Illustration by Art Spiegelman
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“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
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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
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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.
Now available in North America 
*
Will I recover ever? Six of one half adozen of the other. Can’t see a fowaed path.Congrats Silverblatt.
With Bill gone I’m now only half here. Or maybe even a quarter.
Going through moments when someone passes away is such a difficult trip. And for me, with regard to my dad’s death decades ago and now my mom/uncle last year, it is like a feeling that keeps expanding. Much of it has to do with change and how one adapts to things around you changing that one has no control over – it’s a very delicate and often disturbing way of being in the world. But there are the enjoyments in life as well. Often tiny things bring much happiness. It’s really a map that has not been fully explored yet. The saying “One day at a time” is such a cliche, almost meaningless, but often cliches are true. Love, Tosh
Mr. Ehrenstein–
You must be in so much pain right now-so sad and I’m so sorry for what you’re going through. May I ask, sir, was Bill ill, or did this happen as a complete shock? We don’t know each other, but I’m sending my love your way. Please take care of yourself as best as the circumstance allows (do you have people out there? family or friends to turn to?) Be well -k.
I’m sorry for your loss, and your hard times in general.
Xxx
Omg, David, I’m so sorry.
Jeff, Dennis, and The Cave Song, thanks for Michael’s book. I’ve read it, and I will write about it for my Substack blog eventually, but I’m thrilled to be part of the ‘gang’ here – so thank you, Dennis!
A star-studded cast for the new book. Wish it has Joy Williams and Tosh’s interview though. Will definitely check out the book and the audio archives.
It’s been even foggier than usual here, for July. I have a lot of reading to do anyway.
Bill
>Wish it has Joy Williams and Tosh’s interview though.
And your interview, of course!
What’s up with me…I’m still working on a script for an audio project and figuring out a better day job than toll road work. I’ve been goofing around with the Midjourney AI app on discord and that’s been a good way to get me started writing. I’ve been posting them on my Instagram but unlike other people who are posting AI art on their socials I post screenshots of the text prompts FIRST featuring what amounts to flash fiction or weird Tweets with sorta stage directions that ask AI to understand oscure references. Followed by slides of the outcomes which are never ARE successful but I’m interested in the disparity between the prompts. People seem to think the posts are funny. I also pez dispensers out cult actors like Helmut Berger and Mary Woronov with the AI. Trying to see all the Aki Kaurismaki and Tsai Ming-Liang films I haven’t seen yet. Getting into Michael Roemer. Speaking of flash fiction, do you like Diane Williams’ work? I picked up a book but I haven’t started it yet.
*also made cult actor themed pez dispensers of Helmet Berger and Mary Woronov. Type to fast
*the disparity between the prompts and the outcomes.
Fuckin hell, Tj
ha ha– it’s okay its readable— pez dispensers-art– amazing! -k.
Hi. A few years back I listened to your Silverblatt episodes on a binge and had a blast. Did you guys do one after every book release almost. You have good connection. I will have to get that book. The Day of the Locust is one of my favourite films. I hope you leave comments here because I want to know your thoughts on it. Do you think is cool idea to read The Marbled Swarm in Paris? Speaking of The Marbled Swarm I got one Pierre Clementi film called The Designated Victim. I always want to see the films he stars because he inspires me and makes me want to be an actor myself. I submit three poems and they rejected them but I will submit them somewhere else now. In other news I took walk around the neighbourhood today and showed my drawings and some people followed my Instagram. Baby steps xx
Silverblatt is awesome. Bookworm is a real LA treasure. I’ve know Steven for about ten years or so. We’ve read in reading together. He and I met working on a show here in LA called Planet Queer https://www.planetqueer.org/ Do let us know if you are in LA. Have you ever been to the Clark Library? It’s part of UCLA. https://clarklibrary.ucla.edu/ This a great book called Twilight Man about William Andrews Clark https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/55197182 One of its features is the largest collection of Oscar Wilde manuscripts in the world. José and I watched the Todd Verow’s Frisk. Hmmm… not a great movie. Parker Posey as one of the German brothers is hysterical. It has a real soft-core porn vibe, both in violence and sex terms. It’s a curious choice to adapt into a film. I’m not sure how you’d translate Dennis’ inner life filmically. For me, the novel is at least partly about the experience of the reader reading it and measuring their relationship to the narrator. Also, the main visual devices of the novel, the photographs, are oddly absent. Fear not, we found a link to pirate stream of the film. My chapbook is kind of summative, collecting works from the last couple decades. I’m working on a new collection now. I’ll hopefully have it done before the end of the year. Stay cool man!
Mr. Dennis– Four years of dealing w/this not-very-cool guy? You’re a Rock. But, honestly, that doesn’t sound… mmm… I mean, I picture you being very, very open and patient until, that is, someone screws with your work. Ah well; pink vibes, sir– pink vibes over the Atlantic to you. Can you feel them?
Frankly, my half-finished pile of books might be half-finished for a reason– I’m a ruthless reader. As in Geiger-counter roaming Chernobyl ruthless. Nice person (it’s been told), brutal reader (no one knows). I feel it, the moment a work goes weak, the moment it ceases to surge and hum, and I’m left like a car plowing onto the beach– schluuummmmpppfff! This usually happens pretty early in and I’ve learned to push on if I can, tap into my generous self and give it a chance to reveal something beyond the droll narrative impulse (wondering what the hell just happened?—well—but I know what happened; I can see it there in the type-face like it’s turned to avocado cream).
As artists, we can get comfortable too quickly. We concede to laziness or humanity, or maybe we’re more exhausted than we knew, more depleted as human beings before we even get down to it. I worry that I have to be a substantial person to make the kind of work I want to make. I don’t ‘read’ that way in the world—I’m like a ghost. But I’m not what I seem to be, not quite so small, so… and I can’t trust the shit that was beaten into my own head so I step out of myself and just keep working as though I’m only eyes, hands, skin…
As for what we do as artists and the ways we fail: maybe it’s just that damnable knee-jerk drive to be seen or loved or to tell yet another story as if every story hasn’t been told and told to death– If we were more honest, like gun-to-the-head or ‘you’ve got cancer’ honest, more demanding and less narcissistic or cheap it might take longer to finish a work and probably no one would ever know we existed but maybe then we’d get to the other side, get something out and real, the next iteration, do you maybe know what I mean?
(we say we’re ‘trying our hardest’– we almost never really are– I swear, savagery is the only sane response.)
Oh, I’m just being a jerk. I would never, ever speak so harshly to an actual person and honestly when I know the person I’m utterly filled with excitement about the good stuff going on in their work—I’m ridiculously engaged and it’s a little like being in love or something overwhelming like that. I’m just ridiculous.
I do hold my own stuff to the harsher standard, though (yesterday I threw out the entirety of last year’s writing– no regrets). What’s the point in putting things out if it’s only to make noise? Like we really need more noise? I’d rather learn from it: admire what’s worthy, move on from what’s wonky, don’t take any of it personally, and push at that door like the house is on fire.
(because it is)
Hmmm… Sorry, Mr. Dennis. idk why I’m writing this– Honestly, I don’t know why I write to you at all because it’s like writing to another species of being—ha ha! Be well, sir, be well– k.
p.s. I think I write to you because I can ask the question ‘do you maybe know what I mean?’…
Sorry, Mr. D, for the above– I really did just ‘throw out’ the entirety of last year’s writing the day before. Glad I did, but it made me a bit intense. Sorry!
A day of Pocky, sushi, and bicycle museum touring w/my son eased my mind greatly- ha ha!
Please take care of your toes (ice early? heat now? elevation for certain). I send a kind of love, even though we don’t know each other- Kettering
Hey D! I’ve been so looking forward to this book, he seriously is the best reader out there! You asked how I’ve been the last time I popped on and I’ve been remiss in answering. I’m pretty damn good! Working on issue three of my zine, a new chapbook in the works, I organized a reading thing coming up which now I’m nervous that too many people will show up to a pretty small pub! Guess that’s good hype for all of us reading. I had the most fabulous vacay for my 50th up in a tiny town at the top of a long ass lake in WA that you can only get to by boat. It was so nice no wifi, cell, tv…. just books and nature.
Oh yeah I forgot to mention on your Richard Meltzer day that I once had a great interaction with him, my old band was covering Burning For You so we had him clarify some lyrics (pre internet!) he asked our band name and then gave us a whole history of how Lawns started with the Scottish aristocracy etc. In small worldness my boss at the library and her boyfriend do what they can to take care of him these days.
Finally I may send you a tiny 5 question interview for my zine via email…if that’s ok…
-L
Hi Dennis.
How are you? I’m ok. Very interesting post today. I am looking forward to listening to the interviews you have listed. So many great artists! Good news about your foot, but I’m sorry about the weather. Lost Boys looks fun. I’m a big vampire fan, so I’m shocked I haven’t seen it. Young Kiefer Sutherland is a beaut there. Oooh the zoom meetings sound fun! I’ve heard great things about Day of the Locust. Hope you enjoy it! Well my screening of Baby Jane last night was wonderful. I adored the movie. I really love films featuring families going through breakdowns in a large home. Going to show Cries & Whispers on Sunday. Listened to Sabbath’s Master of Reality, Siouxsie and the Banshees’ The Scream and Coil’s Musick to Play in the Daek. Have a great day or night!
@ David, unlimited commiserations to you, I really hope you can stay strong.
Silverblatt is a legendary figure and I will be spending my Sunday diving into some of these interviews.
Last night saw The Cleaning Lady, a truly essential psycho-horror that I discovered via William Bennett’s blog. Would recommend in the strongest possible terms!
Hi!!
What an incredibly exciting book! Thank you so much for the post – and the additional interviews!
Excellent snow globe choices too! Ges Gesch’s works are a… mood too, haha, I must add.
How was your weekend? We had a friend stay with us, and even though social occasions tend to exhaust me a lot, especially days-long ones, I still feel inspired and grateful right now. We had a good time – great conversations, a visit to a nearby, exclusively queer bookstore… It was really lovely.
Love gently coating your banged-up toes with his healing saliva, Od.
Dennis, Wow, this looks awesome. Thanks for this.
Yes, I think she’s out of the woods. She’s a terrible patient and at first wouldn’t do anything they told her to do. But Kayla and I got on her and now she’s starting to heal/mend. I mean, she is 80 and stuck in her ways, so…hahahaha. But she’s gonna be all right.
Me, I’m just watching Wimbledon and enjoying that and doing my other regular stuff. Bleh. But could be worse. 😀
Dennis! Hi. Thankfully my sniffles were just a flash in the pan, so yes, a cool weekend has been had!
On Saturday the warm weather gave way to thunderstorms here. I stood by the back door with my eyes closed, listening to the rain and those lovely deep rumbles for a while. The storm passed by directly overhead, and my socks got splashed. Today I pottered around doing housey things, then made some headway on a short story I’m working on. It’s partly inspired by all the anime I’ve been watching lately – so it’s silly, ridiculous, and a lot of fun to play around with.
I have a question for you this time! Has a friend ever painted, collaged, sculpted or otherwise crafted a portrait of you, and if so, how did you feel about it? Did you like it?
I’m off to give the Kathy Acker interview a listen, so I’ll leave you with an encouraging “let’s both do our best today, OK?” and a friendly smile.
D-Man: It’s very nice to have this and very nice to know I can get the book. I will. I’ve seen Michael S maybe twice since 1975, when we were both at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, me in Writing, him in Literature, and we crossed the boundary between … well, kind of the living and the dead. Just as the Gallery at the Corcoran didn’t much care for living artists, the JHU lit program saw writers as suspect, and really as a challenge. Like, “There are people who don’t acknowledge that we understand writing better than they do?’ Of course, Michael has give a lifetime to homage and respect to living writers. I remember hearing some of these interviews as quite funny when the subject had not yet caught on that Michael was going to be encouraging and kind when they expected a challenge.
But reading’s gonna come later. I’m touristing around London for a couple days, then Scotland. (Do we know anyone in Edinburgh? I don’t think so.) Yesterday was Diarmuid’s wedding to George (cis-woman George if you haven’t met) and it was amazing and colossal. Brilliant family and friends. It was a hippie-style wedding in a circle in a glade; non-denominational pagan, I think. The happy couple got eternal circle tattoos in lieu of exchanging rings. The stunning, unexpected thing for me was Diarmuid’s vows beginning “As my friend the poet Bernard Welt wrote . . ” Golly,. I’m still recovering from the intensity and warmth of being in my friend’s wedding vows. We didn’t throw rice, by the way, but I threw some wildflower blossoms for you.
We are just seeing some stuff in London we haven’t seen (Art’s never walked around the Writer’s Corner at Westminster Abbey) or just want to see again (Tate Britain). We will see a musical based on Brokeback Mountain. I didn’t like the movie (love the story) and i’m sure the musical is worse, but I want to see Lucas Hedges make out with Mike Faist; that has to be worth 35GBP.
I am calling your name from London to Paris, so if you can’t hear it, it’s just one more consequence of stupid Brexit. XO
I’d hoped I could order Silverblatt’s book on my Kindle, but Amazon only carries it as a paperback. The next time I go to Codex or McNally Jackson, I’ll look for it, but I’ve noticed that few indie press releases are available electronically. Have you heard anything about future volumes of a Bookworm series, given the number of great writers he interviewed at length?
Really good weekend movie-wise: I watched Bertrand Bonello’s COMA (someone please release this to American theaters!), John Akomfrah’s HANDSWORTH SONGS (very a propos to recent events in France) and Jean Eustache’s final 3 shorts.
The growing conservatism of American movie theaters and distributors is glaring. It was heading this way before the pandemic, but it’s impossible to miss now, when even arthouses are slowing down to make room for July’s blockbusters. Lincoln Center is opening only three new films for week+ runs in the entire remainder of the summer. (At least they’re running a festival of new Asian films and showing restorations of two Kira Muratova films.) The increased reluctance to release subtitled films is also palpable. Even though your new film is in English and was made in the US, do you fear having an even harder time making it to American theaters than your first two films did? It seems like NYC arthouses are heading towards screenings of older films that already have an audience rather than taking a chance on showing new ones for at least a week.
Simultaneously writing reviews of the new Beverly Glenn-Copeland and Greta van Fleet albums is a disorienting experience! (GVF remind me of the album Linus Roache released as a hippie cult leader, except that his voice is much less annoying than their singer’s.)
Hey Dennis,
Thanks again for rushing this into print, as it were. It looks super lovely and hopefully brings a bunch of new eyes and ears to Bookworm.
Been working madly on my new books, trying to steal time away from freelance jobs, realizing I need to revamp the endings of two of them. Were any endings to your novels especially tricky for you?
Have you seen Asteroid City yet?
Hi D! Oh I did start working on it but I am having some doubts if this is what I want to be doing (do you get that?) but part of me is saying I might as well just write it and get it out of the way, you know? I hope to get invested in it more soon. If you did get a chance to listen to that Dismemberment Plan track, I’d love to hear your thoughts. I try to listen to it every new year just to be theatrical, haha. I hope your weekend involved a lot of chillin’ possibly like a villain, not that I think you’re evil, but even if you were I won’t judge.
Hii!! How are u? Oh wow. How terrifying. How did the hitchhiking ordeal end? They just got bored and stole the car? Wow.
There’s a lot of trafficking here. I might need to get another pocketknife.
Aren’t flights usually really expensive? Can you trust really cheap ones to not have a suicidal pilot driving the thing. Lol. Just a random thought. Kind of.
There’s a guy in this program here named Daniel. He’s like a pathological liar, Schizophrenic or something. He ALWAYS makes shit up its absurd. Like u say “Hey Daniel!” he goes “Yeah you know these three car crashes I’m still recovering from” or “Yeah you know I got to go to Atlanta for a record label” and he thinks he’s married to Taylor Swift + inspired her songs and met a unicorn in Pennsylvania. I’m serious! He shows me a video of this little Asian twink beatboxing and he, a white, chubby, guy is like “Yeah that’s me in a wig and makeup” and sometimes you kind of have to feel bad ya know? OR like my new roommate, who told me she is Schizoid affective. We had a conversation a bit ago about how we’re all angels and that she was talking to God. Its like, well ok! Haha. But you kind of get were their coming from ya know? Like, I used to think I wasn’t even supposed to be alive. Really. My feet weren’t my own and I thought my liver was shrinking, crazy shit that u really cant judge other people for until you go through it.
Hope that wasn’t like some crazy rant. Maybe I am crazy but I like to think, hopefully, I’m more honest and understanding because I’m so used to everything in a way. I wish I wasn’t so judgmental because I always regret it. We’re are all going through things ya know?
Peace n Love ya know?
Oh God! there’s this hippy lady here and I think I’ve spent too much time with her!!
Well whatever because I do believe u about my mom. I never thought she was right because I always felt this but only repressed it cuz of her.
But I feel very mysterious without a face. It feels super cool. Like, I could tell you I’m 7ft11 and that I have two different colored eyes and its like still this weird abstract thing but maybe I should have a face idk?
What do u think?
also this kid is trying to flirt with me in my dms. How did I get such charming Rizz? Haha!
Hey DC. Yeah very cool about T. I had a really nice weekend, got to see a friend and was introduced to her friend visiting from NYC who was just a treat to hangout with. I am reminded of how isolated I am, until I actually connect with someone but it was nice to just have a fun day with so much social activities. Brunch, karaoke, mall, dinner/business talk. Im socially exhausted and drained but Nulick passed on some incredible photos of his “plastic teen son” wearing a Aphex Twin band shirt, it’s going to be apart of his blog post, he also announced on his IG that the review is going up on the DC blog exclusively and that got rave feedback. Wishing you a beautiful week my homie.