts of attention on all things with the chance and hope that revelation will occur.

WGS: Well, I suppose if there is such a thing as a revelation, if there can be a moment in a text which is surrounded by something like claritas, veritas, and other facets that qualify epiphanies, then it can be achieved only by actually going to certain places, by looking, by expending great amounts of time in actually exposing oneself to places that no one else goes to. These can be backyards in cities; they can be places like that fortress of Breendonk in Austerlitz. I had read about Breendonk before, in connection with Jean Améry. But the difference is staggering, you know—whether you’ve just read about it or whether you actually go and spend several days in and around there to see what these things are actually like.

MS: It was once explained to me that there was in German prose something called das Glück im Winkel, “happiness in a corner.” I think that your radical contribution to prose is to bring the sensibility of tininess, miniaturization, to the enormity of the post–concentration camp world. So that a completely or newly forgotten prose tone is being brought into the postmodern century, and the extraordinary echo, the almost immediate abyss that opens between the prose and the subject, is what results. Automatically, ghosts, echoes, trance states—it’s almost as if you are allowing the world to howl into the seashell of this prose style.

WGS: Well, I think [Walter] Benjamin at one point says that there is no point in exaggerating that which is already horrific. And from that, by extrapolation, one could conclude that perhaps in order to get the full measure of the horrific, one needs to remind the reader of beatific moments in life, because if you existed solely with your imagination in le monde concentrationnaire, then you would somehow not be able to sense it. And so it requires that contrast. The old-fashionedness of the diction or of the narrative tone is therefore nothing to do with nostalgia for a better age that’s gone past but is simply something that, as it were, heightens the awareness of that which we have managed to engineer in this century.

 

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MICHAEL SILVERBLATT

A New York City native, Michael Silverblatt graduated from the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he came under the influence of such cutting-edge author-teachers as Donald Barthelme and John Barth. He moved to Los Angeles in the 1970s, working in motion-picture public relations and script development—until a chance encounter at a dinner party and a conversation about Russian literature with Ruth Seymour, the general manager of KCRW, led to the idea of a radio show.

KCRW’s Bookworm, a nationally syndicated radio program showcasing writers of fiction and poetry, debuted in 1989. Describing his interviews as “conversations,” Silverblatt has hosted hundreds of our most celebrated writers. As the guiding spirit of this weekly show, Silverblatt has reinvented the art of literary conversation, introducing listeners to new and emerging authors along with writers of international renown. In 2018, Michael Silverblatt was the inaugural recipient of A Public Space’s Deborah Pease Prize, awarded to a figure who has advanced the art of literature.

Michael Silverblatt interviews
https://iowareview.org/blog/lowly-humble-bookworm-conversation-michael-silverblatt

Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2Xr6GZj-KM

New York Review of Books profile: https://www.nybooks.com/online/2023/05/06/the-oracle-of-public-radio/

 

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BOOKWORM THEME SONG BY SPARKS

 

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KCRW Bookworm Radio Show Archive
https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/bookworm

 

A few interviews that might be of particular interest to DC’s readers:

Kathy Acker
https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/bookworm/kathy-acker

 

Bret Easton Ellis
https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/bookworm/bret-easton-ellis-1

 

Joy Williams
https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/bookworm/joy-williams-the-quick-and-the-dead

 

Tosh Berman
https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/bookworm/tosh-berman-tosh-growing-up-in-wallace-bermans-world

 

Derek McCormack and Martha Kinney (Little House on the Bowery showcase)
https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/bookworm/martha-kinney-derek-mccormack-and-dennis-cooper/martha-kinney-derek-mccormack-and-dennis-cooper-1

 

Dennis Cooper
https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/bookworm/dennis-cooper-1

 

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BUY A COPY OF BOOKWORM:
https://www.amazon.com/Bookworm-Conversations-Michael-Silverblatt/dp/1737277581

 

 

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p.s. Hey. This weekend the blog has the huge pleasure of hosting a post put together by novelist Jeff Jackson in cahoots with Song Cave press that draws attention to the birth of a new book of select interviews from Michael Silverblatt’s immense and important NPR radio program Bookworm. Silverblatt is the English speaking world’s greatest reader and thinker/interviewer when it comes to contemporary literature, and this book has been very long awaited. The post includes two exclusive-to-DC’s bonuses: Silverblatt’s interview with the late, incredible WG Sebald and the book’s Introduction by Alan Felsenthal. An important event for lucky us. Thank you so very much, Jeff and the Song Cave people. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Antiques Roadshow really hooks you, or me, at least. It triggers multiple fetishes at once. And its pleasure isn’t a guilty one, I can’t imagine. Okay, so I’m a chef, it’s official, ha ha. Yeah, those coin machines are awesome, and I don’t understand why they aren’t everywhere. You bought the tree! Good for you! I hope it has place of prominence. My toes hurt, but, you know, you can’t really do anything about smashed up toes, so I’m just waiting on the human’s body magical healing trick to complete its process. It’s really hard to pick one wanted snowglobe. I’ve always wanted a Walter Martin & Paloma Munoz globe. That hideous one at the bottom with the reindeer foetus in it is pretty tempting. And I sort of like empty Margiela one. The castle/bats one is a really good pick too. Love lowering the temperature outside — well, and inside too — by at least 15 degrees, G. ** T. J., Hi! Hooray for alcohol in that particular instance. It’s pretty rare that a writer reads their work in a manner that satisfies the sound their writing makes in one’s head when reading them, for sure. Thanks about the film. Excited for you to see it! What’s up? ** Misanthrope, Whew, sounds like she’ll right as rain again in no time. The paucity of snow in snow globes is a huge and often fatal problem within the genre, absolutely. ** alcyon, Hi, alcyon! Really great to meet you! Thank you for coming inside. You live in Paris! Like me. Crosstown greetings. I’m in love with Paris, that’s for sure. Paris is pretty great for bookstores, even if you’re an English speaker. NYC might better, I guess, though. My favorite Paris bookstores are After8 in the 10th arr. — it’s a godsend — and maybe Red Wheelbarrow, which is across from Luxembourg Gardens. Do you know them? Thank you a lot for reading my books. Are you a writer? Can you say more about you and what you do/like/etc.? Hm, I might have to think a bit about my favorite Paris things. The 10th is my favorite arrondissement. I used to live there, and I really miss it. Le Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature is definitely one my very favorite things in Paris. Hm, let me think a little more. The heat today is messing with my memory. Yes, where I live influences my writing, I think. I’ve mostly set my books in Los Angeles because I grew up there and know it so well. And my novel ‘The Marbled Swarm’ is set in Paris and is kind of my personal monument to Paris, I guess. I don’t really think too much about where my novels are set though. I think the setting just kind of comes automatically or something. Anyway, it’s great to meet you. I hope we can talk more. Maybe we should meet and have a coffee or something sometime, if you want. ** Steve Erickson, Yes, incredibly sad about Bill. I hope David is as okay as possible. I need to keep my mind on the film as far as looking for funds goes, but, as Zac is away at the moment, we can’t actually work on it, so it is kind of a short break. Yes, please send a link to the South African music podcast when it’s up. Interesting. I’ve been wanting to get the Beverly Glenn-Copeland album. Will do. Thanks! ** _Black_Acrylic, I think Margiela’s globe wins the fashion globe prize. Yum food there, and that’s a helluva nice t-shirt. Have a sweet weekend, Ben. ** Kyler, Hi, Kyler. Good to see you! Oh, I think I missed your email somehow. I’m been very otherwise preoccupied lately. Okay, I’ll send you my address via some method. Yes, really looking forward to your new book, of course! Take care, sir. ** A, Dolan’s earliest films are the most tolerable. Okay, needing money is a relative thing, I guess, yeah. Troy Weaver is a great guy and a wonderful writer, so, cool. It’s too hot today for the day to be enjoyed, but I’ll try to sneak something out of it. Hope your Saturday is more conducive. ** Kettering, Hi, and thank you for the kindness to David. ** Mark, Hey. Oh, well, presumably I could get some UCLA higher up to let me pore over their Barton collection next time I’m in SoCal, worst comes to worst. I know who Steven Reigns is. I don’t know if I’ve actually read his work though. Seems cool. What a nice thing that brunch sounds to be. Good on him. How was it? Thanks for the links. I’ve never used Apple Books, weirdly, but now I have the best reason to. I’ll go grab it and read ASAP. Excited to get to know your work. If you mean the riots, yeah, they’re pretty much over now. My main weekend plan is to try to survive the heat which has suddenly pounced on Paris. There are some friends I’d love to see. I have his biweekly Zoom ‘book club’ that I do with some US writer friends that’s tonight. One of them the poet Amy Gerstler who I believe blurbed Steven Reigns’s last book. We read some texts and watch a film and talk about them. Your weekend sounds pretty set to go. ** Bill, Have you ever actually scratched your head in confusion? I don’t think I have. I assume people must do that since the phrase is so ingrained in the lexicon. Haven’t heard the new Swans, no. I have to say I’m not so wildly in love with the albums of their recent reincarnation phase. ** chas, Hi. Twenty years … I doubt Paris has changed much at all. It’s very gradual in its evolution. There are cafes galore, and artists sitting in them making art and talking about art with other artists is still a commonality. I sometimes feel like I spend half my time here sitting in cafes jawing with my friends. Lots of coffee and still a fair amount of cigarettes, although vaping is reinventing the smoking set here too. I hope I don’t give off territorial vibes. I try not to. I think I just have a very non-French set of facial features. Sadly. I hope your cold is already bored of being in your body and on its way out. Possibility of a cool weekend for you even so? ** Cody Goodnight, Hi, Cody. I’m ok but it’s hot outside so I can’t be fully ok. My foot’ll be better by Monday, that’s my hope or even demand. Thank you. It’s supposed to rain and thunder and so on = cool things down later today, but, looking at the sky, that’s hard to believe. I can’t think of a bad Sabbath song either. I just looked through Joel Schumacher’s IMDb in search of anything by him that isn’t bad, and I would say the only exception is ‘The Lost Boys’, which was kind of fun. ‘Love is the Devil’ is good, yeah. I have this biweekly Zoom meet-up I do with some US writer friends where we watch a film and read some texts and talk about them, and it’s tonight. The assigned movie, which I’ll be watching today, is John Schlesinger’s ‘The Day of the Locust’, which I remember loving back in the day, and I’m curious to see how it holds up. Stay cool this weekend. ** Nasir, Good for you on the water storing. It’s scorching here, so I need to hoard some water in the fridge too. Nice snow globe you found, yeah. Good snow globes are sadly a rare thing. My day was good. I saw a really great longtime visiting friend, and we looked at mediocre art and ate amazing falafel. Congrats on getting the new idea. Daunting is the best! I won’t even starting writing something unless it’s daunting. Cool. Did you work on it this weekend? I’ll listen to ‘Ice Of Boston’ today. Strange, likeable title. No rambling on your end whatsoever. Hope I wasn’t too unconcise on mine. Love to you too, pal. ** Darbznoodlez , Big plans, cool. I got hijacked and kidnapped for an afternoon by a hitchhiker when I was in my teens, so I don’t do that on either side. I remember reading about that poor girl in the 70s. Jesus. Look, weird thing to say, but fuck what your mother thinks. As you can probably imagine, writing the things I write about made me not exactly supportable by my parents, and I just decided I didn’t care what they thought when I was a teen, and putting them at a safe long distance emotionally was maybe the best decision I ever made. Easier said than done and all of that, I know. But, you know, your mom is obviously and completely wrong. Don’t keep things inside you and hurt yourself, no matter what you do. Or so say I. I vow to make your cat a total, cliched Frenchie and send her back in a box like a throne if I have the opportunity. I hope your weekend does something very nice for you. Love from inside the first air-conditioned building I can find. ** Right. Have a fine weekend with the amazing Michael Silverblatt and his writer pals. See you on Monday.