Geoff Dyer Books

This book may be more meaningful for the reader with some knowlege in the field. It's coversational tone and references to photographers
and their works already familiar to the reader promotes a feeling of intimacy.
I found the author's views on photography interesting. His views on the
works of well-known photographers,their similar subjects and their personal approaches to these like subjects proved illuminating as well.

"The Ongoing Moment" is an examination of the content of some famous modern photographs. This is by no means a history of photography. Instead, Dyer suggests that something may be learned about photography by examining photographs with similar content taken by different photographers. In doing so, the author organizes the photographs by subject matter into a taxonomy that is, by the author's own admission, idiosyncratic, and perhaps bizarre. For example, his categories include pictures of blind people, pictures with hats and pictures of barbershops.

He focuses (pardon the pun, but Dyer seems to love that kind of clever speech) on the documentary photographers of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Alfred Stieglitz and Robert Frank, and mostly on photographers in America although there is reference to Atget and Brassai and other photographers not working in America. His method is to discuss individual pictures with the same subject, occasionally placing the picture in context by referring to some other art with a similar theme like a poem by Robert Frost or "The Moviegoer" by Walker Percy. But the discussion seems to be purely descriptive. It's said that a picture is worth 10,000 words and speaks for itself. If that's true, what are we to learn from Dyer?

Dyer says that he suspects that the book will be a source of irritation to many people, especially those who know more than him about photography. He gleefully acknowledges that he doesn't even own a camera but that he wrote the book in an attempt to comprehend photography. After reading the book, I don't know if Dyer comprehended photography, but I was certainly irritated.

Dyer's discussions sound like cocktail party conversation by a witty, cynical person. He includes lots of stories about the photographers, often scabrous, and is not above being sexually and scatologically vulgar, perhaps to impress us that he is a man of the world. But his examination of the photographs deals with the denotation of the subject, and seldom the connotation. This may be because of his insistence on examining content only. Yet it is the form of art that allows the artist to convey to us what is going on in the work beyond the simple subject.

I also have to complain about the photographs included and not included in the book. The included pictures were often too small. But in many cases Dyer makes reference to a picture that is not included, usually for the purpose of comparison. He is then forced to give a lengthy description of the non-illustration. I understand that the author may not have been able to get the rights to print a particular picture. However, if, as Dyer seems to suggest, there are a set of favorite subjects of photographers which in many ways are similar, it would have been better to select another photograph that we could see.

Dyer himself says that there are many great books available about the ideas of photography and seems to recommend them to the reader. This left me with the question "What is this book for?"

Dyer, a non-photographer has taken on the task of trying to catalog trends in photography. Its weaknesses are that it is limited as the author writes (he did have to get permission to use images) and is mainly American men and twentieth century. While it includes Diane Arbus, Dorothea Lange and Nan Goldin extensively and two brief mentions of Imogen Cunningham. The absence of Margaret Bourke-White, Lisette Model, Sally Mann, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, and Tina Barney when they would have fit into what was studied created the typical boys club attitude.

That being said it is still a good introductory to thinking about what is going in your photographs. Without taking a photograph he illuminates the subject of subject matter.

By having no chapters but rather by slipping in and out of subject matter he does a very good job of introducing photographic history and theory to the beginner. He allows people to think about how they have been influenced by the images and social meanings of subject matter that goes into a photographer's decision to trip the shutter.

One of the greatest lessons for a photographer to learn is that you are not photographing a completely new idea. You as a photographer have been influenced by the society that you have grown up in and while you may not consciously recognize that an image is familiar to you that image has been seen before. Dyer indicates that quotation can sometimes create better images by the quoter than the quoted and allows the photographer to make a statement about the quoted.

Dyer as an Englishman can take an outsider's view of American photography and recognize cultural differences and preferences that an American inherently overlooks as natural. I think that this helps him understand Robert Frank even more than Americans think they do, however it also ignored William Klein's work that was always overshadowed by Frank's coming out a year or two later and grabbing the attention.

Overall he did a thorough examination within the limitations of the length of the book and images to use (images should be larger) and tied it altogether by the end. It is hard to write a cohesive book on such a wide subject so the author who hopes that his book can be read non-linearally did an excellent job of weaving an image into his tapestry.

This book is admittedly the first and only by Geoff Dyer that I have read but I have a feeling that will change for me. As an interested reader about photography, the book is a wonderful weaving of history and culture in the production of the "representative" photograph.

One need not have a deep knowledge of the history of photography to be amazed at the linkages and connections that Dyer proposes between photographers and their photographic products. Examples are presented in the book to facilitate Dyer's exposure (perhaps fabrication) of a long extended conversation amongst recognized photographers through the subjects they photographed. Whether by fact or fiction or insider knowledge, it turns out not to matter, for the wonderful thing about looking at such photographs is that the content can mean so many different things depending upon the life and experiences of the viewer - true of any art done well.

This book is not a history of photography--nor is it meant to be--though it does look at photography over a large span of time and so is by default a history of sorts. But the book is really one writer's meditation on photography. As such, much is left out, but the omissions in no way mar the book; being comprehensive is not the point. One reviewer above calls the book cynical, like cocktail chatter (not sure what the two have in common or how Dyer could in any way be construed as cynical), which seems preposterous. Simply put, Dyer writes as a person fascinated with and under the spell of photography (an approach he took to his book on jazz), and in doing so offers keen insights--the likes of which are not to be found in other books on the subject. His viewpoint as an outsider is actually a benefit. Beautifully written, this book is a classic, something a reader will return to again and again.

This must be a mis-titled or earlier version of "Paris Trance."

Since the early 1950's, John Berger has authored an almost dizzying number of works on art history, art criticism, fiction and politics, as well as a large body of writing that seems to defy categorization altogether. And that is why one can't help but feel a kind of admiration for Geoff Dyer's courage to take on, for his first full-length book, a difficult critical subject and author in Ways of Telling: The Work of John Berger.

Although Dyer clearly sees Berger and his work as massively influential yet nearly always overlooked by his peers and contemporaries, it is obvious that Ways of Telling is a great deal more than a mere reaffirmation of, or a critical love letter to, an illustrious writer and his sometimes ground-breaking work. In Ways of Telling, Dyer looks carefully at the broad spectrum of Berger's career, from articles on politics and aesthetics during the early 1950's published in Socialist newspapers and magazines, to novels written in the mid-1980's. Perhaps because Dyer intended (one could plausibly surmise) Ways of Telling to be not only an academic critique but a work written for a slightly wider readership, we are invited to take a closer look at several of Berger's more universally known works. These include G, an historical novel influenced by Socialist Realism and according to Dyer, possibly inspired by the Cubist movement as well. We look at A Painter of Our Time, Berger's breakthrough novel about the struggle between the moral imperative of being true to one's creative gifts versus fidelity to one's political beliefs. Scrutiny is also given to the near-canonical Ways of Seeing, both the BBC television series and the widely-read 1972 book of the same name. Dyer is quick to acknowledge that although the polemical, class-based attack on consumer-driven capitalism and "the authority of property" by way of a beautifully written critique of Western Art is often crudely drawn in Ways of Seeing. One might miss the point entirely if one chooses to ignore the manner in which Berger's sharp sense of aesthetics and his critical eye opened the floodgates to what is now the standard method for looking at art for an ever-widening audience.

No doubt it is a tall order for any reader, or writer to separate John Berger's Democratic-Socialist and Humanist value systems from much of his work, Dyer reminds the reader that any attempt to do so is pointless and probably an unnecessary exercise. To quote Dyer " He is a great writer, but the quality of his work is important, finally, not for what it reveals of him but for what it enables us to glimpse of ourselves, of what we might become-and of the culture that might afford him the recognition that it is due."

This collection of essays is killer! I'm still smiling thinking about it two years later and picking up another copy to read it again! Gave my original copy to a friend instead of Goodwill where most all other books I am ambivalent about go.

I can think of only a few books that have moved me so completely while also triggering repeated, spontaneous eruptions of laughter. It's Dyer's masterpiece and a transcendent read for anyone piecing together the mysteries, longings and abject absurdities of adult life. Can't recommend it more highly.

This is a collection of travel essays and drug-taking reminiscences, presumably autobiographical, covering several years of the author's middle life (they start in 1991) during much of which he seems to have been depressed, in spite of strenuous efforts to have fun.
He writes well, but some of the subjects, such as getting high with flower children on a Thai beach, no longer sound as fresh and original as they must once have. Mystical insights into Mahayana may be great experiences but don't make for entertaining narratives. I thought his best writing was when he described decaying downtown Detroit,surrounding the artificial oasis of the Pontchartaine Hotel,stone-cold sober in the rain.
Such a memoir raises the question of whether illicit drug-taking can be self-treatment for depression. Would he have been better off with Prozac?

I read this book while I was in India, and I did not like it at all (the book, not the country). The author's tone made me feel angry. He sounded so lazy and boring. One of his stories in Paris talked about smoking marijuana on a date and walking around downtown. That was the crux of the story - he got stoned in Paris on a first date with a younger girl. That's cool if you are one of my college buddies, but not cool if you're a 40-something author who I paid good money to read.

I have to admit I picked up this book with the comic title because I heard the author writes of his experiences at the Full Moon Party on Hat Rin Beach in Ko Pha Ngan, Thailand. I have indeed been to this relatively isolated island but not to the infamous festival of alcohol and psychedelic trance music. Luckily, British writer Geoff Dyer has actively partaken fully in all the legendary activities that have made the festival's reputation. But this episode is not the only attraction in this slyly funny, surprisingly introspective travel journal, which glides seamlessly from place to place on a magic carpet of hallucinogenic drugs. With a blessed lack of apology, Dyer chronicles his wide variety of mood swings with mind-bending wit and precise observation. A true drifter, he takes his jaundiced eye, as well as his loneliness, frequent listlessness and pervasive self-dissatisfaction, along with him wherever he goes, but what prevents the book from being an incoherent downer is how he makes his restless nature palpable and often hilarious.

In a collection of eleven short stories, the author takes us to New Orleans, Cambodia, Bali, Paris, Ko Pha Ngan, Rome, Miami, Amsterdam, Libya and Detroit, but he makes a point of ending each chapter with something to leave the reader wanting more. It could be a vivid image or a personalized sensation but never a look-back summary. Whether it's musing about the potential of a racially motivated incident on a Mississippi road trip or the details of a suicide in Miami's South Beach or the lush greenery of Bali's rice paddy fields or the artistry of a one-legged barber in Cambodia, Dyer has a gift for conveying his thoughts in an authentic, descriptive way that does not smack of posturing. It seems only appropriate that he ends his book at the Burning Man festival, the pinnacle of radical, often hedonistic self-expression. There, he sneaks up on a deeper purpose in life with little contrivance. If drug-induced states of alternating euphoria and depression are not your cup of tea, clearly this is not the book for you. Otherwise, I suggest you sit back and enjoy a most intriguing and idiosyncratic travel writer.

"Ever since the world began, the only memoirs of any interest have been written by 'indiscreet individuals,'" Edmond de Goncourt noted. "And my only crime is to be still alive twenty years after they were written."

He got that half-right. Indiscretion is the secret sauce of memoir. But de Goncourt's sin was not to be alive to hear the howls of protest from his victims and their allies --- it was that he and his brother Jules savaged their friends and enemies with equal glee. And that's the first great attraction of this edited edition of one of the greatest journals in all of literature: It's really bitchy.

It's really bitchy in large part because the Goncourt brothers had an extremely high opinion of themselves. In 1851, they published their first novel. Their self-review: "It contains in embryo every aspect of our talent and every colour on our palette." Alas, their timing was terrible; Bonaparte had just dissolved the National Assembly and declared himself Napoleon III, dictator of France. From their first diary entry: "What a time it [our novel] chose to appear! A symphony of words and ideas in the middle of that scramble for office."

For social beings, the Goncourts could be profoundly anti-social. They loathed half the world on principle --- "Woman is the animal that lives inside a silk dress" --- and periodically cut themselves off from the Paris literary scene: "We had given away our old evening clothes and had no new ones made, so as to be unable to go anywhere. No women, no pleasures, no amusements: just unceasing toil." By 1857, they report, "No friends, no connections, every door shut in our face, and all money spent on books."

Don't be fooled. They knew everyone: Flaubert, de Maupassant, Victor Hugo, Degas, Rodin, Baudelaire, George Sand, Turgenev. There are regular dinners, and, after, the Goncourts go home and scribble.

Flaubert tells them how he lives without a woman: "I just lie face down and during the night...it's infallible."

Hugo, they write, "had a notebook in which he writes down what he has just said."

One good thing about their deep skepticism about some of the greatest writers in French literature --- when they're at their cattiest, they offer unvarnished opinions that take us much closer to understanding the greats than a lot of more reasoned analysis. Here they are, on the subject of the "hidden sides" of their dear friend, Gustave Flaubert: "He quietly pushes himself forward, establishes relations with important people, creates a network of useful acquaintances, all the while pretending to be independent, lazy, and fond of solitude." And they are just as cutting when they take the long view. Voltaire, they observe, "spent his life taking an interest in something --- himself."

"Genius is the talent of a dead man," they said. Not quite. The Goncourts believed they possessed it --- and in abundance. But the unanimity of thought which made theirs such a successful collaboration didn't pay off. All told, they wrote about 30-odd plays, novels and books of criticism. None has survived them.

The literary immortality of the Goncourt brothers comes, instead, from the writing they threw off easily and without concern for style --- these journals. The extreme realism of their novels had won them no friends and few readers. But the extreme realism --- okay, subjective realism --- of their table talk gives us a picture of Paris in the middle of the 19th century that is fresh, original, acutely observed. Their masterpiece is, in essence, a gossip column.

The Goncourt brothers were quite the pair: they pledged at an early age never to marry (don't worry, they had plenty of mistresses in the proper French form)and dedicated themselves to cultural pursuits of dubious quality and success. Their unquestionable victory, however, is this salacious, gossipy journal.

The Goncourts were anti-Semitic royalists who hung out with most of the cultural elite of the day: Zola, Maupassant, Flaubert, and Degas all peopled their vicious circle of decadence and artistic jealousy. Their snippy back-and-forths with Emile Zola over the "ownership" of the literary movement of Naturalism is particularly entertaining. Of course Zola went on to defend the maligned Capt. Dreyfus with his "J'accuse" letter in 1898, so it is certainly possible to read the Goncourt's racism as an underlying factor in that schism.

There are some curious holes in the narrative, though -- this version has absolutely no entry mentioning the funeral of Victor Hugo in 1885, which was one of the most amazing cultural events in all history and turned Paris into one large carnival of drunkenness and sex for almost an entire week.

If you want to get a glimpse of life in the fin-de-siecle' then this will give it to you, royalist warts and all.

I thought this book was terrific. I'm not a big fan of romantic novels, but this one got me going for a week or so. It has a plot that for some may not make too much sense, the writing itself is very straight forward and quite real...you can almost feel those characters to be a part of you.

What I loved most about this book is the language the author uses, his examples....how he describes the scenes of love, sex...it's very raw, ugly in a way, but real and beautiful at the same time.

If you want to read a story about how people in Europe feel about sex, love, relationships, the importance of work...happiness you can read this book, because it will give you a very close point of view...

Definitely recommended, very different from what so called "New York Bestsellers" are trying to sell you...enjoy it and I hope you do as much as I did. I spent every free moment I had to read this book.

I'm hoping this is the author's first book. From the jacket descriptions and the subject matter I thought this would be a sure winner just to put me in the mood of Paris in the fall. But the writing was so tepid and clumsy, the characters so poorly sketched and the dialogue either so badly written or falsely pretentious that I couldn't even finish half of this book. The sex scenes are basically just snapshots of the author's own perversions and are neither necessary nor believable. To me this book is a complete failure. If you were drawn, like me, to France and the idea of intelligent romance read James Salter or James Baldwin instead. You will be glad that you did.

BTW

I thought this book was very well written. It kept my attention as many don't. All-in-all a very good read.

4 characters. Luke. Alex. Sahra. Nicole. Living in Paris. In love. Having fun. Having sex. Taking drugs. Uh-huh. What else? Not much.

Reading this book was like eavesdropping on a conversation. At its best, the tale told was amusing, sometimes curious and I read with uncommitted interest. At its worst, it was as insipid as any conversation one might overhear between strangers. And, to me, these characters remained strangers - indistinct, faded strangers - from start to 300-page finish. What specific insights and traits a reader could glean from the characters, Dyer spoon-feeds us through direct narration and heavy-handed depictions instead of subtle guidance and gestures. I couldn't understand why any of these character would consider the others interesting or compelling. Moreover, there did not seem to be any ultimate truth or principle in the novel that was worth pondering over. (The theme of "living out one's destiny no matter the cost" was weak and, at least in the way Dyer developed it, not worth more than a few seconds thought.)

Oddly, the strength of this novel was that it *did* make me feel as if I were eavesdropping. As I read (listened to) their conversations, stories, and jokes, observed their interactions, I was vaguely curious about their lives and relationships with one another in the same remote way I'd be interested in 4 people sitting next to me in a cafe. In other words, from a distance, the interaction between the characters and the outward structure of the relationships seemed real. But, when I tried to become more interested in Luke, Alex, Sahra and Nicole as individuals, I realized that I couldn't. There just wasn't anything there.

Just as a drunk's jokes fall flat before those who are sober, so drug induced experiences are surreal to those whose awareness has not been chemically altered. Such is often the case in Paris Trance, the seventh novel by English author/journalist Geoff Dyer. One wishes to empathize with the characters, but finds it difficult to relate.

This puzzling rather incohesive tale of misspent youth set in the City of Light covers several years in the lives of four twenty-something expatriates who trade arch remarks, go to many movies (Cassavetes films being a special favorite), are often strung out on Ecstasy, and have non-stop sex.

Luke arrives in Paris from England with the announced intention of writing a book, but he never sets pen to paper. He is lonely, yet neglects to learn French, and wanders aimlessly until he finds work at the Garnier Warehouse overseen by Lazare, who seeks contentment in "whipping himself into a froth of anger and irritation."

It is at the warehouse that Luke meets Alex, a fellow Britisher and film buff with whom he becomes fast friends as "there was an immediate ease and sympathy between them."

"They flourished in each other's company, their intimacy increased as they met more people. Things Alex said in groups were always addressed implicitly to Luke; other people were used as a way of reflecting back something Luke intended primarily for Alex."

Shortly thereafter Luke meets and becomes involved with Nicole, a Belgrade, who came to Paris on a scholarship and now works as a translator. Alex partners with Sahra, an interpreter from Libya. The foursome become inseparable, sharing meals, holidays, and dancing the nights away with drug fueled energy.

In a year or so the two couples go their separate ways - Sahra and Alex stop taking E and "Saying no to E - or anything else for that matter - was like saying no to Luke,"
whose "happiness had begun to have a desperate edge to it."

As abruptly as he had arrived on the scene Luke leaves Paris. He goes first to America, later Mexico, then finally returns to London.

Some eight years later when Alex is in London for a relative's funeral, he again finds Luke. He is living in a dismal flat where, as Alex writes, "As soon as I stepped inside I could feel the loneliness, could smell the life he led..."

Mr. Dyer is a capable, gifted writer. He has a keen ear and exhibits a deft knack for innovative, colorful phrasing. Nonetheless, with Paris Trance he has painted a bleak landscape littered with wasted lives.

- Gail Cooke

I take issue with the other review of this book. The reviewer seems to expect this book to be something it clearly is not, nor ever intended to be. Jennifer Gough-Cooper is a fine art photographer who created an absolutely beautiful series of photographs about the experience of seeing Rodin's work in the context of the Rodin Museum, with all its wood floors, French windows, glass vitrines, antique mirrors and mouldings. The photos are not about having "special access" and taking the works out of their context to give a sterile "objective" perspective. In terms of the "soft focus," this is an intentional product of the artist's choice of a shallow depth of field. The images in this book are not documentation, but fine art. In fact, the Rodin Museum chose to exhibit these photographs in their museum and acquire a set for their permanent collection. This book is pure poetry and I highly recommend it.

I have a serious collection of Rodin books and look forward to every new one that is published, so I was anxious to get this book. Unfortunately the book is a major disappointment. While a few of the photographs are interesting, the majority are an embarrassment - no better, and often worse, than any museum goer could take with a simple point & shoot digital camera.

It seems apparent that the photographer, Jennifer Gough-Cooper, was not given serious access for photographing the sculptures. She had to shoot through the glass display cases just like any museum goer and, for whatever reason, she does not use a polarizing filter. In many photographs the results are reflections which obliterate the sculpture itself, because of the reflections from the glass cases.

And the "soft focus" of some of the photographs seems more attributable to using an auto focus camera and the problems of shooting through glass than any artistic decision. Of the many other Rodin books that I own, none has such poor photography though admittedly not all are of the high quality of David Finn's photographs.

Just as a drunk's jokes fall flat before those who are sober, so drug induced experiences are surreal to those whose awareness has not been chemically altered. Such is often the case in Paris Trance, the seventh novel by English author/journalist Geoff Dyer. One wishes to empathize with the characters, but finds it difficult to relate.

This puzzling rather incohesive tale of misspent youth set in the City of Light covers several years in the lives of four twenty-something expatriates who trade arch remarks, go to many movies (Cassavetes films being a special favorite), are often strung out on Ecstasy, and have non-stop sex.

Luke arrives in Paris from England with the announced intention of writing a book, but he never sets pen to paper. He is lonely, yet neglects to learn French, and wanders aimlessly until he finds work at the Garnier Warehouse overseen by Lazare, who seeks contentment in "whipping himself into a froth of anger and irritation."

It is at the warehouse that Luke meets Alex, a fellow Britisher and film buff with whom he becomes fast friends as "there was an immediate ease and sympathy between them."

"They flourished in each other's company, their intimacy increased as they met more people. Things Alex said in groups were always addressed implicitly to Luke; other people were used as a way of reflecting back something Luke intended primarily for Alex."

Shortly thereafter Luke meets and becomes involved with Nicole, a Belgrade, who came to Paris on a scholarship and now works as a translator. Alex partners with Sahra, an interpreter from Libya. The foursome become inseparable, sharing meals, holidays, and dancing the nights away with drug fueled energy.

In a year or so the two couples go their separate ways - Sahra and Alex stop taking E and "Saying no to E - or anything else for that matter - was like saying no to Luke," whose "happiness had begun to have a desperate edge to it."

As abruptly as he had arrived on the scene Luke leaves Paris. He goes first to America, later Mexico, then finally returns to London.

Some eight years later when Alex is in London for a relative's funeral, he again finds Luke. He is living in a dismal flat where, as Alex writes, "As soon as I stepped inside I could feel the loneliness, could smell the life he led..."

Mr. Dyer is a capable, gifted writer. He has a keen ear and exhibits a deft knack for innovative, colorful phrasing. Nonetheless, with Paris Trance he has painted a bleak landscape littered with wasted lives.

- Gail Cooke