{"id":17091,"date":"2024-10-15T20:30:25","date_gmt":"2024-10-16T00:30:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/?p=17091"},"modified":"2024-10-16T16:55:12","modified_gmt":"2024-10-16T20:55:12","slug":"episode-608-sven-birkerts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/episode-608-sven-birkerts","title":{"rendered":"Episode 608 – Sven Birkerts"},"content":{"rendered":"

Virtual Memories Show 608:
\nSven Birkerts<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/traffic.libsyn.com\/secure\/virtualmemories\/Episode_608_-_Sven_Birkerts.mp3<\/a><\/audio><\/div>

Podcast: Play in new window<\/a> | Download<\/a><\/p>

Subscribe: Spotify<\/a> | TuneIn<\/a> | RSS<\/a> | More<\/a><\/p>\n

“What fascinates me most \u2014 what I find most exciting \u2014 when I’m writing is when I find the smallest possible thing that will open out into the biggest possible thing.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>Author & essayist Sven Birkerts<\/a> returns to the show to celebrate his fantastic new essay collection, The Mir\u00f3 Worm and the Mysteries of Writing<\/a> (Arrowsmith Press). We talk about the estrangement of the everyday, the problem of other minds, how serendipity tells us something about where we are, authors’ photos and self-mythologizing, moving house (& turning 70) during COVID, and the inspiration of Cortazar’s Around the Day in Eighty Worlds<\/a>. We get into the threat of AI to writing, reading, and thinking, opening up to ambivalence, why people find it so tough to say the word “soul”, Kierkegaard & Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer<\/a> & being on The Search, and wondering what Bob Dylan is like in the kitchen in the morning. We also discuss writers’ homes & graves and the myth of inspiration, his new Sketches From Memory<\/em> essays and how they’ve opened him up as a writer, how we build circles of affinity, how his father’s career as an architect influenced his eye (but not his writing), why people find it so tough to say the word “soul”, and more. Give it a listen!<\/a> And go read The Mir\u00f3 Worm and the Mysteries of Writing<\/a>!<\/p>\n

And go listen to our 2017<\/a>, lockdown<\/a>, and 2021<\/a> conversations!<\/em><\/p>\n

“I don’t know if empathy is given, or if it’s something that life teaches us, or something we resist and don’t have.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n