So, sometimes, it can be an active, shaping force and other times, as in the case of The Wizard of Oz, it's just gratuitous and stupid and I wish I hadn't done it. Because the book arrives at the form and style that it does as a compensation for my not having recourse to G major and D minor. So, for instance, with the jazz book, it's absolutely eminent to that book's conception that I didn't know anything about the technical side of music. It's always stuck in my mind, that line of Pynchon's in that introduction to his book of early stories Slow Learner: "Ignorance is not just a blank space on a person's mental map, it has its own contours and coherence." It can be epistemological but it can be some kind of shaping force. Other things about not knowing are quite important. I've already come to regret those rather pointless lines about never having seen The Wizard of Oz and saying I won't. Well, nowadays it's so easy to dig for information the answer to anything is only a few searches away. When you hit something that you may be ignorant about, at what point do you dig for information and at one point are you satisfied not to know something? You mention both The Wizard of Oz and Przewalski's horse at different times and let the reader know you don't plan on learning about them. And there's this kind of wager there, that by addressing a particular thing very, very precisely, you may be able to articulate some universal truth. With this particular book, I was aware that although cinema had been a big part of my life, I'd weirdly not written much about it. But what's kept me going is that I've kept coming across things I'm interested in and become preoccupied by. I've been worried throughout my career that I was not going to be capable of it for much longer. How come?" A very stupid question, but he said, "It's because every book I believe will be my last." And that holds true for me as well. I remember asking John Berger in public, onstage, "You've written all these books. You could derive great value from The Success and Failure of Picasso whether you were a Picasso scholar or you knew nothing about him.Īt one point, you write, "Do you think I would spend my time summarizing the action of this film if I was capable of writing anything else?" Which is interesting, because given your multifarious body of work, you seem capable of dipping into anything that strikes your fancy. And his books about them also became works of art in their own right. It seemed to me what Berger did was make boring, old oil paintings look interesting. The second part of my answer would be my long apprenticeship to John Berger. It dealt with some of the main issues of the play, was great fun to read-whereas so much criticism was so boring-and crucially, it was a work of art in its own right. After reading Julius Caesar and then all the academic criticism about it, I came across this poem by Roy Fuller called "The Ides of March." It was a dramatic monologue written through the voice of Brutus, and it seemed to me a fantastically economic piece of literary criticism.
Well, the first part of my answer would be something I distinctly remember while studying English literature at Oxford.
Was there something in your youth or education that served this purpose for you and made you think, I'd like to do that? Many of your essays have that potential for a reader one may not have seen the original artwork you're discussing, but may connect to it through you.
#GEOFF DYER SPACE IN TIME MOVIE#
I read Zona and then watched Stalker, so in a sense, I felt I was seeing the movie through your eyes. We spoke with him before he hopped the pond for a weekend of events in the city. lately: an essay collection, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition a meditation on WWI just published in the States, The Missing of the Somme and his latest, Zona, a pointillistic examination of Andrei Tarkovsky's much celebrated (and snoozed-through) 1979 film, Stalker. The term nonfiction doesn't stick to writer and novelist Geoff Dyer when engaging his subjects in essay form, this Brit combines a rigorous scholarship and criticism with whimsical digressions, both fictional and autobiographical, to create the light but heady concoction that's become his signature.
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