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Bookworm

Vivian Gornick: The Odd Woman and the City

Bookworm

KCRW

Arts

4.5606 Ratings

🗓️ 21 July 2016

⏱️ 29 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Vivian Gornick's memoir The Odd Woman and the City takes us on a tour of a life that is lived by walking, observing and talking. Gornick keeps her eyes open, and does she ever have a mouth on her!

Transcript

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0:00.0

Podcast. Listen to the organist, the culturally omnivorous, intellectually ravenous podcast

0:08.3

from the editors of the Believer magazine. Part of poetry is learning how to speak. Chili, Billy,

0:15.3

I am also a horse. I really value my life, even though I know it's debatable whether I'm even really alive.

0:23.0

The right reading for this is the one I'm giving it.

0:25.9

Find the organist on KCRW.com or wherever you download podcasts.

0:31.8

Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

0:37.3

Boots.

0:40.6

Where would we be without boos?

0:44.4

Where would we be without good?

0:46.6

No, Timberg.

0:48.2

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

0:51.5

But where would we be without books?

0:55.1

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

1:00.9

Today I have a writer with me who I've wanted to speak to for a long time, but since for such a long

1:08.8

time, I maintain the perhaps incorrect stance that I only do literary fiction and poetry on bookworm.

1:19.8

And Vivian Gornick, my guest, has been writing memoirs and works of, well, for lack of a better word, we'll call them literary criticism.

1:29.9

I would say their literary perception.

1:32.8

And it was to my great pleasure when I read the odd woman in the city

1:40.4

and realized that the book, now in paperback, well, that Vivian would be in Los Angeles.

1:50.2

I said, stop being a fool, Michael.

1:53.0

It's time when you read a memoir that moves you to look at it the way any other work of art

2:00.7

that moves you.

...

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