Where you at, Atwood?

In October, Harriet posted on the Silver Car Sessions, a YouTube video series that features interview with poets filmed in a car—seems like a sedan. The videos are intimate not only because they feature close-ups of poets’ faces, which implies a sort of intimacy, but because the pixilated quality of the video / YouTube compression give the series the air of the home-spun. This week, the installment is particularly delicious—an interview with Margaret Atwood, conducted entirely by splicing video of her interview with Bill Moyer (filmed on a computer screen, at that!) with questions posed from the front seat of the silver car in question. The episode is great because not only does it question the dominant form of the taped interview, which privileges formality and authority, but it questions the authorship of the interview itself—as if questions and answers no longer need to be in “real-time” to be relevant to each other.