 I wrote a book that was initially a memoir, started out as, excuse me, I'm initially a novel, or at least I wanted it to be a novel, because it became sort of the story of my failure to be a novelist, which is frankly what I aspired to for many, many years. And that's why the title, Talk Radio and Literary Life, I work in Talk Radio and have for many years both on the commercial side, as well as for the last 15 years in public broadcasting with KQED, the local NPR affiliate. And I wanted to tell many of the stories that were in my quiver, but I also wanted to talk about the aspirations of being a writer. Someone recently said, well, you became a scholar instead and you became a broadcaster, so the problem was that you weren't a good enough liar. That may be, I mean, to be a fiction writer, I think you do have to be a good liar, at least have a more fertile imagination. So it's that story, but it's really a kind of two-fer because I also wanted to tell vignettes about many of the writers that I've been fortunate enough to have interviewed through the years and I realize that I've probably, as I say in the book, interviewed more writers than anybody should or ought to and maybe than anybody has. So what I thought I'd do this morning, this afternoon actually, is give you a kind of, you can tell I'm used to doing radio in the morning, give you a little taste of what is a two-fer. That is a snippet from sort of the part that's a memoir of life and then a part that portrays one of the writers or a couple of the writers depending on the time that I've portrayed in here or that I've given vignettes about. So this is actually something that was recently requested when I was doing the Stanford Book Festival and I was surprised that they wanted to hear this section and it was well received and so I thought I would read it to you. It's not customarily what I read from this book, but why not? When I started out in radio, I started out at a little station in Marin County called KTIM, which was Freeform Radio, which doesn't even exist anymore. Not only KTIM but Freeform Radio doesn't exist anymore. And it was a, in many ways, wonderful and enlivening experience to put it mildly. Many stories about interviewing people like Jerry Garcia and in the midst of the interview, having him take some cocaine out and put it in his nose. Stories about meeting Bob Marley and about the Plasmatics and it was a very, as I said, lively place with a lot of people going through there for the couple of years I was there. And this is a story about that era that comes from that era. I wanted also to pretty much chronicle the 60s in my own life and my own coming into awareness, which I've done. It's interesting because I wanted, in a sense, to be recognized as a novelist and to be recognized as a writer. And when I published this book, it did get some, certainly some recognition and some, for the most part, nice reviews and even was the best seller for a while. But recently, I think the high occurred when, and there are nice plugs on the back by people like Norman Mailer and Michael Cheban and Dave Eggers. I wondered if all of them had occasion to read the book. I mean, they knew me as an interlocutor and as an interviewer and they said kind things. But what came home to me recently, just by way of anecdote, had to tell you, was I was interviewing Louise Erdrich, novelist who many of you know, writes about Native American subjects and who comes from part in the Native American background. And Philip Roth was one of my early literary idols and Louise Erdrich said to me, by the way, I talked to Philip Roth the other day and he said he read your book, which surprised me and elated me, frankly. And I was kind of afraid of what she might say next. But of course, I asked, what did he say? And she said, well, he said, you know, I really like Krasny, he's a good guy and a great interviewer, and I liked his book. And somehow the first two things meant very little. I was able to kind of, I mean they were nice to hear and everything, but the third thing meant a great deal to me. So I hope that like Philip Roth, you like some of the things that I'm gonna read to you today. This is one of my early interviews when I was at this little radio station in Marin County, which I try to recreate. Barbara Boxer, by the way, was not even a Congresswoman nor a Marin County supervisor and she was doing, this'll really take us back chronologically, she was doing little short editorials called Boxer Shorts. And I was doing an interviewing show which was kind of a combination of interviewing some of the celebrated people in Marin County as well as some of the people who I thought were doing very good kind of citizenship public service type things. And I called the program, believe it or not, to my embarrassment, beyond the hot tub. The easy part for me was the interviewing, getting guests especially more celebrated guests are not to be the far greater challenge. Sally Stanford was my second interview, a famous Marinite, that's not with an O, that's with an I, who had been the madam of a house of prostitution. Stanford had published a book about her life made into a film starring Diane Cannon called A House Is Not a Home. She owned a restaurant in Sausalito called Valhalla and held forth there every night, seated in a huge chair that looked like a throne, spinning stories to whomever listened about the cat house she ran and the figure she knew, like legendary San Francisco mayor, Sonny Jim Rolf. I picked Stanford up at the Valhalla and drove her over to KTIM for the interview and I was both amused and appalled on the drive over. Appalled by what turned out to be her racism. Amused because the local paper had been running articles about prostitutes, hitchhiking in Sausalito by Highway 101 and giving drivers quick blow jobs. Thank you for opening that up for me. The newspaper called them Hitchhookers. What do you think about these hitchhookers I've been reading about Sally? I asked her as we drove to the studio. Stanford had no clue what I was talking about so I explained noting that one article reported that a hitchhooker allegedly did six guys in less than 20 minutes. Without a beat Stanford fired good business woman. Then somehow we got to talking in the car about some of the Bay Area old timers including Mel Wax, a public broadcaster who worked for many years with Roland Post. He's a nigger, Stanford blurted. I thought I was hearing things. What? I asked in disbelief. Mel Wax, he's a nigger. Well, Mel Wax is pretty dark all right, although I don't know if he was black as one of my black students said of Sadat, Wax might have not have been able to get served in the South during the Jim Crow years. But here I was confronted by that awful N word again not knowing how to respond. It was hard for me even to say the word. When I was teaching black students, James Weldon Johnson's autobiography of an ex colored man, a sweet young black woman named Sandra laughingly said, why don't you just say it, Dr. K, go ahead. By the way, I only found out recently that this is Danny Glover's wife. We've been my student all of these many years ago. So I said it right in class in front of some 30 to 40 black students. I shook my head and Galton said it before Richard Pryor went on to repudiate it and Kramer of Seinfeld flailed hecklers with it during a stand up comedy routine. It was a pedagogical imperative. No different I had decided than talking about Mark Twain's nigger Jim. The students laughed their asses off. Mel Wax isn't what you called him and that's an awful word. He's a nigger, Stanford stated flatly. Should I have taken her back to the Valhalla and refused to interview her? No, the show had to go on and I above all had to be a pro, a cardinal role. I would go ahead with the interview just as I had with Gauravadal, another horror story. Yet I felt compelled at least to speak out and I decided to do so as I pulled up with her into the parking lot of the independent journal which is the Marin newspaper. I put the car into park and turned to her with a serious look so she would know that what I had to say mattered. What I wanted to say was something with real feeling like I don't wanna have this interview get off on the wrong foot but I need to tell you that nigger is an ugly and hurtful word. I was looking her right in the eye about to say the words but I saw the overly made up face of an ignorant old woman and realized that whatever I said it would not only be futile but it would be more for me than for Sally Stanford. So I stayed mum and told myself I would speak up after the interview ended. But after talking with her for an hour politely asking her one question after another for the live broadcast it was difficult to break roll. By what passes today for good broadcasting I should have been immediately confrontational asking as my first question tell me why you still use that ugly racist n-word but this was then. Okay. Thought I'd just do a quick portrait of one of the writers and we'll be close to home here in Marin as well with Isabel Yende. Isabel Yende once said to me on air we'll keep this motif going for a moment. During the Clinton impeachment that the world had never witnessed a more expensive blow job. She also talked openly another time about having a dream of biting into a tortilla wrapped around Antonio Banderas. She is still the heretical fallen away Catholic girl who delights in body talk and sensuality and what I oxy moronically like to call in her case female virility. The only sins of the seven that really interest her in Tyser she once told me are gluttony and lust. When she came to the United States the immigration officer insisted that she was not white as she had written on the forms. He, a Latino insisted she was an other. So she showed him her breasts and asked him if they didn't look white to him. Iyende is making one of her periodic guest appearances on my radio program. My brother Victor is in the studio because he has wanted for quite some time to meet her. She is herself not unlike a house full of spirits full of warmth and charm and hearty laughter and love of good conversation. She relishes malattention and sometimes acts like a schoolgirl around her husband Willie a California lawyer whom she adores. Her father left her when she was a child and she grew up knowing she was much smarter than her brothers. She resented that they had so much more opportunity. She left her husband and the church and she left Chile after the coup against her uncle whom a surprising number of people still think was her father and whom the TV talk show host Tom Snyder once confused with Pinochet. She felt since childhood like a misfit and then grew up to love feeling like a dissident finding other women in a magazine and change as ways to channel her anger discovering both feminism and journalism as the best outlets for the immense anger she felt. Had she not found ways to channel her anger she assures me she would be quote a total bitch. Had she stayed in Chile she is certain she would have been arrested for hiding people or trying to smuggle out information or trying to get people into embassies. She spent 13 years in Venezuela then met Willie and settled in Northern California. She has sold tens of millions of books including Paula, the heart wrenching portrait of her daughter who died the book for which she wanted no money. Fans swarmed to see her in Europe and South America she has a grandmother who occasionally will slap her grandchildren and his own grandmother was supposed to have moved a bowl of sugar by telekinesis. She hates nationalism and swears that a good prayer the Lord's prayer can always catch a taxi cab. Memory allende tells me is like smoke imagination and memory of the same process and languages like blood. Separation made her a writer. Once she left Chile she always had an accent. She wouldn't be a writer of fiction today without having left everything behind. So I wanted to capture that sense of many writers. I hope I did and I thank you for your attention.