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Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberd.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt.

This is Bookworm, and I'm pleased to have as my guest today, Ben Lerner, whose most recent novel is the Topeka School. He's also a poet and an essayist.

His first book, leaving the Atotcha Station, was recommended to me by John Ashbury, and I read

it immediately, and I've read everything since. The second novel was called 1004 and now the Topeka School.

There was an essay that preceded this book about debating,

and it revealed to me that perhaps the first two books, leaving the Atotia Station and

1004, are in a debate, at any rate, some kind of conversation with one another, and that

now the debate has moved into one volume. Can you talk to me about that?

Yeah, that's a really, that's an interesting way to look at it. I mean, leaving the Atotches

station, the kind of narrator, the solipsistic young narrator, is incredibly distrustful of language

and basically tells all kinds of lies, some comic, some tragic comic, in order to try to present

himself to others. But certainly, language is a technology of obfuscation. And that's certainly

one of the things you can learn in debate is a kind of weaponized eloquence that's designed to conceal.

And in 1004, you're right, that the movement is towards a kind of seeking out possibilities of authentic language, even with a commercialized and militarized vocabulary or whatnot.

And now the Topeka School is kind of the prequel to those different,

...