2016-07-01
50 分钟Ben Lerner joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss John Berger’s “Woven, Sir,” from a 2001 issue of the magazine.
This is the New Yorker fiction podcast from the New Yorker magazine.
I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at the New Yorker.
Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss.
This month we're going to hear woven sir by John Berger, which was published in the New Yorker in April of 2001.
His name is Tylereghenous.
His first name escapes me, probably because I remember that it signified a lot.
His first name, whatever it was, evoked the mystery that surrounded him above all, the mystery of the defeat he had suffered.
I always addressed him as sir.
The story was chosen by Ben Lerner, author of the novels leaving the Atocha station and 1004, as well as three collections of poetry.
Hi, Ben.
Hi.
Hello.
So, like you, John Berger is a fiction writer, a poet, an essayist, someone who writes a lot about art.
Was that part of what drew you to his work?
Yeah, definitely.
He calls himself a storyteller, which I think is the word that's supposed to unite all his practices.
But I've always been really amazed by the relation of poetry to his fiction.
Like, a lot of his novels have poems inside them, like Pig Earth, the first volume of the into their labors trilogy.
And I really love his writing about art.
I've learned a lot from it, and I admire his political commitments.