Thanks for listening to Bookworm. I'll bet you'll want to listen to DNA, KCRW's podcast with Francis Anderton.

She's really one of the best informed people about architecture and the face the world is putting on today.

Find DNA on KCRW's iTunes page.

Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good nose into the bird?

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblad, and welcome to Bookworm.

We have four guests.

The occasion is an extraordinary and exciting show at the Pasadena Museum of California Art.

It is based around the circle that surrounded Robert Duncan, poet, and Jess, whose birth name was Jess Collins, did his art under the name of Jess,

and they were the center of a scene in Berkeley, in San Francisco, of writers and artists who gathered and really created an image of what California art could be in

distinction to everything else. My first two guests are Michael Duncan, who is a curator of the show,

Christine McKenna, who once had a very well-loved show on KCRW called Eight Hours to Harry,

and she is herself a curator, a journalist, a writer, an

interviewer. And let's start out. How did you begin to focus on Duncan and Jess? What brought

you, Michael Duncan? I write for Art in America magazine, and in 1993 there was a retrospective of Jess's work, and it was a revelation to me.

And I wrote a piece about it that was on the cover, and I sort of at that point entered Jess's world.

Later, Christine and I co-created a show called Seminiculture, Wallace Berman,

and his circle, and Jess and Duncan were both in that show.

It's part of a bicostal impulse that was joining literature, particularly poetry, and art,

...