You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think? Who can reason? Who can read?

Hi, this is Michael Sulfraad, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today, my guest is an old friend.

It's Jim Paul, who is the author of Catapult.

Harry and I built a siege weapon.

I acknowledge in advance, we went to school together.

We know each other for a long time. We've sang songs together,

and so it was particularly a pleasure for me to see this book's publication. By now, Jim Paul,

a poet is living up in San Francisco, and one day it took his mind to build a catapult because he wanted to heave stones into the Pacific Ocean.

This leads to a whole meditation on war and warlikeness and defense.

It's a kind of beautiful book and reads to me in a way like a parody of John McPhee.

Were you thinking of that, that kind of joke on the knowledgeable, you know,

geological passage through time kind of book? Well, I've always loved John McPhee's

especially his geology books and in the beginning I felt more that I was doing a

little a little homage to him but it's but my tone gets gets me gets the best of me

so I was off after that and but the notion of Rock's end of, is it really at the

basis of the book? What it's, it is a kind of oral book, to use Blake's word, that is to say,

describes a kind of contracted lowest common denominator mental state. And so Rock was the perfect

metaphor. And having read McPhee, I started with geology.

...