I knew this moment well from previous literary pilgrimages: you look and look and try to summon up feelings which don’t exist.” Culture, he knows, must continuously push against the carapace of its own extrusions. Coming at last to Lawrence’s house in Sicily, he writes: “We had found it. “It is not easy to be unpretentious, simple, direct, honest and yet intelligent,” he quotes from Gedney’s notebooks-but Dyer consistently manages it. It’s just the way he thinks: with and through the totality of everything he has read, heard, and seen. He’s clever, but he’s never “clever.” His writing is dense with quotations and allusions-you sometimes feel them stacked above the argument, like planes waiting to land-but not because he is trying to impress us. He confesses unabashedly to skimming, and doesn’t mind if we know that he has never seen The Wizard of Oz. He isn’t worried about having the right opinions or scoring points off the conventional wisdom. There’s no pretense and no pretentiousness. Since he really doesn’t seem to care what people think, Dyer looks at the book or the photograph, not over his shoulder. “I’ve done pretty much as I pleased, letting life find its own rhythm, working when I felt like it, not working when I didn’t.”ĪLL THIS HAS MADE for a great deal of very good criticism. “Increasingly at ease with the vagaries of my nature, I came to relish the way that getting interested in one thing led to my becoming very interested in something else,” he remarks. One book draws forth another one thought brings on the next.
#GEOFF DYER SPACE IN TIME MOVIE#
Both Yoga and The Ongoing Moment mention Andrei Tarkovsky’s movie Stalker, the subject of Dyer’s latest volume, Zona. But Beautiful, his book about jazz, is built as much from photographs as music later he wrote The Ongoing Moment, which bushwhacks a path through the history of the former medium. Out of Sheer Rage, Dyer’s book about Lawrence, takes a swipe at the yoga cult a subsequent volume, the collection of travel pieces, was titled Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It. “He lived out the ideal of the artist who produces-who works-for his or her own sake more exactly, for the sake of the task itself.” Introducing a collection of his own work, Dyer echoes the sentiment: “I have always written without any regard for the presumed audience of a given publication.” His wandering career (a word he hates, by the way) is the itinerary of a mind moving freely through the world. In an introduction to a collection of his photographs and journals, Dyer writes of Gedney’s “program of intensely private, creative self-sufficiency,” which was driven by an autodidact’s appetite for illumination. Gedney read incessantly, not only kept but physically produced his own notebooks, and exhibited relatively little of his work, even after he achieved success. Paris, Rome, North Africa, India, Southeast Asia-above all, as for Lawrence, America, especially the rawness and vastness of its western reaches.īut Dyer’s highest ideal can be found, I think, in a more obscure figure, the American photographer William Gedney, who died of AIDS in 1989. Better to light out for more erotic latitudes, as Dyer, following Lawrence’s global trajectory, has done. England, to both, is a damp and hateful little rock to break the spirit on. Not surprisingly, he also has the older writer’s rancor for their native country. A scholarship boy at Oxford who has said that his real education began after graduation, when he was on the dole in Brixton and reading everything he could lay his hands on, Dyer has Lawrence’s restlessness, willfulness, truculence, and unapologetic sensuality.
Dyer also grew up working-class his grandfathers were farm laborers, his father a sheet-metal worker, his mother a lunch lady at a local school. With Lawrence, the kinship is a matter of background and temperament.
“If something occurs that moves me deeply-the kind of experience that might provide inspiration for a poet-my instinct is to articulate and analyze it in an essay,” Dyer has written.
#GEOFF DYER SPACE IN TIME SERIES#
The former, the subject of Dyer’s first volume and the author of a long series of idiosyncratic works, many of them hybrids of criticism and personal reflection, showed him the kind of writer he wanted to be.
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