Jazz Hands. Let's start. Welcome to the Librarian is in the New York Public Library's

podcast about books, culture, and what to read next. I'm Gwen. And I'm Frank. And later, we're going to be joined by someone that I am so, so excited to have on the podcast, Margaret H. Willison.

I think of her as one of the closest people in the universe to a celebrity librarian.

And we will introduce her more soon, but she's awesome.

Wasn't there the celebrity librarian on Jeopardy?

I don't know. I don't know. Who was on Jeopardy? This is all over the news briefly because she was winning on Jeopardy and she described herself as loving cats and loving to knit and she said, yes, I'm a hopeless stereotype. Oh, no. I didn't know that. Really? Actually. We should ask Margaret Willison. She'll know everything. She seems like a pop culture. She's a pop culture guru. Yes. She seems to know everything. Yes. We're going to go toward the very low side of our high, low culture split today. I don't know, maybe you're reading like Moby Dick or something. And we can talk about that, but we're definitely going to talk about TV. to talk about TV. What I really want to ask her about is the intersection of TV and books and book people and what they like to watch on TV. I mean, I actually have something to do with movies.

Oh, that's good. I mean, I don't know if you know this about me, but like as a young teen and into my

teen years, I was absolutely 100,000 percent obsessed with movies,

like old movies from the golden age, from the 30s, 40s, 50s.

I mean, seriously, to the point where it was like a religion.

And I thought of that later, like so many of my concepts of life

and what beauty is and what being a good person is

and came from Hollywood films.

And you could analyze up, down, around what it was in me that was so really truly embraced them, like up to the point of obsession.

How did you consume them?

That's actually a great question, because I wanted to ask Margaret this question as well,

like how we came upon the things we came upon as kids in terms of different

possible generations and how we came upon things. I mean, what I find fascinating about that is when

I was a kid, there were like four or five channels, and I saw adult stuff that was geared for

adults' kids stuff that I never would have encountered in a niche market like it is today, it seems.

Like, you know, my nephews were like raised on Nickelon, like, three channels out of 600. But I would flip the channels and see, like, you know, the open mind or 60 Minutes or, you know, a Abit and Costello movie, and then a soap opera, which weirded me out when I was a kid. I thought they were the most mature, serious things. They seemed so adult. But yet I came across them, then I would come across old afternoon movies

and stuff like that. But as I was saying, like, about this obsession was like, you know, how

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