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Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberg.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today my guest is Jonathan Leatham.

He's the author, most recently, of the ecstasy of influence.

It's a collection of his nonfiction, his personal essays, his reviews, his diaries and journals. It's a kind of autobiographical work composed out of the readings and the essays he wrote about hitchhiking to California when before he was even a beginning writer.

And it's very inspired. It's very lively and it's very funny. What do you think makes for

lively literary writing? Oh, boy. Well, thanks, thanks, Michael, for the high praise. I mean, you know, my model for this book, the thing I kind of wanted to aim at was what Kurt Vonnegut calls in Palm Sunday, naming that book, an autobiographical collage. But I had, especially in mind, Norman Mailer's

version of the autobiographical collage advertisements for myself, which is a kind of contentious

and anxious book. He's really trying to define or redefine his sense of himself and his purpose

as a writer at the point that he put it together.

Another example that spoke to me was Cortazar. Julio Cortezar has a book called Around the Day in 80 Worlds, which makes a kind of book out of innumerable, tiny, disparate, kind of centrifugal fragments.

And somehow does make it into something not just larger than the sum of its parts, but larger than the usual sort of book.

It becomes a kind of giant Roershock blot, something you can go at from many angles and find different

things reflected there at different times.

Let's paint a picture for our listeners, Jonathan.

Let's make a composite portrait of the artist as a young or no longer young man.

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