Saroyan and Godine talk shop

Aram Saroyan and David R. Godine have a lot to talk about. Godine has just published Saroyan's book Door to the River: Essays and Reviews from the 1960s into the Digital Age—selections from which first appeared here on the Poetry Foundation site—and Saroyan was born with the raconteur's gift, so hearing them in conversation on this podcast on Godine’s blog is a seventy-minute treat. The tone for the conversation is set by Saroyan reading from his essay “The Driver: Reflections on Jack Kerouac,” which chronicles Saroyan, Ted Berrigan, and Duncan McNaughton attempting to interview Kerouac for the Paris Review. To Saroyan’s surprise, Kerouac was stout, had a potbelly, and seemed “more like a crazy guy in a bar.”

The two quote from De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (“Democracy not only infuses a taste for letters among the trading classes, but introduces a trading spirit into literature”), muse on universal literacy, how reading enough books helps one temper experience and character (“If you read enough books, you know that the evil is inside each of us”), and how literature has the power to change the direction of a country (citing Uncle Tom’s Cabin).

Most important, their discussion on the future of publishing puts what’s going on right now in a lineage of literary evolution: they discuss the changing concept of publishers as gatekeepers of taste and culture. They talk lulu.com, missing the feel of threads in the middle of old paperbacks, and how years from now, we’ll all have forgotten how to turn on our Kindles because something else will have come along. Enjoy.