I'm Christopher Leiden, and this is open source, reading our way out of a ruined time with the model reader Patricia Lockwood.

She's the poet laureate of the Internet, just for starters.

She's a big league literary critic, master of social media and the Twitter joke, but also of the mysticism of St. Teresa.

She's on a field trip to Harvard this week from her home base in Savannah, Georgia, and we're a meeting for the first time in Cambridge.

You play so many parts, Patricia Lockwood, a novelist, too. In this almost archaic culture of books,

your mindset is very 2025.

This side of Harold Bloom, I've never met a wider scope in a reader.

Can you share the way you great readers seem to inhale the printed page?

The ease and speed of your reading.

The bodily experience of it, too.

Reading to feed a raging imagination,

reading to remember with instant and photographic memory, which you surely have. And let me just say,

I hope this is the first of any number of conversations about books and an introduction to

your mode of reading. I want you to teach me and our listeners

to read the way you do. Is it too late? Is it too early to begin to read the way I do?

So it does freak me out a little bit to hear myself mentioned with Harold Bloom because we

spoke about him briefly and you said that he read how many words?

He said his best cruising speed was the neighborhood of a thousand pages an hour. I said,

Harold, that's impossible. That's all of Proust in an afternoon. Yeah. But he said, test me.

He called on his wife. In graduate school, she would poke him and say,

you're just turning pages. And he'd say, ask me what I read. And he would virtually have memorized it.

Yes. So that's not how I do things. It's very funny also for you to say that I probably have a

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