Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm happy to have as my guest, Jeff Dyer, whose most recent book is a book called The

Ongoing Moment.

It's published by Pantheon, and it's a book largely about photography,

particularly American photography, and it is by the author, among other things, of yoga for people

who can't be bothered to do it, Paris trance out of sheer rage and the marvelous book that is in a way a previous attempt

in this vein but beautiful, a book about jazz.

Now, first of all, the only thing I could think of to describe the methodology here was something

that Hugh Kenner said when he was writing the pound era. He called it the x-ray moving picture of an age.

And this is something like a cloud that moves and takes different shapes

as it presents a series of improvisations, really, and responses to photography, to particular photographs,

ideas about photography.

But it's an ongoing analysis, that is to say, the sections, though brief, lead to one

another, and there are shades so that really there's no place, or very

few places where it's appropriate to put the book down. How did you describe what you were doing?

Yeah, it does have that pause.

You're right.

...