The Confederacy of Bookworms

Bookworm

KCRW

Arts

4.5 • 606 Ratings

🗓️ 9 August 2023

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Guest host Mary Corey, teacher of American history at UCLA and author of "The World Through a Monocle" about The New Yorker Magazine, teaches a course on American popular culture that explores the blurry lines between perceived high culture and what we think of as popular culture. In this episode, Corey takes us through excerpts of Bookworm conversations with lauded boho rocker Patti Smith, writer and brilliant wit Fran Lebowitz, and outré filmmaker John Waters. Each of these rebel artists has left a mark on our national culture and all of them are serious readers, making up a confederacy of Bookworms.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.
0:03.7	Boots!
0:08.8	Where would we be without booms?
0:12.6	Where would we be without good?
0:14.8	No.
0:15.0	It's a rhetorical question, sir.
0:19.7	But where would we need without books?
0:24.1	From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Mary Corey. Welcome to a bookworm retrospective, celebrating 33 years of
0:34.9	bookworm and its host Michael Silverblatt.
0:38.3	I teach American history at UCLA, and Michael is my friend.
0:43.1	He's currently on hiatus for health reasons.
0:47.3	Michael recorded more than 1,600 bookworm shows.
0:51.3	He spoke with Nobel Prize winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, and countless
0:56.0	writers of literary fiction and poetry from around the world. Michael invited me to be on
1:03.1	Bookworm in 1999 to talk about my book, The World Through a Monocle, about the New Yorker magazine,
1:10.2	along with David Remnick, who was at that time
1:13.0	the brand new editor of the magazine. At UCLA, I teach a course in American popular culture,
1:20.6	where we spend a lot of time exploring the blurriness of the lines between what we think of as
1:26.5	high culture and what we think of as high culture and what we think of as
1:28.8	popular culture. Today we will be hearing excerpts of bookworm conversations with lauded
1:34.8	boho rocker Patty Smith, writer and brilliant wit Fran Leibowitz, who had she been born 40 years earlier,
1:42.3	would have surely found a place at the Algonquin
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from KCRW, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of KCRW and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.