This week’s podcast with Malcolm Margolin featured so many great quotes, I don’t want to limit it to the 2 or 3 I put in the show notes for the episode. So here’s a big ol’ compendium of What Malcolm Said:
- “For years I’d been a slave to the in-box. Being out of the loop was a little disconcerting.”
- “What got me into publishing was to attract beautiful women.”
- “On the outside, I can create things I could never create on the inside.”
- “What I’m passing on to people is . . . the capacity to have fun. To have a life that you can build around. Not branding, and not the demands of the marketplace, but what you really think and what you want.”
- “Dressing Indians up to be perfect victims does them a disservice. What I’ve tried to do is get beyond the ‘dress code’.”
- “In some ways I feel regret; the irony is that I was so active in preserving other people’s cultures and languages, but I let mine go.”
- “As Phil Levine said, ‘Why be yourself when with a little bit of effort you can be interesting?'”
- “One of the biggest changes in the course of my life is the growing dominance of salesmanship in everything we do.”
- “Our culture takes knowledge and structures it around the sense of time. We have history. One thing led to another, and that’s causality. . . . We know the history of institutions, of genealogies. The Indians had none of that. Time is flat. Indians structured their knowledge around place.”
- “Their whole world was filled with stories, and the stories talked to one another.”
- “I’m an emotion junkie. If I can go more than a few hours without breaking into tears, it’s a wasted day.”
- “I’m not sure I know anything you couldn’t talk me out of in 5 minutes.”
- “I think if there’s an inscription on my headstone, it should be, ‘He was easy to please.’”
Now go listen to the podcast!
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. Malcolm is the author/editor of eight books including 
, named by the San Francisco Chronicle as one of the hundred most important books of the 20th century by a western writer. His essays and articles have appeared in a number of periodicals including The Nation, Small Press, National Parks, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Los Angeles Times. He retired from his role as publisher at Heyday Books this year.
digital recorder (because I screwed up with my main recorder). I recorded the intro and outro on a 
feeding into a 
. Processing was done in Audacity and Logic Pro. Photos of Malcolm by me.
(Viking). We talk about her deep dive into a dead language, the 
. Other highlights of her career include the US hardcover debuts of: George R. R. Martin, Graham Swift, Mary Gaitskill, Patrick McGrath, Clive Barker, Frank Zappa, Michael Moore, Siri Hustvedt, and Kristin Hannah. She was the editor of Steven Millhauser’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 
, and Yann Martel’s Booker Prize-winning 
. In 2008 she became a freelance editor and began studying Latin, which she continues to do. She teaches Latin to teenagers at her local library in Red Hook, New York. 
digital recorder. I recorded the intro and outro on a 
(Center for Hellenic Studies Press, 2016). Glynnis’ background is in art and art history: a BA from University of Oregon, a BFA from the Pacific NW College of Art, and MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Tufts University. During a Fulbright fellowship to Cyprus, she published a book of paintings, Archaeology Lives in Cyprus, and a book of cartoons, Cartoons of Cyprus. She spent almost 10 years working as an illustrator on archaeological projects and excavations in Cyprus, Turkey, Syria, Israel, and Lebanon, and continues to work in Greece. She began a doctorate at the University of Wollongong in Australia, but instead of finishing, married the famous archeo-musicologist John Franklin and had some children (now in school). She has exhibited paintings in Boston, London, Nicosia, Wollongong, at the Laura Russo Gallery in Portland, OR, and in Burlington, VT, where she now lives. She teaches a course in Comics at the University of Vermont and drawing at Champlain College. Glynnis is a member of the NY-based web comic collective 
, drawn by Leland Purvis (Abrams ComicArts). We get into how Jim went from nuclear engineering to writing comics about scientists, the amazing life of Alan Turing, why emotional truth plus factual truth must be greater than 100%, the challenge of conveying hard concepts and theories to lay-readers, the difference between ordinary geniuses and extraordinary geniuses, how his engineering background feeds his storytelling mode, and more! 
, 
, the New York Times bestseller 
, and the recently published 
, what contemporary books look like they’ll last, and why he eventually came around on Faulkner. 
(Norton), and is a columnist at 
feeding into a 
digital recorder. Intro was recorded on the same setup. Photo of Mr. Mikics by me.
(Little, Brown and Library of Congress, 2014), 
(W.W. Norton, 2012), 
(W.W. Norton and LC, 2009), 
(HarperCollins and LC, 2009), 
(Abrams and LC, 2006), 
(Library of Congress, 1999), and 
(Knopf and LC, 1997). His work has been featured in such magazines as American Heritage, National Geographic, Civilization and Smithsonian.