The insightful host of KCRW's Bookworm -- one of the best sources of author interviews you'll find anywhere -- is himself interviewed in new issues of The Iowa Review and The Believer. It is another opportunity for Michael Silverblatt to be a great teacher of deep reading.
BLVR: When you say “tailored,” what do you mean?
MS: I’ve read all of the work, or in some cases as much of the work as is humanly possible. We all have time and deadlines, accidents, emergencies, but I read as much of it as I can. I’m very against interviewers who do not have time to read the work, who accept jobs knowing that they don’t have time to do the preparation. And that is almost everyone who has a daily interview program. How could you read, or see, or watch, or hear as much as you need to? So, you wing it. And it’s not going to stop. Winging it is going to be the American way. But I want to read the work. What for? To be able to be a mirror to my writer. I want to read the books that have influenced the work, childhood books, all kinds of things. And so my preparation is infinite.
Most writers have never spent time speaking to someone who’s read all the work except someone working on a dissertation or in an English department, in which case it’s rather different. They’ve read the work to test a theory or an idea. No, I’m there to astonish them by the extent to which I can mirror them. ...
BLVR: So do you favor rhetoric over content?
MS: I believe that words and their arrangement in the sentences are what get our attention. I want, as Barthelme has his Snow White character say in his first novel, I want to hear words I have never heard before. I want the words and sentences to peacock around, to open their plumes. Art speech—I’ve called it that after art songs—is a form of speech no one can speak unless someone else is speaking it. In other words, when I start to speak it you can see a writer lift up their eyebrows and say, “Oh, it’s safe to noodle around. It’s safe to throw in a word or not know where the sentence ends.” In other words, to speak from the realm of style rather than from the realm of information or communicative exchange. I want to hear their styles, I want to hear the emotion that goes into shaping a style.
Silverblatt has been doing this work for twenty years. Of the many amazing moments came this one, when he hosted a very rare interview with Kurt Vonnegut in front of a live audience:
MS: Kurt didn’t sign books, he didn’t stay on, he was escorted into a car immediately through a back door, but he said, “Give me your book,” and drew a picture of himself and a bubble coming out of his mouth saying, “Would you be my friend?” and gave me his phone number and he looked at me and said, “I’m so lonely.”
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