A leaf out of silver-tongued Michael’s book
I’ve posted before about Michael Silverblatt, the host of KCRW Santa Monica’s sublime and extraordinary Bookworm show, available in podcast form here. Silverblatt has the strangest, softest diction; in many words (“classic”, “collection”, “published”), he seems to transpose the letter ‘l’ for a ‘y’. In the background of many of his shows, a stomach grumbles emptily and defiantly. It’s such a regular audio interlude that it can surely only be Silverblatt’s own digestive system protesting, and yet somehow peristalsis merely adds to his charm.
This is a man who cares not a jot for that bane of most radio show hosts, “dead air”: silence; which he uses to formulate the most thoughtful responses since Malcolm Muggeridge snuffed it and Barry Norman became a parody of himself. His interviews employ a consistent, if peculiar, style and he is always well prepared — to such a degree, in fact, that if a guest throws in a reference to Shakespeare or the joys of childhood, Silverblatt is armed with a comment on the need of the playwright’s audience to be overwhelmed or about the child’s need to pick its nose.
Recent Bookworm highlights include Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly, talking about their book for kids of all ages, Big Fat Little Lit; Uzodinma Iweala discussing his novel Beasts of No Nation, written in the first-person voice of a child-soldier; and Carlos Fuentes satirising Mexican and global politics in his book The Eagle’s Throne.
It’s hard to put your finger on what’s so great about Bookworm and Silverblatt’s approach; on the first listen his show might seem twee and annoying. A friend has commented (referring to the Bookworm interview with songsmith and poet Leonard Cohen) that Silverblatt was “trying to out-Leonard Leonard with his rather convoluted attempts to define Cohen themes”. Needless to say, I disagree. It’s easy to misinterpret Silverblatt’s thoughtfulness in formulating responses for being tongue-tied.
Yet others have complained about one of the things that makes the man so compelling:
And then there was WS Merwin, summarising his poem To The Unlikely Event from ‘Present Company’:
Bookworm, I hardly need to add, isn’t the only haven for the bibliophile armed with an iPod (and you don’t need an iPod to listen to podcasts — almost any old computer will do).
US-based Writers on Writing is a weekly radio show hosted by the somewhat pat and pedestrian Barbara DeMarco-Barrett. Each Thursday, writers, poets and literary agents join DeMarco-Barrett in the studios of KUCI-FM in Orange County, California (88.9FM) and her show is simulcast worldwide. Now it’s also available as a podcast. Recent shows have featured TC Boyle; and, via phone, the former US poet laureate Billy Collins. DeMarco-Barrett puts to Collins that the poems in his latest collection, The Trouble with Poetry: And Other Poems, are longer than they were in previous collections: “Let me dwell on that for a few minutes,” Collins quips, his supersonic remark disappearing right over her head.
My favourite living poet also dwells on the terrible advice young poets are often given in writing workshops; that they should set aside, rather than throw away, a good image from a failed effort for recycling in a future poem:
Neal Sofman’s Californian show on Writers Voice Radio, “a clean, well-lighted place for books at Opera Plaza in San Francisco”, can be found at podcast directory Podcast.Net. Lately, his shows have featured Julian Barnes, Dava Sobel and Nick Hornby. Hornby, of About A Boy and High-Fidelity fame, is on the show to read from his latest novel, A Long Way Down, in which he brings four of his characters back from the edge of suicide.
Of course, downloading podcasts, then transferring them to your iPod and finding the time to listen to them is all very well. But after a while they begin to merge into one big mass of words. Just as in Billy Collins’s poem Forgetfulness, you lose the name of the author, the name of the book, are left with nothing but a vague sense that you’ve experienced something extraordinary you’ll probably never have time to listen to again. And the fact that you’ll never actually get around to borrowing, buying or reading the book almost goes without saying.
Fortunately, if paradoxically, I’ve actually been reading more since I discovered podcasts, and I don’t think it’s only through a sense of guilt. I’ll never catch up, of course, with all those books that sounded so fascinating thanks to Michael Silverblatt’s silver tongue, and which I’ve since added to my Books To Check Out journal. But I’ve ordered Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly’s Big Fat Little Lit from Amazon.com — choice comic stories culled from their three bestselling comic collections, and which I heard about on Bookworm.
I thought I’d better begin with something light.
This is a man who cares not a jot for that bane of most radio show hosts, “dead air”: silence; which he uses to formulate the most thoughtful responses since Malcolm Muggeridge snuffed it and Barry Norman became a parody of himself. His interviews employ a consistent, if peculiar, style and he is always well prepared — to such a degree, in fact, that if a guest throws in a reference to Shakespeare or the joys of childhood, Silverblatt is armed with a comment on the need of the playwright’s audience to be overwhelmed or about the child’s need to pick its nose.
Recent Bookworm highlights include Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly, talking about their book for kids of all ages, Big Fat Little Lit; Uzodinma Iweala discussing his novel Beasts of No Nation, written in the first-person voice of a child-soldier; and Carlos Fuentes satirising Mexican and global politics in his book The Eagle’s Throne.
It’s hard to put your finger on what’s so great about Bookworm and Silverblatt’s approach; on the first listen his show might seem twee and annoying. A friend has commented (referring to the Bookworm interview with songsmith and poet Leonard Cohen) that Silverblatt was “trying to out-Leonard Leonard with his rather convoluted attempts to define Cohen themes”. Needless to say, I disagree. It’s easy to misinterpret Silverblatt’s thoughtfulness in formulating responses for being tongue-tied.
Yet others have complained about one of the things that makes the man so compelling:
Michael Silverblatt has been hosting Bookworm on KCRW for about 50 years now. I read somewhere that he hosts the show out of his apartment. Which brings me to this: Please, please someone get him a new microphone. Or teach him how to enunciate for radio. I've heard he's a brilliant guy but I can't understand a word he says.The guests he cajoles into providing unexpected responses, that is; indeed (as I’ve said before), his Elliot Perlman interview turned out to be even more of a revelation for Perlman than it was for the listeners.
Somehow, I always understand his guests.
And then there was WS Merwin, summarising his poem To The Unlikely Event from ‘Present Company’:
“What’s unlikely? … Almost any event is an unlikely event if you begin to think about. It’s unlikely that we’re here… The whole thing is unlikely, and isn’t it wonderful?!”Silverblatt’s almost cavalier employment of ‘dead air’ suggests he doesn’t know what he’s doing but, in fact, he’s thinking about what he’s going to say before he says it. So sensible and yet so rare nowadays. He’s by far the most intelligent interpreter of books I’ve heard and, for someone like me, the non-intellectual but thoughtful framework he provides is always helpful. I thoroughly recommend Silverblatt’s Kurt Vonnegut interview, whether you’re a fan or not.
Bookworm, I hardly need to add, isn’t the only haven for the bibliophile armed with an iPod (and you don’t need an iPod to listen to podcasts — almost any old computer will do).
US-based Writers on Writing is a weekly radio show hosted by the somewhat pat and pedestrian Barbara DeMarco-Barrett. Each Thursday, writers, poets and literary agents join DeMarco-Barrett in the studios of KUCI-FM in Orange County, California (88.9FM) and her show is simulcast worldwide. Now it’s also available as a podcast. Recent shows have featured TC Boyle; and, via phone, the former US poet laureate Billy Collins. DeMarco-Barrett puts to Collins that the poems in his latest collection, The Trouble with Poetry: And Other Poems, are longer than they were in previous collections: “Let me dwell on that for a few minutes,” Collins quips, his supersonic remark disappearing right over her head.
My favourite living poet also dwells on the terrible advice young poets are often given in writing workshops; that they should set aside, rather than throw away, a good image from a failed effort for recycling in a future poem:
“I can recognise from about 100 yards a poem that’s been constructed of the spare parts of other rejected poems. You get a sense that the poem is together only because of duct tape. It’s just super-glued, something is holding it together, but there’s no organic flow. You don’t get the sense that this poem is the result of a continuous experience that happened in real-time with the author’s imagination.”Australia’s Radio Adelaide has podcasts here, hosted by Cath Kenneally. Recent shows have included Vikram Seth on his memoir of a great aunt and uncle; Chrissie Amphlett of pop band Divinyls talking about her memoir Pleasure and the Pain; and Marian Keyes from Ireland on her book The Other Side of You.
Neal Sofman’s Californian show on Writers Voice Radio, “a clean, well-lighted place for books at Opera Plaza in San Francisco”, can be found at podcast directory Podcast.Net. Lately, his shows have featured Julian Barnes, Dava Sobel and Nick Hornby. Hornby, of About A Boy and High-Fidelity fame, is on the show to read from his latest novel, A Long Way Down, in which he brings four of his characters back from the edge of suicide.
Of course, downloading podcasts, then transferring them to your iPod and finding the time to listen to them is all very well. But after a while they begin to merge into one big mass of words. Just as in Billy Collins’s poem Forgetfulness, you lose the name of the author, the name of the book, are left with nothing but a vague sense that you’ve experienced something extraordinary you’ll probably never have time to listen to again. And the fact that you’ll never actually get around to borrowing, buying or reading the book almost goes without saying.
Fortunately, if paradoxically, I’ve actually been reading more since I discovered podcasts, and I don’t think it’s only through a sense of guilt. I’ll never catch up, of course, with all those books that sounded so fascinating thanks to Michael Silverblatt’s silver tongue, and which I’ve since added to my Books To Check Out journal. But I’ve ordered Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly’s Big Fat Little Lit from Amazon.com — choice comic stories culled from their three bestselling comic collections, and which I heard about on Bookworm.
I thought I’d better begin with something light.
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