Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No to the bird.

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 today my guest is Deborah Treisman.

She's been engaged with a special project.

Once upon a time, there was an art curator who began his history in Los Angeles.

His name was Walter Hopps.

He opened galleries, did the first shows here of Andy Warhol's soup cans of Marcel Duchamp. He brought Max Ernst back into prominence.

He showed a good deal of Joseph Cornell, in addition to all this, and much, much more.

He ends up at the Smithsonian.

He's the modern art man of his generation.

And in addition, he was a spectacular raconteur.

He's thought to have been one of the best talkers about art,

and unlike most curators, everyone, all the artists love him because he's trying to understand art more than he's trying to sell it. And he's trying to understand it at the same time that they're trying to understand it and find words for what they're doing. Now, Deborah at a certain time comes up with the project of wanting to capture this man's voice because he didn't like to write. He liked to talk. Deborah,

at that time, was the editor, the literature editor of the wonderful magazine Grand Street. Now she is

the primary fiction editor at The New Yorker. So she is an editor, and it took a long time for this

book to come together. Well, tell me why. Well, so I knew Walter when I worked at Grand Street in the

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