Michael Silverblatt - Bookworm

July 5, 2010 3:18 AM

“I like to think that at best the interview becomes something like the unaccountable experience of talking to oneself in a mirror.” - Michael Silverblatt, Host of Bookworm on KCRW interviewed by Sarah Fay for The Believer. All twenty years of Bookworm archives can be heard here
posted by minifigs (6 comments total)

His DFW interview is one of the most compelling things I've ever heard. It's interesting that Silverblatt dropped that quote, during the interview DFW asks: "Can you adopt me?". He's incredibly insightful and clever without being pretentious or haughty. I love him.

The DFW interviews can be nabbed from The David Foster Wallace Audio Project
posted by GilloD at 3:48 AM on July 5, 2010

"I have an experience of the book, and it's as if I have not a flat surface in front of me but rather a beehive around my head. It's very strange." - from the Believer interview

I was thinking of posting this, I had never heard of Bookworm before reading the interview in the Believer, and have been devouring the podcast since. Fantastic stuff.
posted by oulipian at 6:17 AM on July 5, 2010

I love Michael Silverblatt's interviews. There's something so charmingly unguarded about the guy -- he's not trying to put on some kind of persona, there's no attempt to out-cool the interviewee, no pretense or ego. He's utterly unembarrassed about his love of books and his curiosity about the people who write them.
posted by Pants McCracky at 6:51 AM on July 5, 2010

Michael Silverblatt is honestly one of the best readers on books in the U.S. today, despite only rarely writing. He evidently studied with Donald Barthelme; he has a nice account of that time in the McSweeney's issue from a couple years back devoted to Barthelme.
posted by with hidden noise at 10:32 AM on July 5, 2010

I love Silverblatt. I always groan when I find myself in my car on Thursdays at 2:30, and Bookworm is on. It's like the most horrific experience ever. But I don't change the channel. Silverblatt comes with KCRW. I will eat my vegetables so that I may have ice cream later.

Seriously, though, he won me over with one interview, where the interviewee started coughing. And coughing. I was all...wtf? They had been discussing gender identity. The interviewee, coughing, then sounding like he was strangling himself...turned into a woman. On the radio. I was astonished. That was absolutely the weirdest thing I have ever heard on the radio, before or since, and completely, totally unexpected.
posted by Xoebe at 12:03 PM on July 5, 2010

Am I the only one who thinks this guy always sounds like he needs to blow his nose?
posted by malapropist at 11:50 PM on July 5, 2010