Bookworm: clock stopping

Written by:Stephen Mitchelmore.

A reminder of an excellent audio resource: Bookworm of KCRW radio in California. I’m listening to Martin Amis discussing Yellow Dog with Michael Silverblatt. Much prefer to listen to the man than to read his books! He talks about how ‘a massively unsmiling event’ affected his work on the novel. He goes on to talk about ‘the culture’ having passed by the ‘clock-stopping’ age of literary writing. When reading a New Yorker article on Iraq, he says, that also has a poem on the page, one’s eye excludes the poem - this oasis of clock-stopping - because one cannot be doing with such disengagement with the world. Yet, I would ask, isn’t that the case with the article on Iraq too? Isn’t that threatening the same breach? And what would be the consequences of ignoring it?

There are dozens of other interviews with other authors, half of whom I haven’t heard of. The remarkable thing is: they actually talk about the author’s book. We don’t have radio interviews with authors over here: more fear of content.

Posted on July 17th, 2004.

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