The Story of America, Pt. 1

Bookworm

KCRW

Arts

4.5 • 606 Ratings

🗓️ 16 August 2023

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Claudia Rankine, award-winning poet and author of Citizen: An American Lyric, a book-length poem about the pernicious racism of American daily life, hosts the first of a three-part episode on the story of America, as told through literary fiction. Over the decades Michael Silverblatt spoke with hundreds of writers about America — its foundation, its history, its challenges, and its culture. This episode reveals the story of America as the story of race. We’ll hear from David Foster Wallace, Russell Banks, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, William H. Gass, Joan Didion, and Claudia Rankine herself.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.
0:03.7	Boots!
0:08.7	Where would we be without booms?
0:12.6	Where would we be without good?
0:14.8	No, Tensberg.
0:16.4	It's a rhetorical question, sir.
0:19.7	But where would we need without books?
0:24.5	From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Claudia Rankin.
0:31.3	Welcome to a bookworm retrospective show, a celebration of 33 years of bookworm on KCRW with Michael Silverblatt.
0:41.9	Michael recorded more than 1,600 bookworm conversations.
0:47.4	He is on a hiatus right now for health reasons.
0:52.5	In 1996, Michael spoke with writer David Foster Walsh about his novel, Infinite Gest. In the
1:00.3	conversation, David revealed his intentions in his approach to writing Infinite Gest.
1:06.5	I don't think I really understood what loneliness was when I was a young man. And now I've got a much less clear idea of what the point of art is,
1:14.6	but I think it's got something to do with loneliness
1:16.2	and something to do with setting up a conversation between human beings.
1:20.9	And I know that when I started this book, I wanted to...
1:24.1	I had very vague and not very ambitious ambitions. And one was I wanted to do something really sad. I had very vague and not very ambitious ambitions.
1:28.7	And one was I wanted to do something really sad.
1:31.0	I'd done comedy before.
1:32.2	I wanted to do something really sad.
1:33.7	And I wanted to do something about what was sad about America.
	...

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