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Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberd.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

I want to address listeners who think that I never stopped crying.

It's true.

I never stopped crying, and one of the reasons is, when I was 18 years old,

I'd gotten to college at 16, one of the people there who was teaching in the English department,

let's forget that Michelle Foucault was there, he made me think, and John Barth was there,

he made me laugh, and John Coatesy was there, and he furrowed my brow very deeply.

But a young man who was teaching Victorian literature at the time made me cry.

It was the voice of Robert Haas.

It was a voice full of passion, who would, while teaching, ask us to imagine what it was like

for Oliver Twist, for an orphan in the streets of London, and who would know because he

knew what cobblestones were like,

or, you know, perfect detail with such assurance.

And this man in a department full of poets,

Robert Creely and John Logan and Irving Feldman and many, many poets visiting and otherwise, never mentioned that he was

...