2023-06-26 05:57:26
Reading Geoff Dyer, there is no room (and there is a lot, there is room for almost everything) but to wonder what it will be like to live and coexist with the head of Geoff Dyer. And the answer is both sophisticatedly simple and simply complex: Dyer’s head (UK, 1958) is like a Dyer book. I mean, it’s like most restless and joyful and surprising of the mental centrifugations where there is space from a deep analysis of the impossibility of writing a biography of DH Lawrence (one of his heroes, along with John Berger), through a frame-by-frame dissection of the film ‘Stalker’ by Andrei Tarkovsky, to a diary of his two weeks aboard an American aircraft carrier without neglecting his ear for jazz, his eye for photography, and his consumption of controlled substances that only further expand his already expansive universe where, in his opinion, there is no writer more overrated and boring than Saul Bellow.
Author Geoff Dyer Editorial Random House Year 2023 Pages 344 Price 20.90 euros
As Dyer once explained, as an existential credo, in an interview: “People still feel the need to go from one place to another. And they are usually disappointed when they arrive. But there are times when all our expectations are met. And it’s a wonderful moment: the certainty that we are where we have to be. In a way it’s like finally being home, but a long way from home.” Hence, there are no limits or frontiers for this virtual and virtuous and almost bipolar psycho-physical ‘flâneur’ and master of the digressive-concentrated neo-Time.news who, moreover, is the author of at least one masterful novel: ‘Love in Venice, death in Benares.
And in ‘The last days of Roger Federer and other endings’, Dyer orders and calibrates with joy, paradoxically elegiac, another of his precise presentations where the miscellany ends up being something rigorously indivisible under a lapidary leitmotif: the ever closer date of no more and the house loses and the final ‘match-point’. Thus (with the figure of the artist of the tennis genius in the title), Dyer deals and cares about the figure of the artist in the twilight for, as a match start, pose your own decadence in that sport and his waning resistance to the rigors of one of his obligatory stopovers: the Burning Man festival, which he already reported on, a few years younger, in ‘Yoga for those who go beyond yoga’.
And from there, anything goes and everything has value. And they are all invited—studied at the punctually late hour—to Dyer’s vigil: Louise Glück, Ruskin, Robert Redford, Kerouac, Beethoven, Anthony Powell, Bob Dylan (one point less for the scant benefit he gets and the almost contempt that he devotes to the magnificent and almost agonizing ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ of the one who, sure, archetypal and paradigmatic, patented the idea of ’forever old’ already at the end of the last millennium), Jean Rhys, Wagner, Bill Murray, Larkin, Coltrane, Nietzsche, The Clash, KunderTurner, Colonel Blimp, Martin Amis and, of course, as all of them radiate Geoff Dyer functioning as connective tissue and at the same time intermediary but leading voice of an accomplice medium.
A lapidary leitmotiv: the ever closer date of the no-go and the house loses and the final ‘match-point’
all and all with one raised-browed, high-culture eye and another winking spasmodically for, Dyer recommends here, “after a stage in a man’s life—especially if he has reached a degree of eminence—it is essential that he retain some residue of how he viewed the world at fourteen.” And it is this charming psychopathy between maturity and playfulness, between the phlegmatic five o’clock tea and the psychedelic hallucinogenic mushroom —which has earned him a critique by Vivian Gornick where he almost begs him to grow up at once— that allows him to reconcile his appreciations on the most precise with, let’s say, his ‘pharaonic company’ of not buying shampoo again for the rest of his life, opting to steal it from hotels (a company that is complicated by the confinement due to the covid that, yes, also has time and place in the book).
project shampoo
Dyer explains and justifies himself: «The shampoo project was one of the things that made my life was pleasant and valuable, and gave it a purpose that suddenly disappeared or seemed completely useless. There were many things like that, and now they are almost all gone. I have never had any great goals, ambitions, or dreams, but I have always had so many little plans, tricks, ploys, hobbies, and interests going on that I have never felt the lack of a greater purpose or the need for greater consolation.”
If this is true, if Dyer truly feels this way, we can only congratulate ourselves for his so ambitious lack of ambition from its beginning to its end.
Happy bubbly headwash, from Dyer’s head.
#Geoff #Dyer #twilight