Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews

by Geoff Dyer

Overview

*Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism*
*A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice*
*A New York Times Top 10 Nonfiction Book of the Year, as selected by Dwight Garner*

Geoff Dyer has earned the devotion of passionate fans on both sides of the Atlantic through his wildly inventive, romantic novels as well as several brilliant, uncategorizable works of nonfiction. All the while he has been writing some of the wittiest, most incisive criticism we have on an astonishing array of subjects—music, literature, photography, and travel journalism—that, in Dyer's expert hands, becomes a kind of irresistible self-reportage.

Otherwise Known as the Human Condition collects twenty-five years of essays, reviews, and misadventures. Here he is pursuing the shadow of Camus in Algeria and remembering life on the dole in Brixton in the 1980s; reflecting on Richard Avedon and Ruth Orkin, on the status of jazz and the wonderous Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, on the sculptor ZadKine and the saxophonist David Murray (in the same essay), on his heroes Rebecca West and Ryszard Kapus´cin´ski, on haute couture and sex in hotels. Whatever he writes about, his responses never fail to surprise. For Dyer there is no division between the reflective work of the critic and the novelist's commitment to lived experience: they are mutually illuminating ways to sharpen our perceptions. His is the rare body of work that manages to both frame our world and enlarge it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555975791
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	03/29/2011
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Geoff Dyer is the author of four novels and five genre-defying books, including But Beautiful; Out of Sheer Rage, which was a National Book Critics Circle finalist; and, most recently, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. He lives in London.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations xi

Introduction 3

Visuals

Jacques Henri Lartigue and the Discovery of India 9

Robert Capa 12

If I Die in a Combat Zone 15

Ruth Orkin's V-E Day 20

Richard Avedon 25

Enrique Metinides 31

Joel Sternfeld's Utopian Visions 36

Alec Soth: Riverrun 40

Richard Misrach 44

William Gedney 51

Michael Ackerman 67

Miroslav Tichý 71

Saving Grace: Todd Hido 78

Idris Khan 82

Edward Burtynsky 87

Turner and Memory 91

The American Sublime 95

The Awakening of Stones: Rodin 100

Ecce Homo 113

Verbals

D. H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers 123

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Beautiful and Damned 129

F. Scott Fitzgerald: Tender Is the Night 137

Pounding Print 146

Richard Ford: Independence Day 150

James Salter: The Hunters and Light Years 156

Denis Johnson: Tree of Smoke 162

Ian McEwan: Atonement 166

Lorrie Moore: A Gate at the Stairs 170

Don DeLillo: Point Omega 173

The Goncourt Journals 177

Rebecca West: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon 184

John Cheever: The Journals 193

Ryszard Kapuscinski's African Life 200

W. G. Sebald, Bombing, and Thomas Bernhard 205

Regarding the Achievement of Others: Susan Sontag 212

The Moral Art of War 215

Musicals

"My Favorite Things" 231

Ramamani 236

Def Leppard and the Anthropology of Supermodernity 239

Editions of Contemporary Me 245

Is Jazz Dead? 252

Cherry Street 264

Variables

Blues for Vincent 269

Loving and Admiring: Camus's Algeria 272

Oradour-sur-Glane 280

Parting Shots 286

The Wrong Stuff 291

Fabulous Clothes 300

The 2004 Olympics 308

Sex and Hotels 315

What Will Survive of Us 319

Personals

The Airfix Generation 327

Comics in a Man's Life 333

Violets of Pride 341

On Being an Only Child 346

Sacked 356

On the Roof 367

Unpacking My Library 374

Reader's Block 378

My Life as a Gate-Crasher 382

Something Didn't Happen 386

Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (with particular reference to Doughnut Plant doughnuts) 391

Of Course 404

Sources and Acknowledgments 417

Editorial Reviews

In this new collection of previously published writings, Dyer (Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi) traverses a broad territory stretching from photographers such as Richard Avedon and William Gedney (“His gaze is neither penetrating nor alert but, on reflection, we would amend that verdict to accepting”); musicians Miles Davis and Def Leppard; writers like D.H. Lawrence, Ian McEwan, and Richard Ford; as well as personal ruminations on, say, reader’s block. In a fond tribute to the power and beauty of Albert Camus’s life and work, Dyer reflects on his own encounters with the writer’s work in Algeria: “Coming here and sitting by this monument, rereading these great essays, testaments to all that is the best in us, is a way of delivering personally my letter of thanks.” In a masterful essay on W.G. Sebald and Thomas Bernhard, Dyer writes: “The comic obsessiveness and neurosis common to many of Sebald’s characters is like a sedated version of the relentless, raging frenzy into which Bernhard’s narrators habitually drive themselves.” Dyer’s writing does what the best critical writing always does, encouraging us to view, read, or listen closely to art, literature, and music as well as to pay close attention to various cultural forms and their impact on our personal lives. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Mr. Dyer's new book, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, is a collection of his occasional prose. . . . They're 'bits and bobs,' he writes, but he takes them more seriously than that, and so should anyone who cares about joyous, wriggling sentences composed in the English language.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“There's a restless current to these essays, as if a net were being thrown ever wider in search of fresh versions of that original burst of aesthetic delight, literature, which managed to turn a working-class grammar school boy from Cheltenham into an international 'man of letters.' . . . This is what I find most remarkable about Dyer: his tone. Its simplicity, its classlessness, its accessibility and yet its erudition—the combination is a trick few British writers ever pull off. . . . [Dyer's humor is] what separates him from Berger and Lawrence and Sontag: it's what makes these essays not just an education, but a joy.” —Zadie Smith, Harper's Magazine

“You read Dyer for his caustic wit, of course, his exquisite and perceptive crankiness, and his deep and exciting intellectual connections, but from these enthralling rants and cultural investigations there finally emerges another Dyer, a generous seeker of human feeling and experience, a man perhaps closer than he thinks to what he believes his hero Camus achieved: 'a heart free of bitterness.'” —Sam Lipsyte, Very Short List

“Dyer's writing does what the best critical writing always does, encouraging us to view, read, or listen closely to art, literature, and music as well as to pay close attention to various cultural forms and their impact on our personal lives.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“All of Dyer's work holds together very well indeed, but what holds it together is a voice, which becomes a persona. It's a very English, low-key, plainspoken, unassuming voice that invites you in, and can become intimate but not too intimate, and can smoothly transit between comedy and gravity. It takes on flesh in his reported pieces and personal essays and some of his fiction, and there it is often richly and sometimes darkly comic—self deprecating, stubborn, canny, forlorn, worldly, hapless, serious, romantic, dissipated.” —Luc Sante, Bookforum

“While contemporary writers such as David Shields decry the need to erase the lines between fiction and nonfiction, for years, Dyer has been exemplar, churning out smart essays with his own cocktail of fact and fiction, private and public, myth and truth and has proven that rigorous criticism and writing arises out of more than just an esoteric bookshelf. Good writing, it appears, begins with seeking what moves us.” —Bookslut

“[These are] brilliantly witty, surprising essays.” —The Daily Beast

“Geoff Dyer has won several prizes, all deserved. When you read accounts of Dyer's work you'll find praiseful critics comparing him to vast numbers of writers, hurling their comparisons into the useless heap that follows him everywhere he goes. I myself often think of G.K. Chesterton for the constant and dazzling flow of paradoxes in his prose.” —Jonathan Lethem, BOMB

“The essay collection 'is considered a pretty low form of book,' in Dyer's estimation, and yet Otherwise Known may be Dyer's masterpiece: a living journal documenting the wealth of his interests, the depth of his insights, and a stealthily powerful argument for the essay, not the novel, as the richest mode of contemporary letters. . . . And let us be thankful that this polymath chose to ignore his father's own words of wisdom: 'Never put anything in writing.'” —The Boston Globe

“Again and again, Dyer pairs an uncommonly precise description of what a particular artist does with an equally compelling, unexpected reason for why it is important. There are few more valuable things that a critics can accomplish in a review, . . . and Dyer's mastery of them is a testament to his achievement.” —The Barnes & Noble Review

From the Publisher

A grab-bag of critical essays, reportage and personal stories from the irrepressibly curious Dyer (Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, 2009, etc).

The title of this hefty tome, featuring pieces published in two United Kingdom–only collections, suggests ponderous philosophizing. But though Dyer takes his art seriously, his prose is as relaxed and self-effacing as it is informed. Indeed, the title essay is about nothing more serious than his quest for a decent doughnut and cappuccino in New York City, from which he extracts some surprising insights about our need for routines, standards and sense of home. Though the book is wide-ranging, his command is consistent, whether he's writing about Richard Avedon or model airplanes. Dyer consistently expresses an appreciation for the way the idiosyncratic human being emerges despite our best efforts to suppress it. That's evident in the way he admires John Cheever's confessional journals more than his acclaimed short stories, and in his urge to uncover F. Scott Fitzgerald's tragic personal history when writing about his novels. It also shows in the subjects he chooses to write about. Consistently suspicious of slickness in art, he's drawn to photographers like Enrique Metinides, who documented disasters and accidents in Mexico City, and musicians like John Coltrane, whose "My Favorite Things" grows more appealing to Dyer the more decoupled it becomes from its Rodgers and Hammerstein source. In a few pieces, particularly in his first-person reportage, Dyer works a bit too hard to find something clever to say about subjects he wouldn't have pursued were he not assigned to write about them—e.g., a Def Leppard concert or a flight in a decommissioned MiG. Also, a handful of book reviews are brief piecework of only moderate interest. But the book is chock-full of Dyer at his most open, thoughtful and lyrical, as in his study of photographs of Rodin sculptures, his appreciation of Rebecca West's neglected travel writings and a candid piece about the first time he was fired, where, in exposing his 20-something childishness, he finds the roots of the adult he became.

Whether in sketches or rigorous studies, each piece bears the mark of Dyer's unique intelligence and wit.

Kirkus Reviews

…almost every essay is enlivened by Dyer's characteristically crisp formulations…as he tries, impressively, to capture what he calls "the humming circuitry of an artist's imaginative life."
—The New York Times Book Review

Stephen Burn

Like other hedonists of letters, such as Cyril Connolly and Kingsley Amis, Dyer is more than just a good critic; he's also extremely funny, passionate about women, drink and life's varied pleasures, a bit of a show-off and immensely enjoyable to read…Years ago, Geoff Dyer's dad gave him a bit of worldly advice: "Never put anything in writing." As always, it's a good thing that sons never listen to their fathers.
—The Washington Post

Michael Dirda

…a collection of [Dyer's] occasional prose—reviews and essays culled from places like The Guardian, Esquire, The American Scholar and Granta. They're "bits and bobs," he writes, but he takes them more seriously than that, and so should anyone who cares about joyous, wriggling sentences composed in the English language…There's a certain, finite quantity of Mr. Dyer's sentences extant in the known universe. This book contains some of the best.
—The New York Times

Dwight Garner