Bookworm

By: Jamie Brisick | April 01, 2009 | In Print Profile Talent

My fascination with KCRW’s Bookworm began on that manic stretch of eastbound 10 between Fairfax and La Brea. I was in the No. 2 lane, infuriated at a certain frosted Escalade with vanity plates, when Michael Silverblatt’s slightly-nasal-but-oddly-compelling voice came over the airwaves and saved me from road rage. He was talking to writer Jonathan Lethem about his latest book, and topics bounced from intellectual property to advertising to Los Angeles to emo. There was something incredibly personal about their dialogue, as if the conversation could go anywhere. From there I became a Bookworm junkie, downloading and lapping up interviews with Norman Mailer, John Updike, David Foster Wallace, Paul Theroux, Salman Rushdie, Joan Didion, et al. I found myself learning as much from Silverblatt as I did from his subjects.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, Silverblatt’s early love of books and literature was guided by his parents, a dedicated fourth-grade teacher and congenitally poor eyesight (“I liked reading because when a book was in front of my face, it completely occupied the field of vision.”). He went to college at the State University of New York, where he was exposed to “a passion of ideas, politics, literature.” In grad school at John Hopkins University, however, he became disillusioned with academic life. He moved to Los Angeles in 1980, where he wrote screenplays, worked at bookstores and read voraciously.

In 1988, at a dinner party, Silverblatt was overheard discussing Russian poetry by the general manager of KCRW, Ruth Seymour. She invited him to start the show that would become Bookworm, and the rest ... is a rail against road rage.

This year marks Bookworm’s 20th anniversary. To celebrate, I thought I’d talk to Silverblatt about books, literature, education and how we can become better readers. As the Bookworm jingle says, “You are a human animal. You are a very special breed. For you are the only animal, who can think, who can reason, who can read.”

A tall, bespectacled man in his mid-50s, Silverblatt was gracious, passionate and, much like on air, willing to talk about anything. Along with introducing me to Angelini, his favorite Italian restaurant, he walked me through his Fairfax District office, which is a one-bedroom apartment converted into a library. It should be noted that books not only covered the floor-to-ceiling shelves, but could also be found in closets, cupboards and sinks. It should also be noted that Norman Mailer called him “the most important reader in America.”

Ladies and gentleman, Michael Silverblatt ...

On Bookworm:
I came here as a reading geek. I wanted to talk week after week to writers who most spoke to me. But I realized very quickly that if I wanted listeners to try my books, I’d have to try theirs. It had to be a two-way street. And that’s what an interview is, too. An interview on the air is so much more than what gets said. You hear the laughter, the emotional flow. And it’s only then that the listener starts to feel comfortable and really listen. That’s the point at which they say, “I might read that book.” And I want to get the reader to that point. And it really involves a lot of give and take, a lot of emotional sharing.
I generally read about six to eight hours a day, and try to read the author’s complete work before I interview them. And you’d be surprised at how few authors have ever met someone who’s read everything they’ve written. I’m like a mirror to them. Then they start trying to see themselves in the mirror, and then we’re really in something like the equivalent of a psychoanalytic transaction between a person and their image. That’s when you get the things that are generally interesting.

I think we have a spiritual and imaginal dimension that I never hear referred to, so I wanted my half-hour to be a place where every kind of seriousness about the value of life — its preciousness or its wastefulness, its insanity, its possibility — could be a valued subject for conversation. And I wanted listeners to say, “God, I never hear people talking about this.”

On Reading and Unforgettable Language:
Reading is the act of being alone with another person’s imagination and hearing whatever that imagination wants to reveal to you. It’s a great condition for acceptance, for being willing to take in the unknowable, the surprising, the mysterious — that’s what I love. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s horrifying, sometimes it’s emotional, but most of all it’s unexpected. You can’t win a reader by telling a reader what he or she already knows. The memoir thinks it can, or thinks that somehow some spectacular story of drugs and incarceration or whatever — that that’s the unusual. The unusual is the unexplored aspect of the everyday with a writer who has the ear to recognize the unknown and to put it in a language that makes it unforgettable.

In the Nabokov book, Ada, when Van kisses Ada on the mouth, it’s a first, and it needs unforgettable language. And he thinks, “a hot boiled strawberry, still hot.” Yes, that is your lover’s tongue in your mouth in your first taste of it! It has the lividness of the flesh, which is like the strawberry, and everything is there.

Those who keep alive to the moment-by-moment of emotion and translate it into images that remain unforgettable — that is the hypnosis, the dream of reading. Marilynne Robinson, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize winner Gilead, calls it “the continuous dream,” that writing is putting the characters, the writer and the reader in a dream that doesn’t break. You have entered the stream of the underground imagery that is with us every moment, waking or sleeping. A writer who is sensitized to that is writing unbroken, dreamlike, jewel-like prose, and that really is what we’re always looking for.

When you’re looking for the book to read, open the book up anywhere and see how many lines you have to go before you find an unexpected, surprising word. If you only have to go two lines before you find the word you wouldn’t have thought of but will never forget, that’s the book to take with you.

On Writers and Their Inherent Comfort with The Uncomfortable:
Those moments late at night when we’re all alone and we feel frightened — those are a writer’s moments. Those are the places where a writer begins, where the emotions get unsettled, where you want to explore a thing you’re too frightened to say but suddenly there it is … and that’s the moment when your ordinary non-writing person calls someone up, wants to get on the phone, wants to distance it.

Every day we live surrounded by incongruous, often antithetical, opposing feelings. The writer is the person who is saying, “Look, the human is a grab bag of everything.” Emerson says, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” We become consistent only by ruling so much of the human equation out. The writer wants to restore the density and richness — the impossibility — of that equation. We want to feel that our lives are magical, and to experience that magic is, to begin with, to recognize that of the same person at the same moment, we love them and we hate them. We wish they would go away and we can’t bear to be without them. That is the state that language at its best is trying to describe. Two directly opposed things at the same time. That’s what a genius does.

On Thrillers, Mysteries, Self-Help and Bestsellers:
Books that make the bestseller list nowadays are mostly thrillers and mysteries, or in some way are involved in self-help, telling you how to live a better life. Most great writers don’t like to give advice. Problems get examined, understood, felt — writing brings you close to an experience that can be understood through writing, but not solved through writing. If you think about it, mysteries and self-help are looking for a solution. Can you solve the mystery? Can you solve the life problem? A writer isn’t really interested in that. Nothing is going to bring Romeo back to Juliet, but it’s one of the greatest love stories ever, because every moment is seen and felt in language that any of us can repeat and cause someone else to fall in love.

      It’s a paradox, but great writing is useless. It doesn’t get you on the airplane if you’re afraid to fly. It doesn’t put money in your account if you’re short. All it can do is connect you to the essence of life, which is moment by moment seeing, feeling, thinking, living, examining, reliving, dreaming. When people aren’t close to these things, they’re robots. And most of the bestsellers are teaching robotics.

How To Become A Better Reader:
One becomes a better reader mostly by reading, always by keeping a dictionary at one’s side. Don’t look it up later; look it up right now. In the first years of reading, don’t read in bed before falling asleep; the book will be taken over by dreams. V.S. Pritchett used to say, “They’re called the Great Books because they’re greater than other books.” They’re not called the great books because they’re hard or taught in school. It is possible that a Great Book, written 150 years ago, will no longer be great for these times. Sometimes books fall asleep. So if you read a book and you say, “I don’t like this,” just put it aside, but go to another Great Book.

The most important thing is being able to tolerate incomprehension. We have a weird culture now because almost everyone who reads in America was taught that you never read what you don’t understand. In previous years, yeah, you were taught to read, but in addition to the reading assignment, the third-grader would have stories by Edgar Allan Poe and essays by Emerson and poems by Longfellow — this is as recent as one’s grandparents. If you grow up doing this, you learn that the incomprehensible becomes comprehensible with time. Instead, people are nervous and terrified of not understanding something. They haven’t been taught how to sit and not understand something. So we have a whole nation of people who, if they don’t understand it right now — that’s it. Learning to sit with something a little above your level is something that Americans in general need to learn.

Another thing: When you’re starting a book, choose a day and sit down and don’t get up until you’ve read a hundred pages. If that’s preposterous to you, then read 70 pages. This means sitting down for around three hours and developing a stamina to read a hundred pages. If you read a hundred pages in one sitting, you’ll be committed to the book. If you can do that, you discover before long that a 500-page book is really 15 hours, or five days. Suddenly War and Peace doesn’t seem like an unconquerable voyage into the unknown future.

I often say to people that reading is a form of meditation. You’re sitting, and the eye is going from left to right, from left to right, from left to right — you’re doing the thing that anyone doing meditation is doing. Your metabolism changes; I think your blood flow changes. It’s really a fascinating state of mind.

On the Art Novel:
I think literature runs against everything you’re taught as a child, which is essentially, “Don’t talk to strangers.” Literature is hearing from strangers, and recognizing that to live in the world, you have to hear what the stranger has to say. A work of literature really has to say, “I’m going to be ugly and strange at times, but I am going to be so fascinating that it will be time worth spending. Because there’s a world about which you do not know, and don’t we want to enter another world? Aren’t we tired of what we know?”

A great artist digresses. When we think of digression we think of triviality, someone who can’t stop talking. But a great artist knows there’s no such thing as digression. You’re talking about the same thing, ultimately, all the time. William H. Gass, a great critic and novelist, made the bon mot, the epigram, “A pork chop thrown into the garbage is garbage. But a pork chop thrown into Proust is Proust.” In a great artist, anything that the artist puts, it will belong, ultimately, because the artist has a dense and eternal sense of form, whereas the popular artist tends to have a sense of pace.

The kind of novel that I like most, for better or for worse, is what I would call the “art novel.” It’s often without social context; it may even be without characters. The art novel believes — and I’m in agreement with this — that what you believe or identify with when you’re reading a great novel is not any character, but with the prose, with what it’s trying to make you believe, and then the way it rips your beliefs down. And in the process of seeing language being used first as a telling medium, then as a convincing medium, and then as a destructive medium, in which what you accepted is revealed to not have actual existence, but only philosophical or notional existence.

On Spreading the Good Word:
I regard myself as sort of like a pilgrim. I’m here to help spread the culture of the word and the book and the generosity of the human imagination. The imagination is boundless. The imagination can be infinitely extended. The imagination can reduce things a hundred times its size.

When I came in, I thought it was all about reading, and more people should read. That’s not really the way I think anymore. I think now more people should be hearing about the unusual truths of emotion and language that occur, among other places, in literature, in great art, in movies — that they should be growing more comfortable with how strange we are inside.

On Developing Brain Space:
The literary culture, as I knew it as a young person, is probably over. And it’s not a happy thing. People are not as smart — I’m not as smart — as the people I first started listening to when I started reading writers. Hearing these people talk was thrilling. They’d get angry and passionate, or funny, or they’d really take each other by the neck verbally and strangle each other. It was incredible to hear this passion of ideas, politics, literature.

And this is what Obama is talking about: We have to educate our kids again. Education is not being stressed. The qualities that went into being a great teacher are no longer valued. The idea of college as being a place where you go to make social contacts — this has to go, too, or we’ll be living in a greedy, stupid, unkind, inhumane world. It’s a real matter of simple human choice.

People who were not made to memorize things when they were kids don’t have the brain capacity of memory. That’s something that gets developed. When you do that, it doesn’t matter whether you remember what you’ve memorized, it’s that you’ve done it and held it in your mind for a month or so until the test or what have you. It’s that you’ve developed the mental space for it. It’s about developing the intellective capacity to know something.

On Death and Resurrection:
Is literature dead? No. There are always people who love it and love it passionately. The question is what will cause it to resurrect? That it will seems unquestionable to me. The kind of imagination in novels, stories, poems, plays, essays — this is ineradicable. It has had a significant downgrade, but the level of astonishment people have in reciting these statistics is an indication of how vibrant and vital these things had been, and that we simply await the return of their vitality. Everything dies; many things come back, often in revitalized and fuller forms.

This is a time, one of many really, where the culture feels itself to be dying. You ask someone about reading — dying; about the earth — dying; about Broadway shows — dying; about records and CDs — dying. This is the great era of culture death. That’s a fascinating phenomenon. And it will be read about in the future.

 

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