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Tag: geoff dyer

Published February 17, 2012

Something for the Weekend

Zona, Geoff Dyer’s book about Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker,  reviewed at The Daily Telegraph:

Zona’s subheading insists it’s “a book about a film about a journey to a room”. Literally speaking it is. Tarkovsky’s Stalker forms the foundations. Dyer retraces the cinematography faithfully and beautifully. So beautifully, in fact, that I found it difficult not to start falling again for Tarkovsky. But Zona is also about an author on the verge of a nervous breakdown. “I mean, do you think I would be spending my time summarising the action of a film almost devoid of action if I was capable of writing about anything else?” Dyer writes, as if about to explode.

See also: The Guardian. And in a lovely twist, Dyer, a nominee for Hatchet Job of the Year, reviewed by the eventual winner Adam Mars-Jones at The Spectator.

Meanwhile, an interview with the man himself at Guernica Magazine:

I’m most interested in the book which is completely un-sellable on the basis of a proposal or contract. One of the reasons so many nonfiction books are so boring is because what they’ve done, very diligently, is fulfill the terms of their proposals—they’ve written up their proposal, long-form, and often what this does is then set up a sort of serial deal, where the whole book can essentially be reduced back to the size of the original proposal! What I really like about this book is that the proposal would be turned down instantly: there’s nothing to propose. Nicholson Baker talks about the way in which the most successful nonfiction books are those that can be boiled down into an argument so that everybody can wade in with an opinion without having to undergo the inconvenience of having to read the book itself. The more you can condense it, the better. Malcolm Gladwell is the supreme exponent of this: Blink—oh yeah, I get it! “Blink.” That’s all you need to know.

(pictured above, the UK edition of Zona published by Canongate. Design: Rafaela Romaya / Canongate Art Dept. Photograph: Mosfilm. The book is published by Pantheon in the US)

And in non-Geoff Dyer related news…

A remarkable set of the Paris Review covers at social media site of the moment Pinterest.

And finally…

At The Guardian, Sukhdev Sandhu charts the rise of radical alternative publishers, and talks to some of the contributors to the Zero Books imprint, including Nina Power:

The book still retains a curiously weighty status in comparison to blogs. A book is a snapshot of whatever it was you felt was interesting at that moment, and it’s fixed in aspic, which can have its drawbacks.

There’s an appeal to physical books, particularly short books like most of the Zer0 catalogue, at the moment: the physical form provides some relief from the relentless pressure of the online environment. It’s very difficult to keep one’s attention on online content – the temptation to click away is always there. In conditions where your attention is besieged in that way, short essayistic books, which you can read in one afternoon, come into their own.

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Published February 10, 2012

Something for the Weekend

James Victore shares his workspace with From The Desk Of.

Burn Unit — At the New York Times ‘Bits’ blog, David Streitfeld writes on Amazon’s recent image problems:

[Take] the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek two weeks ago. It shows a book in flames with the headline, “Amazon wants to burn the book business.” What was remarkable was not just the overt Nazi iconography but the fact that it did not cause any particular uproar. In the struggle over the future of intellectual commerce in the United States, apparently even evocations of Joseph Goebbels and the Brown Shirts are considered fair game.

Witheringly Obscure — Wired Magazine talks to William Gibson about Distrust That Particular Flavor and collecting antique watches:

[It] was really about pursuing a totally unnecessary and gratuitous body of really, really esoteric knowledge. It wasn’t about accumulating a bunch of objects. It was about getting into something utterly, witheringly obscure, but getting into it at the level of, like, an extreme sport. I met some extraordinarily weird people. I met guys who could say, “Well, I’ve got this really rare watch, and it’s missing this little piece. Where might I find one?” Then the guy would kind of stare into space for a while, and then he’d say this address in Cairo, and he’d say, “It’s in the back room. The guy’s name is Alif, and he won’t sell, but he would trade it to you if you had this or this.” And it wasn’t bullshit. It was kind of like a magical universe. It was very interesting. But once I’d gotten that far … I got to a certain point, and there was just nowhere else to go with it. The journey was complete.

Magic Journalism — Writer Geoff Dyer chooses five unusual histories for The Browser:

[T]ypically, I guess, you read history books for the content – that sounds an unbelievably stupid comment – and you’re drawn to certain works of history rather than others because you’re interested in the period. You read Stalingrad by Antony Beevor because you’re interested in the Second World War, or Russia or whatever. Whereas it seemed to me that the thing about these books was that you might be interested in the subject, but it’s the way that the subject is dealt with that is the distinguishing feature of each one.

And finally…

A long article for Intelligent Life  on ceramicist Edmund de Waal and the double-edged success of his memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes:

In the 18 months since the book came out, de Waal has completed six overseas book tours, given dozens of talks, answered hundreds if not thousands of questions. He has also kept his porcelain-making studio busy and has plans for a subsequent book, about the history of porcelain around the world, which will take him from 18th-century Plymouth to the hillsides outside Jingdezhen where porcelain was first made in China, via Dresden, Marco Polo’s Venice, Istanbul and Yemen. “Porcelain”, he says, “is light when most things are heavy. It rings clear when you tap it. You can see the sunlight shine through. It is in the category of materials that turn objects into something else. It is alchemy. Porcelain starts elsewhere, takes you elsewhere. Who could not be obsessed?”

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Published November 9, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Expanded Original — Geoff Dyer, author of Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, on Penguin Modern Classics and the paintings used on their covers:

The use of different paintings meant each book was a “modern classic” in its own particular way. A side effect was that books I was reading for an education in literature doubled as an introduction to art history… Since then the happiest moments in 35 years of museum-going have occurred when I’ve seen these Penguin Modern Classic paintings on a gallery wall. Especially since the cover often showed only a detail of the original. Seeing the works themselves revealed exactly what had been lost, though I invariably saw it the other way around, with the painting as an expanded version of the Penguin original.

Sci-Fi Diet — Mike Doherty interviews Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story and Absurdistan, in Caplansky’s Delicatessen in downtown Toronto:

“My cholesterol is in the science-fiction realm,” he says. You’d expect him to be gargantuan, like Misha Vainberg, the gourmand oligarch from Absurdistan who’s always asking his manservant to make him meat pies, but Shteyngart is a slight fellow, with big black-rimmed glasses and a perpetually amused mien. He’s an ideal dining companion, if you’re not a rabid vegetarian, his speech a mixture of astute cultural observations, probing bons mots and moans of contentment.

That Synching Feeling — James Meek, author of  The People’s Act of Love, on e-books and social reading:

Once there were private libraries; then there were public libraries; now there is the ghost library, where poltergeistic fellow readers may not only be reading the same book as you at any moment but actually underlining the page of the book you are reading seconds before you get to it. They may be next door; they may be in Kamchatka; they may be anywhere, so long as they have Kindle and wifi.

And finally…

An epic two–part interview with John Hodgman, whose new book That Is All has just been published, at the AV Club. It is totally worth it, if only for the extended rant about children, mortality, the apocalypse and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road:

I did a little math, and was like, “Wait a minute, Cormac McCarthy is like 75 years old! And he has a 12-year-old son! No wonder he wrote this book!” I’m like, “Cormac McCarthy, you jerk, you’re not talking about the apocalypse, you’re talking about your personal apocalypse, because you’re an old man who’s not going to get to see his son grow up. That’s what this book is about. And for you, it feels like the end of civilization, and an intolerable world, and you can’t say goodbye to a son that you can’t guide through this awful world that allows you, an old person, to die.” I’m like, “How dare you, Cormac McCarthy, put me through all that when you’re the one going through this personal apocalypse?”

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