Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

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 Silverblant, and welcome to Bookworm.

I was looking in bookstores, that thing that we still love, and seeing books by a press called Seagull Press.

And I'd see that they had translations by Thomas Bernhardt, things that I didn't know by Peter Huntke,

translations of all sorts of works that had never been in English before.

And then I happened upon the most beautiful of these books, self-portrait of another,

which happens to be by my friend Seis Notabum, who was a regular on bookworm every time we had a new book by Seis,

we welcomed him to Los Angeles to talk to us about it.

It's been years since there's been a new book, American publishing being what it is,

and this book is beautifully done.

It's a collaboration with an artist, a German artist who lives in Berlin named Max Neumann.

The book, Self-Portrait of an Other is 33 prose poems. I met Neumann in 89.

I was invited to Berlin.

There was an artist's program, sort of meant to,

because West Berlin was very isolated,

and East Berlin was communist and under, let's say, Russian domination, if you want.

And so in the West there were all kinds of international artists as a sort of window towards the east.

...