Michael Silverblatt on his love of reading

this is a production of Cornell University good evening welcome I'm Stephanie Barnett in the creative writing program and welcoming Michael silver bottom line is very happy to me yesterday having been on me plans he made a much celebrated appearance here last winter I want to tell you that John Lennon's interview of the interviewer is now available as a podcast on the creative writing site and of course I want to thank our two anonymous donors without whose generosity we would not be here and without whose generosity Michael silver-black would not be here for the past 21 years Michael silver clef has been host of the national public radio show bookworm which is broadcast about once a week from KCRW in Santa Monica and which is available for downloading if you happen to be unlucky enough as we now are not to have it on our local radio station going to the Bush administration's history his disembodied voice according to more than one poster on the Internet is so seductive so hypnotic so compelling that apparently has prevented people driving on the la freeways from committing acts of a road rage in 21 years he has interviewed over 1,000 writers and maybe you could tell us the number I've read that it's over 1200 and before interviewing them he has read all of their books not just the book that's coming out that month not only has he read all of their books but and I'm just guessing from some of the questions he asked he seems to have read the books the writers read before they wrote their books and I learned today a couple of hours ago that you've also listened to the music that writers listen to when they're composing testimony from one of our graduate students that you told him what he had been listening to when he was working on his novel writers are constantly expressing their gratitude to him for his insights about their own work quite memorably David Foster Wallace the late David Foster Wallace was so stunned by Michael silver Blatz characterization of his project that after half a beat of silence he asked Michael silver-black if he would adopt him what characterizes his conversations this is ability to strip himself of pretense and reveal the ways that he is reading of writers work with his entire conscious mind as well as his own history and I remember he began the interview as you know Diaz on the occasion of the publication Oscar Wilde the book that won the Pulitzer by saying that he Michael Silverman was Oscar Wow that he true read a lot of science fiction and that he too was a nerd that was the word that you used as I recall he is as open to intellectual experience as anyone I could name living her dad he is capable also a profound empathy which is to say that both his mind and his heart are colossal and that he brings two writers and two books and affirmation that living inside a good narrative or living inside a good poem your story or your poem if he happens to be talking to you is the only way really to exist on this planet and this week during his residency here he is bringing this big heart and big mind to the work of all 16 of our MFA students some of you already know some of you are about to learn that he is modest and self-deprecating while still remaining ended and sincere I think it's unusual to find a sincere self deprecation he happened to say dinner last night that his name contained the syllable black which could be extended to blather which is what he said he did only he would characterize his articulate see that way but it reminded me when I woke up this morning or I didn't have a rejoin her at dinner Michael I thought of one this morning I was reminded that your first name is the name of an archangel in Judaism Islam and Christianity and that Michael of course is the one who led the armies against Satan and Satan if I could paraphrase you I hope you'll forgive me for this Satan I think we might characterize and as those readers you were talking about who did not read with affection and who read to ridicule he has said that he never interviews a writer whose work he doesn't admire and he's also said that there are enough people who are turning people away from reading and that he does not want to be one of them so let us welcome with much warmth and affection the Archangel Michael I always feel happier and safer when I see something that looks like a microphone because I spend so much of my life in front of one and didn't entirely expect to can you hear me in the back yeah easily and well fully because there is a microphone that can be used and there's enough water here I have you know papers inside here but I'm not going to read from the Med no I don't really believe in it I never was able to spend very much time listening I to lectures I am able to attend to readings most of the time but I had such a weird situation I used to in classes in college I went to the State University of New York at Buffalo I used to sit and write down every word that the professor said because it wasn't what they had to teach that interested me it was how they said it I had at Buffalo inexplicably unaccountably what has to have been the most astonishing assemblage of minds and speakers and might I add funny voices that I've ever encountered and let me name them because they really account for me I went there to be a math major this was a compromise my parents would have liked me to be a business me I had no interest whatever and fortunately in those days liberal arts colleges didn't tend to have business departments so they were completely out of luck they couldn't force me into it and the year I got there it was 1969 and they were in the midst of the second year of the so-called revolution so classes were frequently suspended we got to have our classes often if at all at our professors houses which meant really that most of the math classes were completely suspended because there were 200 people in the lecture hall whereas English classes tended to have sixteen or so and I just I completely fell in love with John Barth Donald Barthelme Dwight MacDonald Rene Girard Michel Foucault John Coetzee Robert Haas Robert Creeley John Logan Irving Feldman Carl Dennis all of them there and teaching at the same time and constantly it was not yet the case that a teacher taught one out of every three semesters of four semesters they were there to be encountered and could be visited at home Foucault in particular was teaching for the first time in America at that time only his book madness and civilization in an abridged edition was available Buffalo was thought to be one of those hot beds of structuralism and post-structuralism because we had many people who had studied with Richard maxi from Johns Hopkins and and Renae sure our had moved to Buffalo the author of deceit desire in the novel so the school truly did what it intended to do when it announced itself as the show place of the new Nelson Rockefellers State University system they wanted the English department did to model themselves on Black Mountain Black Mountain was a College down south where many many poets studied together I mean extraordinary poets and at one time it was one of the major schools of American poetry the Black Mountain School and Creely was down there and John Oppenheimer and others it was an interesting place because Charles Olson a very great poet was the Dean and they wanted to have as many artists as they had scholars in other words as many practitioners as interpreters and Buffalo did too as a result for me it and not Disneyland was the happiest place on earth I never encountered so much and so constant a level of intellectual penetration penetration I would say under duress because with the Revolution people were constantly being I mean constantly being bopped on the head with tear gas canisters were being arrested for protests this included the professor's I don't think at any time in American education professors were as close to their students in feeling and behavior as they were then I my life was utterly changed my deepest interest in literature had come because my mother as usual had refused to give me what I wanted don't take that in any secondary meaning we would go to the beauty parlor together and I would sit around while she was under those dryers and next door there was a place called our baby shop where there was a big version of Disney's Alice in Wonderland a book huge and I wanted it some I loved the pictures and my mother went in and she insists and I know it's true but she bought me the real Lewis Carroll Alice in Wonderland not because it was a work of literature and better than the Disney version but because it was less expensive I mean we were the quintessence of a thrifty family my mother was the child of immigrants her sisters and brothers have been born in Russia her mother had been born in Russia they saved I mean still I just visited the house the visit to Cornell made it possible for me to see my mother they were as thrifty as you can imagine this involving reuse of tea bags and silver tin foil and bags and if the pencil ran down to its knob they kept the eraser so and we still have drawers of these things drawn us if eraser is draw it's an incredible incredible thing in its own way I am a dreamer and in my imagination a lavish person in that I have always bought myself whatever book I wanted to read next and they're pleased to me that we go instead to the library or why do you need more books or don't you have enough already was what constant I'm you know I had a post office round they used to you could take a test and work for the Civil Service during the summer so my first year in college gave me a post office round and my parents forever after believed that I missed my calling why won't you work for the post office they said you'll have security you'll get advances there's a pension I mean this is what I grew up with really really really all the way until last year when Oprah magazine wrote a piece about me old magazine and my parents and aunts and uncles and cousins finally decided that if I was good enough for Oprah I was good enough for them I mean they started for the first time in my life to ask me questions about what I do to ask me if I'd read this or that it was as if I had given them permission these were people you have to understand who hoped that the first baby born to a cousin would have as his first words hockey puck they would sit there saying hockey puck hockey puck and rooting for him you know that it would come out before Papa or mama I mean it was it was insane friends who would come to visit for holidays would say to me do you realize that none of them spoke to you the entire time we were there I said yes it's quite often the case they don't know what to say to me and I didn't know what to say to them and my uncle German by profession a butcher would say to me eerily given what he sold what's the matter cat got your tongue because I was equally shy and terrified and somehow or other it wasn't until I got to college that I bloomed but but only really in private because I would wait until the class was over and then go up to talk to the teacher because I didn't want to say anything in the class I had been one singled out as they pardon me but but that that passionate seductive voice is something of a myth at first when I was famous for was not having a radio voice and the speech teacher who used to come around to classes in public schools caught me I have the one letter I have trouble with three times in my name Michael silver black elves and I was caught to have amazing ell I still do and so I was afraid that someone else would hear the laziness of this ell and you know you remember when caring is hearing their own laugh at you that's the way I felt every day was the prom and they long laugh at me and I just kept my thing whatever it is under a rock except in the presence of John Barth and Donald Barthelme these people who I dread it never occurred to me that you needed to have courage to speak to these people as far as they were concerned because they had written what they'd written and because I had responded to it so intensely they were my friends they didn't know it yet but they were not going to escape my love I'm especially Barth because when I read that book on the mail route it was the Gracie Mansion mail route in New York City that's where I lived and there were many many of my first encounter this is my freshman year of the manny rare and used bookstores that used to be in new york so many on that one mail round and i that i bought the complete works of dickens a book dealer son who hated books said to me waggling a copy of tick-tock of oz it was a first edition and I loved the Oz books all of them who would you kill to get a copy of this and I found it so interesting you know that I would keep going back there he was a chess master you know this was a world that I yearned to enter that New York City world of eccentricity and literary nests it was it seemed everywhere around me and on the subway were waiting for on the steps for something to open I would hold my book like a badge in the hope that someone would talk to me you know I've read that book how are you liking that book would you um lend me that book when you're finished with anything and there in Buffalo for the first time in my whole life there were people who wrote books I never met an author before and that the author was the author I read the summer before I went to Buffalo John Barth mostly because people would say to me Oh Buffalo I hear John Barth is there and I had no idea who he was but my friend and I read the sont lead factor and the John sculpt boy and I never even though I'd read all of Dickens great deals of Dostoevsky I never read anything as complicated before I didn't think a human being had written it I thought it was and now we are in the age I thought it was post human I thought that the man I would meet when I was so eager in my first week of college to run there to see I thought his head would sprout from a shoulder I thought he'd have a macro cephalic and dangling from the other shoulder I thought that the scariest thing was someone who was that weird looked like an ordinary human being with a suntan from having been away for the summer it was the first thing I learned really that writers were not what they looked like that you could encounter someone who'd created a rogue's gallery of grotesque and a morals who looked just like you or I I mean it really did surprise it because I thought it should be somehow incised on someone's face their acquaintance with a morality I mean John Barth I mean ruined my ears from 16 when I arrived at college to 21 when I left College it took me a long time to graduate I didn't want to leave why because his basic thing was that the realm of possibilities of choice was so beautiful was so great that to choose one thing to do was inevitably disappointing and that therefore paralysis was the preferred mode of being and I thought there was no way to disagree with this it was so obviously true and I paralysed myself I developed a writing block I you know anything that you can think of that would not come to the aid of a young man in college I learned from these John Barth books and adopted as credos as a way of life um I was very grateful when he went on leave and Barthelemy came in because you see from Barth I learned that you shouldn't believe what you learned from a book a book is not necessarily there to tell you the truth a book is there to make your life more difficult the greatest books make life and thought to my mind this is not true of all books for me the books I love the most made it harder for me to live somehow I appreciated finding life difficult because I am one who does not think that the earth was made for us I think that we are first to last strangers on it and that it takes us a good first half of our life just to get used to gravity you know that it's not easy I always tell the suicidal young people that I know and meet that they're not wrong that it's hard to live here and I used to you don't want me to go into this very deeply it's not very pleasant but that is my way of being alive and I equally well know that thinking is so immersive for me that I will never kill myself I'll be interrupted by a thought I want to finish first it's not it's not it's not in my it's not in my destiny for that although I I've been nearly convinced over and over fortunately my favorite person who ever lived on earth my grandmother lived to be a hundred years old and I have an aunt her daughter my mother's sister was now 101 she can remember who I am for 10 seconds at a time and my mother to make sure that her sister understood who she was talking to this weekend said what do you remember about Michael very loudly so my aunt could hear and my aunt said Michael with the books that way we knew that she knew who I was maybe Who I am it was true I read while walking down the street mothers would call my mother to warn her that I would before dire automobiles died or what a möbius would befall me I'd be fallen by dire automobiles something bad would happen and but I think I developed antennae you know what I mean the ability to walk without seeing in places I knew and I loved doing it as far as I was concerned I couldn't read enough and there in college when I learned that Buckminster Fuller practiced something called I believe either tensegrities sleep or Dymaxion sleep but what it meant was that he'd sleep from 50 minutes to half an hour four times a day and that was all he needed and so I from my sophomore to senior year of college not the fifth year but the middle three I I slept for around two hours a day so that I would have more time to read I read very very slowly I have to say and that's why I needed the time I was of course as you might suspect from what I'm saying thought to be an autistic child and they kept having to make decisions about where to put me in my education with so-called special children or with otherwise called gifted children gifted special gifted special so you know and really there was equal justification for both I couldn't walk up or down stairs without putting both feet on the same staff this took me until junior high you know there was no secret that could be kept about my inability to control my bladder you know all the things that happened to children happened to me and occasion teasing which made me put a book in front of my face so I wouldn't see the people when they were making fun of me and I didn't really think that there was anything particularly wrong I didn't like when they conspired to be nice to me they once heard a bunch of the worst bullies planning to pretend to be as bad at baseball as I was and that therefore I would be the best on the team and wouldn't this make me feel better and I thought oh god I hope they don't please don't make me go through that while they won't pretended not to play ball I didn't want it I don't want anyone's kindness really when it comes to that I want to be understood for my gifts I don't want to be deplored for my absence of ability there are very few things I do well this is one of them talking reading cantering being hurt when it seems necessary to be heard crying when tears are necessary because of hurt or because of being moved to tears I think people who don't cry and in public are unnatural I think given the conditions under which we now live not to cry is to be called and not answer you know it's just a a very strange world when I was in college as I said I met all these writers and all these others would visit them there all the students of Charles Olson made pilgrimages to Buffalo to visit the place where he had lived a good part of his life he struck me as being the ideal liver he lived in the motel across the street from the campus and when his room got too full of books his students would come and clear the room and he moved to the next room of the people who have lived this way I know of only De Quincey who's an also a favorite writer of mind when writers tell me about their favorite books I you're right I am Stephanie I immediately go to read them Norman Mailer once told me that his favorite novelist as a boy had been a writer named Geoffrey Farnham if they are NOL who wrote hundreds of boys adventures in the Walter Scott mode so I immediately went to get they were the worst things but I couldn't stop reading them it was absolutely true if you believed in ridiculous escapes from you know castles with moats and princesses to rescue there was no one like Geoffrey Farnham I mean there was no stopping me I read most of Tobias Smollett because John Barth had once written the introduction to one of his books called Roderick random and the mind of John Barth was such an on decodable thing to me that anything I knew he had read was of interest to me I always thought that if I could fill my mind to the brim that I would be able to become or impersonate one of the writers I loved and I didn't know that nothing that I could do would give me their gift now because I had come to college wanting to be a math major out of Lewis Carroll who when I found Alice in Wonderland and through the looking-glass and they made such a difference to me why because I didn't understand them they were made for incomprehension in their time to begin with but in my time all those poems that are parodied they're not known to us the book gets stranger and stranger and stranger with the years you know now that no one knows poetry by heart all these people being asked by Tweedledee and Tweedledum to recite poems or the red queen or the caterpillar everyone asks Alice to recite a poem how strange that has become and yet it was once as normal as the sunrise I became interested in that too you know like what were these poems that Alice supposedly knew by heart that were being twisted into Wonderland language well there it was easy because the annotated Alice printed the original versions of all those poems whether they were by Wordsworth or Tennyson or who have you but then when I'd read them see my father was always willing if I wouldn't buy a book to drive me to the library at any time to get the book and the next thing I needed was Lewis Carroll's other children's books and those were only horrible thing called Sylvie and Bruno and Sylvie and Bruno concluded it was the cause he felt that the Alice books were too crazy and irreligious these are sentimental treacly things with impelled Hren who speak with various lists and speech impediment I won't move and you know it was just so I decided to read Lewis Carroll's real books which were math books he was a mathematician and I taught myself logic and symbolic logic in particular using Lewis Carroll's text books so I thought I'd be a thrilling math major and you know that I would be happy for the rest of my life proving things that are not true and I became in Buffalo not a passionate reader this is how to become a passionate leader all of the books I loved it turned out would really ultimately chess games and it took me not just my undergraduate years but my graduate years to get to the point when I finally understood that I was not a wide reader that my favorite books were all versions of the same book Nabokov spelled fire you know they were great books unquestionably by great writers but if you gave me a book about how to marry and live and die I didn't want to read it I didn't want to know anything about the real world I only wanted the reimagined world the resented world and that was when I understood it was the first year I was given the show that there were not 52 books a year by John Barth being published that in the interim minimalism had occurred and the people weren't even writing all that many books in this manner were reading them when they were published they were you know sort of aberrant sees in the new world and most important that if I didn't start being willing to experience books about the disappointments of the heart that I wasn't really a literary person that I was a fan I mean I am an ecstatic and an enthusiast as well as a depressive but I did not want to be a fan and I keep meeting young men who want to become reviewers literary critics in the old sense not scholars but people who write reviews and magazines and what do they want to review they want to review Tom McCarthy they want any time a book is more intellectual than anything else these are the books that particularly appeal to the young man who wants to be a book reviewer and I've taken to telling them you will never be anything you're your impulse is no different from wanting to write a column on mysteries or a column on science fiction unless you can start to read and care about the books that are emotionally sated preferably over sating I was so surprised after having pretended to read it all my life at what a great book watering Heights and the level of the emotional sadism practiced among the characters and everything that Heathcliff says in that book is so cruel and beyond human feeling I could barely believe it you know that these sisters on that more used to invent fairy stories together I immediately read the poetry you know the about gondol the imaginary land that the Bronte's wrote sometimes together sometimes apart I became very very eager to experience It was as if whoever you are I think you begin your life one way but you must make a decision that turns you in the opposite direction or perhaps you will never complete yourself that gradually I figured out you know how not to be ashamed of crying or to own the years of being thought or you know all of those things that it was all true that what I wanted to avoid was what I had to understand the fantasy world of that kind of chess literature or Alice in Wonderland or oh you know you could name them by the hundreds it starts in the 18th century you know the game bulk that it was excluding literally the confessional and the confessional was the other side for a period of time of intellectual poetry so it seemed always that if you loved John Ashbery you couldn't love no more Sylvia Plath and I thought but what if you could I mean what really if you could love everything as deeply as people are said to in fact what if you decided that instead of Buddhists dispassion toward everything you would develop intentionally and otherwise a capacity for loving as many different things as possible what have you made this your human goal and I can't begin to name to you the number of places in which this is useful and the number of rescues I feel that I perform without horse or mold or castle or princess no Jeffrey far no for me rescue of people hoard sand a woman I think someone in her 70s said you know I love your show but you only sound like you're crying and I said don't you like to cry and she said not when there's nothing wrong and I said that's the best time you know how wonderful to have the consolation of tears when nothing is wrong so I still find for better and worse that I live at odds to the folk around me you know that that no well plenty of people choose to live this way but they don't say so and that as a result I'm as fantastical a creature as anything in Oz or in Wonderland that you know I like it if people can say I never met anyone like and by that they should mean that it was not an unpleasant experience for some reason you know a poet that no one reads anymore but I still like and I like his novels too and I like his place so it's unaccountable I like his poetry to be honest the least incomings when I read that thing I sing of Olaf glad and big and about a soldier and you know he defects and he says there is some I will not eat and you think how do you stress that there is some I will not eat there is some I will not eat there is some I will not eat there is some I will not eat but all the ways of stressing it are my ways of living you know that that I won't accept certain behaviors that I won't be a part of certain impulses that people have to victimize people like me and people like us by telling us that we'll never make a living that will never be among others and be able to stand up straight the teaching has become a lonely and despicable and not well paying profession I believe that I will find the ways to make all those things help make all those things untrue because the people of value to me are the people who don't believe that and live their life by different lights I suspect many in this room are of this kind of person and I thank you for being that and for being here to listen to me thank you and very open to any kind of question imaginable don't think that there's anything I won't try at least to answer irresponsibly yes you you've been in Los Angeles now for what 25 years 31 years 31 years and yet you said that New York was this is the world you wanted at the New York culture and literary okay yes um why my if New York was the place that I loved and the people that I you know gave showed me the way most of New York's intellectuals had children and those children were getting every job I wanted it's very simple I go to Ferris trouncing Giroux on Donnell Barthelemy recommendation for an editorial John and Susan Sontag son had the job or Irving house or so and so everywhere I went I was also afraid that as a result you see nepotism did not resent the extreme idealism I believe in I believe in idealism both in the you know common way of saying it in that I'm naive ly optimistic about things but I believe also an idealism in the sense that I read and love Philter and the German idealist philosophers I'm not at all sure that the world exists and I'd rather think that it didn't at this stage I'd rather think this was a nightmare I was happy and not be prone to believing that others are being subjected to it but you know I believe among along that line that my job is a dream that somehow or other the possibility that I could spend my days and nights reading and thinking and when talking talking to writers um I think yes that in the culture we're living in it's entirely inappropriate for people on radio and television to be berating and insulting books there are enough of them to like and they're just hastening the inevitable that within an imaginable future which was once completely unimaginable there will be large huge numbers of people not reading do not want to read hating reading although having been taught what Hans Magnus Anson's Berger calls second-order illiteracy they can read the newspaper they can work with an instruction manual they can keep a bank book balanced they can pay their taxes but they can't read something they don't understand why because in comprehension was never talked to them because they grew up reading run dog run run run run go dog go you can't not understand it you can learn how to read but there's no reason to reread it and all of our children virtually are taught this way it was not the way they always were taught they were taught my mother was my grandmother was in addition to how to read there were readers that contained things that were impossible for a child to read you know that both here in America and in England a second to fourth grade reader contained the fairy scenes from A Midsummer Night's Dream Wordsworth light reading were post stories essays by Emerson essays by unfortunately Carlisle you can imagine I don't want you like Carmel and that what you've learned by having that reader from second to fourth grade was it in fourth grade you could read things that you couldn't read in second grade that the light came on that what was once incomprehensible and painful to feel your way through what once you had to go to the dictionary for every other word became readable and enjoyable and in you know sixth grade maybe you did a production of Midsummer Night's Dream and you were in it and you heard the whole story and because you were so used to the fairies you knew already in sixth grade that the wrangling between titania Oberon and their court was the same as the wrangling amongst the groundlings fighting about hope I want and the four lovers in the forest that a child could understand this if he knew the fairy scenes well enough um I've spoken to among others Rory Graham about whether we couldn't perhaps go into schools and spend time teaching works that the students are too young to understand because what does a teacher have to be in order to teach those things passionate wildly caring so interesting and exciting that you could hold a classroom wrapped while they try to read something they're not going to be able to yet to understand this was how people grew more thoughtful when they got older we teach people not to get it the first day you're taught it we're gonna arrange it all in order and by the time you leave first grade you'll be a reader and then second grade you'll read things equally stupid but a little bit harder and third grade fourth grade probably forever until you're reading an actual worth of literature and by then I would submit that it's too late for most people unless they're also reading at home unless their parents also read but what you've learned in school is to master what you're given virtually as soon as you see it because if you don't you'll fall behind and make trouble for the teacher a slow learner is the bane of the classroom as fascinatingly now is a fast learner a kid a knight you know like mentor kids around LA and you know people who like meet me and ask me if I'll be there sure how could you say no kids who read a lot at home and come into history class having questions of course they've read more probably than the teacher are slowing the class down the teacher doesn't want you to know things in great detail the teacher wants to know and test you want only things in the textbook and his or her lesson plan I have watched really brilliant kids be sent to schools for problem children because they are not able to sit still and learn just what they're told it is so crazy now so that I have to tell you when I got sent all of these packets and manuscripts from you that when I read them I honestly say that whatever I mean I mean it in my way that in every single manuscript that I've read and in many cases reread and again because it's not respectful to talk to Eider without no wait the work although that is what's done on Charlie Rose are on fresh air someone else reads it and gives the list of questions to the host who doesn't have the time to do that reading because the programs on every day how could they write therefore the book section of any of these popular shows is only the least interesting section because the host has seen the movie the host has listened to the record that only took 40 minutes the host can't be uninformed about politics his viewers and listeners will tell him and write in and have a problem so this host gets to slide when it comes to books and poetry and much as that bookseller waggled the copy of the Oz book at me there was Charlie Rose sitting across from Harold Bloom lifting up a copy of one of the many Blume books saying so Harold what is this about any of you who grow up and are lucky enough to get a publisher to send you on a tour until you get to me most of the people who talk to you will not have had time to read the book unless you have it inadvertently become already as popular as the very most popular writers why would that be because if a book is a best-seller the host had better read it because his listeners may have read it and if he makes errors or flops they'll know these people never want to be ashamed if I were one of those people who didn't have a chance to read the work in question it's where I begin the interview I have not read this book and I am talking to you with ignorance I do not want my listeners to confuse talk born out of ignorance with taught born out of perception and time but we're not thought to be worthy of this confidence I mean I find this such a difficult thing that you know it got to the point they used to talk about what was it called the the Peter Principle that people were promoted until they got to the point where they could no longer do their job well then they stopped being promoted but this is like you know you get a show that's on one day a week then you get a show that's on every day and then you're supposed to cover everything from the news to sports to books and you are as you work this way less and less informed about everything you say and know and these become and turn our most famous commentators how could we expect any different why are we so crazy as not to demand that specialists in each area cover each area because we've gotten used to a kind of complacency and because we don't want to be feeling incomprehension you could listen to television radio read newspapers and most magazines popular magazines and never encounter something you don't understand do you understand what a nightmare that makes life because we all know secretly that there's very little going on in the world it's easy to understand anymore certainly not in science certainly not in math those people who used to be able to transform this incomprehensible material into things that we could begin to understand were called teachers and we don't respect them by and large what I'm trying to do on the radio you see the general manager of my station had been married to a poet not only opponent but the first person to translate mayakovsky in our tone in America a man named Jack Hirschmann he was for a time the poet laureate of San Francisco published by city lights so when the person from one of the major networks was appointed to the board of KCRW and was welcomed to the board he stood up and said that he loved being invited to join the board of KCRW and he loved KCRW except for bookworm where the idea of talking to one writer for a whole half an hour I mean what's the point of talking to someone hearing this conversation about a book you haven't read ie the conversation couldn't possibly be interesting in its own right it had to be referring to an experience he wouldn't be having didn't intended to have reading the book and my general manager had the bravery and dear courage as a person was a person is a person like me who was able to say if you think that bookworm is the show that you would like to change on kcrw you may be on the board of the wrong station because we regard it as our flagship show as our brand we would like people to listen to KCRW because they listen to bookworm it's what allows us to play music when we play music to move in new directions as long as bookworm is there we won't have the world of the intellect and the emotional world covered I found when people told me this they mostly told it to me spitefully I have to when people told me this I was so happy you know when Barnes & Noble wanted to sponsor the show see this is why I believe in idealism they were offering around a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to the station to sponsor the show in all the places that it aired and I went to my general manager and said most of the people who listened to the show patronized independent bookstores and it would be in here he inherently contemptuous of the people who owned independent bookstores who actually carry the books by the writers I'm talking to to have Barnes & Noble be the sponsor it's wrong I don't want the money and they're already talking to me about covering Barnes and Nobles hovering books now most of the Discovery novels by Barnes & Noble are not bad and I probably could find somebody willing to cover but as far as I'm concerned no one gets to tell me what to cover I don't want to have a half hour of my berating an author whose work I don't like there are plenty of other people to do it for me plenty of places in the culture with that kind of division is regarded as what criticism is at its best when I read something like book forum you know which is probably the best remaining review outlet in America it is and the writers are often brilliant and they've been graduate students in English or whatever subject they're covering but they never allow themselves to go over the moon about anything there's never in thine eyes 'm you know spend no time let no beats of the heart no more beats of the heart occur than necessary before you get this book because it will change you be sure you know they don't do that kind of revealing it's always a kind of very intelligent but a little bit tepid and you'd better know the range of references I could talk to a room of people of very various intelligence and know that most of them had understood me if not every word the words that would help them to understand intellectuals 10 no longer to talk that way next question as you spoke I just redesigned the entire English curriculum we should no longer have courses called milky or modern poetry we should have all modern course is called what Ashbury read what Hoover read and that's how you get your literary tradition by that organic way of following the breadcrumb trail left by contemporary read left my writers of our own time so what do you think of that is the silver silver gladion redesign as long as it would include what Dickens read because Dickens as it happened would love Tobias Smollett beyond all other writers that writer I mentioned that I'd read because I saw John Barnes name on the introduction of the book and what Milton read and what John Donne read and where that kind of metaphorical structure came from as long as you did it always that way and go further and further into the past yes when I was a chess-playing reader I read Dada and I you know Renata within comprehension and couldn't understand Dada and would hear people later on like Martin Amos say that this was you know in the book cups big mistake I kept wanting originally to talk only about people who have been at Cornell and I've had all sorts of things to say about Pynchon and the bulk of and ammon's but then I thought deference those only so far I'm talking to all of you anyway so that's enough respect being paid but I read for such a long time books only because they were parodied or travesty in odda say I read Chateaubriand I read Rene in a Tonga the book that takes place in America I read HG Wells's odd novel the passionate friends and then because I didn't like it and I hadn't read much HG Wells I read a book that Marilyn Robinson breath mentioned in an essay called tonal Bungay and I like that even much much more I read the French Romantic poets and not even going to remember most of their names co-pay sent one and you know a whole lot and then I had to go and find the translations of these poets and sometimes in odda when nada came out in paperback not Amir Nabokov under the name of vivian darkbloom which is an anagram of not Amir Nabokov wrote notes and he tells us that the sentence that told us that odda and her I think it's cousin Lu said we're wearing yellow - blue vos gowns that if you said yellow blue vos you'd be saying I love you in Russian so it's not just translation its transliteration of the sound Luiza coughs key thought it would be so worthwhile that he didn't translate khattala since English he gave us English words which read-aloud would sound the way Catullus sounds read inland another kind of translation the world is what is it larger Horatio what's that thing in him there are things in heaven and earth saying what Horacio Horacio doesn't believe in ghosts there are more things in heaven and earth than in your philosophy erasure or that amazing thing that he says to the ghosts of his own father when he says it needs no ghosts come from the grave to tell us this my liege ie ghosts should say more interesting things than you're telling me I mean it's so let it go said yes yes that's right that's right that's right um so you know for me it's a big big big ball of yarn endlessly round that there is nothing that you come to know it will not come to use for you some day or other if only because you can only use what you know you can't use what you don't know all right the only case and I recommend it as an exercise um write a character much much much much smarter than you are without doing research for it find out how to give the reader the impression that the character you've made is smarter than the writer it's very fascinating how this happens some was Carroll has a weird German professor in Sylvian Bruno whose goal in life is to make a map so detailed that one inch equals one inch and the German people when he affects us are very angry because when unrolled it blocks out the sunlight and nothing can grow this is what people smarter than we are thinking up next oh please please don't do that yes German fighting I'd be very happy and honored to and it was on my honor to speak to sable what are the initials W G it was known as machs to France I felt for sure that the fuss that people were making about the immigrants which had to do with the juxtaposition of photograph and text their photographs in this book and some of them are falsified a passport in particular is not the person's passport being written about and so people came to do X racist you know this word if racists there's a home business in criticism right now about poems about pictures and the relation of illustration to text and things of the sort I think it's very very interesting but interpreters were it phrases happy and they thought that this book by sable was centrally about the photographs because how many other books did you have photographs and actually the answer is plenty and Thackeray drew illustrations to his children's poem the rose in the ring and you know they're all such Bruno Schulz illustrated his stories they were all so today I thought that this had virtually nothing to do with the immigrants and I thought how am I going to get around this because all sorts of people including my friend Susan Sontag we're writing essays and that's all that was about and I said to him you know I don't really think I have heard of a novel the kind of novel known as dusk look in vinkle which means happiness in a corner it is a kind of concept at least for novel writing that makes me joyous I think of Bruno Schultz although I know he was not a member of the happiness in a corner school as writing this kind of literature if you haven't read by the way Bruno Schwartz's the street of crocodiles it's one of the ecstatic experiences it's a poem poets will have a better time with it the novelists but everyone will love it he was killed on the street by Nazis and a lost manuscript called the Messiah never has turned up Cynthia osek wrote a whole novel called the Messiah of Stockholm about the imaginary finding of this manuscript at any rate happiness in the corner and they both started to talk to me about German country riding my grill partha and others the interview is aired is only two-thirds of our conversation I have kept all of the originals and someday I will make sure that the rest of that interview gets transcribed as frequently as the part that has been transcribed and very proud of that conversation because we were in an ecstasy he we were talking about his novel a stirlitz and I said that it reminded me of the traditions once glorious and beautiful of the writing about insects that was popular among naturalness but poets as well made a link wrote a book called the life of the be many many such books exist writers would go in the natural world and describe the things they saw writers notebooks was once were once filled with us if you have the opportunity recently a thing called the journals of Jules radar was republished by what's the name of the literary magazine that's also a press and comes from the North West tin house they have a person they republished the issue the this book of the notebooks of a writer we don't read very much in America the notebooks of Jules Verne are often children learning French in America will be given his novel called the corrupt carrot head to read because it's a very it's written in very simplified languages it's a very beautiful and sophisticated book he describes things he sees but not only that he describes he and his wife bringing his baby to the seashore and they put the baby on the sand the baby's wearing a sun suit and the baby wriggles its arms and legs and they put on the suspender of the sun suit it shows starfish and the baby wriggles in the starfish rings and I just wanna play and once when I was in when I was in graduate school very briefly I taught composition classes and I thought that people would write much better if they knew how to look at what they see and so I gave them around 14 pages of the notebook some jewels from in order to go home with for the first major vacation Thanksgiving and I said it doesn't matter it's not imitating see like this and they all brought in astonishing things the failure of composition classes is not the failure of the student as Walter J on the great Jesuit critics said it's a failure of the imagination of the teacher in giving assignments that students cannot do well ever what did you do on your summer vacation and on says the student can't even imagine who would they tell this to their friends or friends don't care their parents their parents were with them grandma who could you even stand talking to Grandma for more than a minute or two so you're being asked to write down a thing that you can't ever imagine sharing and that everyone will fail at this except a couple of bright kids who say teacher likes Huckleberry Finn teacher likes Catcher in the Rye I will please teacher by sounding like a cross between Holden Caulfield and huckleberry and it was absolutely tried I recognized it and so you need have to spend time I had so many exercises and I found that no students would this is the basic thing who would pay attention would fail to be interesting in and once they're interested and proud of the things they've seen and described they write they may not be grammatical but they're eager to learn the grammar to make such a beautiful thing also correct I again very angry it exercises writing composition exercises that do not make the person feel nobler and bed by accomplishing them sable we talked about all these riders sampled felt very happy because nowhere in America had anyone any idea of the traditions he came from because we don't translate those books here and snifter Adelbert snifter that was another writer that he admired and then once he said those to me I didn't know them either but I went to read them because a country novel I want to find it's a tradition I don't know I want their translated but it's not commonly found I don't know enough languages I wish it did but that was my experience with say bunk I was so horrified to learn it his death which was only several months later and it gave fuel to my terrible feeling that right now the thing we cannot have and will not tolerate in the world for very long is genius Vilano dead before we even knew him in America so young seybolt as we were getting to know him David Foster Wallace you know the writing which had nothing typical or ordinary you are comparable to others we're not going to have on the boat close in our Beckett's and our choices we are going to have for best and worse the commentators on the common the ecstatically unusual book will not be a thing of our time and we can only hope that in that day that that honks Magnus Henson Berger mentioned that guy who said about second water illiteracy he said that the time not too long in which being able to read difficult works will be as unusual as being able to play the piano well or being able to dance classical ballet but not to worry because when we meet one another we will be so happy and grateful to meet another who knows the same thing but the conversations will be that much profound and that much more delicious becuase so rare I don't know whether that's choice so hope not or at least not before I go but but but it is to be put on record that someone thinks that a German philosopher journalist and poet next yes because now go ahead please because you were talking about ghosts and because she brought up Wallace because it seems to me in the past few years that contemporary fiction has really been arranging itself around an absence and have have you known before for a writer to turn up so so completely in the works of his contemporaries yes every novel must have well I'm telling you a big secret that I don't believe has been said publicly about David Foster Wallace I mean it's not talking for me is like I'm brought jumping I always have to figure out at what distance from the starting point I should begins in making the run-up to the jumping point David's deepest hope was to be able to write what he called a hard novel and have it be loved and you'll notice that running through that hard novel Infinite Jest is a voice that we know from a writer who also infiltrated most young writers would read him at one point or another there was JD Salinger the person talking to you making friends with you while showing you how different from you he believes he is the book that I think was designed to make an entire generation turn up at Salinger's unwilling doorstep the book was designed to make you want to meet a man who didn't want to meet you it has that paradox inherent in it he never wanted to meet he became more of a recluse over his life but it wasn't his fans that drove him into reclusion anyway what Dave had figured out was that style of direct address to the reader was the thing that bonded the reader to Catcher in the Rye more than anything else about it and of course having the kind of binary mind the explanation of the binary that he had here the expert tennis player there the expert addict he matches The Catcher in the Rye which you can't resist which you find irresistible with that missing film that everyone is looking for which will kill you if you see it with pleasure so you know that's the inherent balance but I I think that Salinger was such a writer while he was living and working barfle Niwas and Carver I think that the last 50 or 60 years of writing have been centered around a writer who made a breakthrough and then was so beloved by other writers by other readers by the people who studied with him and knew him and drank with him of them that I've mentioned interestingly I hadn't thought of this before but candidates for Alcoholics Anonymous David and Salinger and Carver and bar for me I don't know what that has to do with but addiction and conviviality sometimes go hand in hand but yes I do think that writing does arrange itself around an absent center and it's often better except for Salinger all these writers I mentioned died young I would say in Donald's case without having completed a masterwork although many many single and short works of genius but I was of these dead people closest most intimate with Donald and so I had very high expectations and that he died believing that he was burnt out rather than temporarily encoded it was very sad to me David had a similar but not exactly the same belief that he couldn't not only his own depression but that he couldn't figure out how to prevent the end of reading by providing the book another book so emphatic fatica ly readable writers creating hunger for their next work Salinger so interesting to me the time went by and at the time no one reported whether there are manuscripts left behind I'll tell you a secret there are I have not had access to them but there are things of Salinger that will be steadily published and the announcement has not yet been made but I have it on really believable authority so one of my dearest questions can a writer who once had that finger on the pulse of his time did he have it still when he died will these stories be as meaningful to us now as his published works were to us then if they are what an astonishing thing that will be if a writer who wanted again to be a be-all and end-all wouldn't it be amazing if the existence of other Salinger novels made people who thought that they don't like reading wanna be want to read like crazy not be able to wait and they apparently are scheduled for publication he determined it in an order almost like from beyond the grave receiving the pieces of Dickens's novels the way people did at the docks the serial novel I don't know that they're all pieces of the same thing but I know that he worked out when he wanted them published and at this quite a space of time between publish sections but thank you for asking that question because I think it is very interesting that in a time when community is such a problem that each of these writers created a community of writing around themselves and their styles that changed a generation of writing and thank you for we have a resection thank you for you and we'd like you to continue the conversation there if we could can we thank you so much this has been a production of Cornell University on the web at cornell edu

Channel: Electric Cereal

Views: 16,169

Rating: 4.9891009 out of 5

Keywords: Michael Silverblatt, John Barth, Donald Barthelme

Id: 0SfWDUzXlNw

Length: 91min 54sec (5514 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 13 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/sloth-or-entropy]

35:52–44:15 for his thoughts on "becoming a passionate reader" and how only loving books by authors like Barth, Nabokov, and Pynchon (things usually termed "difficult") is like being any other genre fanboy. <3

48:22–1:01:32 for his thoughts on "second-order illiteracy"

[u/vo0do0child]

I have so many favourite authors, but Michael Silverblatt is the only favourite reader I have. He’s so in love with books, and it’s not just intellectual to him, it’s a heart thing. He groks the emotional and spiritual content of books and manages to get me really hyped about literature every time I listen to one of his interviews.

[u/deathbyfrenchfries]

"Your impulse [to read "intellectual books] is no different from wanting to read mystery or sci-fi... unless you read and care about the books that are emotionally sating" @39:18

I'm sorry, I kept watching for a few minutes after that quote but still couldn't quite make out what he's actually arguing. What I get from his words are: A) "intellectual" books are not "the" emotionally sating books, B) but neither are genre books really, and C) deciding to read a book for it's surface or genre elements is wrong.

It just seems like he's arguing recursively based on his own undefined assumption of what should be "emotionally sating" to anyone else. And if his argument is just "Read what's emotionally sating" then... so what? Authors like Pynchon and McCarthy have been emotionally sating to me (The Crying of Lot 49 not withstanding), and if Silverblatt read them for the wrong reasons the first time around, that's his own damn fault and nowhere near a valid foundation for an argument.

[u/TaleOfTwoDres]

I been listening to Silverblatt for a few years without ever seeing him. I love his voice. That combined with his hyper-articulate phrasing makes it fun to listen to him interview writers. Often it sounds like they are speaking two different languages.