talking to oneself in a mirror.

It has taken me this long to find Michael Silverblatt but now I have I can feel an new obsession coming on. He has a program called bookworm on KCRW and I have been listening to their archives all afternoon. Also this month the believer magazine has an interview with him.

BLVR: So how do you read? Do you read as a writer, an academic, or a fan?

MS: No one ever gave me any flashcards telling me the difference between those things. I read like someone who has been subjected at one point or another to virtually every stimulus that is appropriate to literature. Let me give you some examples. When I was in junior high, Stephen Sondheim started publishing what were called “Cryptic Crosswords” in New York magazine. They are astonishing, extraordinary crossword puzzles, nothing like American crossword puzzles in that they have puns and anagrams. Sometimes they’re three-dimensional. Sometimes you enter the words as a knight would move across a chessboard. Sometimes you take the crossword and cut it up into pieces as indicated and reshape it so it forms a quotation or a syllogism. A typical clue goes like this: “Broken harmonicas floating in Manhattan, for example.” Now that is a very clear clue to someone who does this kind of puzzle. You take harmonicas and you break it, rearrange the letters, broken harmonicas, and if you have the patience you discover that harmonicas rearranges to Maraschino and you would find a maraschino floating in a Manhattan, for example. This led me to read funny.