White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World by Geoff Dyer

I like to travel. I like to read books about travel. I want to share another's experiences in foreign places, especially locations that I will likely never get to. It is, as they say, a Wide, Wide World and taking a journey from the comfort of my reading chair without the hassle of luggage, noisy hotel rooms, and trying to decide where to eat lunch is much less stressful. 

My latest armchair adventure has been with author Geoff Dyer. He was just this week a guest at the library for another terrific author event. His book, White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World, was released earlier this month so his appearance in Louisville was one of the first stops on his book tour. Lucky us.

First of all, this book of nine tales is unlike many travel adventures that you might have read. The author states quite plainly that the stories are a mixture of fiction and non-fiction which makes the twists and turns more exciting as there is always a bit of mystery...did this really happen or not?

Geoff Dyer

For instance, in the titular piece, he and his wife (name changed from the real Rebecca to the made-up Jessica) are driving near White Sands National Park in New Mexico and stop to pick up a hitchhiker. All is well, until within minutes the car passes a sign:

WARNING

Do Not Pick Up Hitchhikers

Detention Facilities in Area

What happens from there includes much neurotic thinking (I laughed because I could follow every little byway of his fevered brain) and is as spooky as a Twilight Zone episode.  

Mr. Dyer read this chapter as part of his presentation but never did let us know how much of the event was real. Maybe all of it or maybe part was just a figment of his imagination.

It doesn't matter. The writing is excellent and entertaining and funny in a snarky sort of way. I couldn't wait to get home and read more.

So far I have traveled with Mr. Dyer to The Forbidden City in Beijing where he has a mild flirtation with a non-guide tour guide; to Tahiti in search of a Gauguin experience; and, to The Lightning Field, an art installation in the American desert. 

I had him autograph my hardcover copy of his book. He didn't seem to be in any hurry and we had a brief intense chat. He is British (and charming of course). I asked him what writers had influenced him or that he continued to read and he answered: John Berger, Annie Dillard, and Rebecca West.

He especially recommended Ms. West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her 1200-page classic about Yugoslavia and the Balkans. He promised that if I read the first thousand pages and wanted to give it up to let him know and he would refund my money. (I told you he was charming.) Ms. West was one of the Dead Ladies in Jessa Crispin's book that I wrote about here.

As to Annie Dillard, Mr. Dyer wrote the preface to her collection of essays In Abundance (here) and also includes a quote from her in the front of his book:

The point of going somewhere...is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there. We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.

Mr. Dyer has taken her words to heart.

The 40s: The Story of A Decade from The New Yorker

A generous friend brought me a book the other day. As you can imagine, I rarely turn down the gift of a book. It was one he wanted to pass on and thought I would like.

Oh, yes.

The book contains a collection of fine pieces from that illustrious magazine The New Yorker and is entitled The 40s: The Story of a Decade.

And what a decade it was. During the first half the world was at war and the second half was spent beginning recovery from that war.

I whooped out loud with glee when I opened the book to the Table of Contents. Oh, the riches. Here are pieces written during WWII by E.B. White, A.J. Liebling, along with John Hersey’s profile on the then Lieutenant John F. Kennedy.

There are post-war pieces by Edmund Wilson, Lillian Ross, and Rebecca West’s report on the Nuremberg trials.

And, oh, the section of Character Studies: Walt Disney, Edith Piaf, Duke Ellington, Albert Einstein, and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Of course I read the book section first. Clifton Fadiman muses on Ernest Hemingway’s latest offering For Whom the Bell Tolls (he finds it to be a much deeper book than The Sun Also Rises), and Lionel Trilling gets a glimpse of the future in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, a book he found to be “profound, terrifying, and wholly fascinating.” It is compelling to read these reviews written so soon after the now-famous books were just hitting the market.

There is also commentary on film, theatre, art and architecture, musical events, and fashion.

And of course it wouldn’t be The New Yorker without poetry - verses by William Carlos Williams, W.H. Auden, and Elizabeth Bishop - and fiction - Carson McCullers, John Cheever, and the first publication of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery.

Irresistible! You can see why I am excited to have this book at hand. History combined with stellar writing. So much more convenient - even at almost 700 pages - than a mile-high pile of ten years’ worth of magazines.

It is one I will dip into slowly and savor every word.

P.S I am quite a fan of The New Yorker, especially its early years. You can read three of my previous posts on the writers from that era here, here, and here.

The Dead Ladies Project by Jessa Crispin

I am not really sure how to classify The Dead Ladies Project. It is part travelogue, part biography, part memoir. It begins with the author Jessa Crispin standing in her Chicago kitchen trying to convince two policemen that she is not going to kill herself.  

She realizes it is not her physical life that needs to end but only what she was doing with it. She divests herself of her apartment, her furniture, her books, her men, and her social circle and heads off to Europe. Her aim: 

It was the dead I wanted to talk to. The writers and artists and composers who kept me company in the late hours of the night: I needed to know how they did it. I'd always been attracted to the unloosed, the wandering souls who were willing to scrape their lives clean and start again elsewhere. I needed to know how they did it, how they survived it.

So begins her two year journey. But not all the Dead Ladies are Ladies. First, she visits the William James Center which turns out to be just a small room at the University of Potsdam near Berlin where James had come to escape the heavy hand of his father. She spends time reading his letters, journals, and essays in order to absorb his pragmatic philosophies.

In Trieste, she ponders what Nora Barnacle felt as she waited all that first night in the city for her soon-to-be husband James Joyce to return to where he had left her and their luggage outside the train station. 

She visits St. Petersburg where W. Somerset Maugham goes to escape his scolding lover Syrie. In Lausanne she marvels at how Igor Stravinsky and his music seemed to thrive even as he faced limitations during the war. 

And so she moves on to Maud Gonne's Galway, Rebecca West's Sarajevo, Margaret Anderson's South of France, Jean Rhys's London, and Claude Cahun's Jersey Island. 

It is a dizzying journey. 

But this is not a lilting, carefree trip from four-star hotel to four-star hotel. Ms. Crispin sublets not-so-nice apartments from sometimes not-so-nice landlords. She occasionally stays with or meets with friends. She drinks. A lot. And often. She cries in airports. She gets lost. She pines for the married lover she left behind. She struggles with unfamiliar languages and streets and people. 

She doesn't seem to be having a good time.

Her depression, or maybe it is just melancholy, is contagious. It set up a wanderlust in me that spiraled into thoughts of selling everything and moving about America spending a few days here or a few weeks there until money or time ran out. 

I enjoyed reading about the lives of these artists and writers. I enjoyed reading her impressions of the cities she stays in. I enjoyed her writing style and her intelligence. I enjoyed reading about her choice to at least try and create a different life for herself. If you can get past her youthful romantic yearnings and louche lifestyle, I think you would enjoy this book too.