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Boots!

Where would we be without books?

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.

Today, my guest is Ron Padgett, and we're here to talk about a very unusual book, Fizz.

It's called Motor Maids Across the Continent.

It's published by the Song Cave Press.

And it's a variety of book that I don't think you've heard about before unless you have, in which case you're

lucky. It goes back. Good. Oh, 40, 50 years, people have been finding pulp novels, taking white

out to them, revising them, changing the words, and creating new,

sometimes dadaistic, surrealistic, at any rate, wild and interesting books as a result of the process.

Now, I am very happy that motor maids across the continent is one such

book. Ron Padgett, as you know if you've been listening, is a poet. His poems recently

appeared in the movie Patterson for the young poet in that

movie. But tell me, what were you looking at when you found what became motor maids?

I mean, what was the original text that I was working from?

I found an old book in a used bookshop here in New York on, I think it was West 23rd Street,

and it was a dusty old volume called Motor Maids Across the Continent.

I can't remember the author's name now. It was published around 19, I think 17 or something like that in the United States.

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