Working the Room. Geoff DyerЧитать онлайн книгу.

For my mum and dad

‘There are writers for whom no forms exist: too clever for novels, too sceptical for poetry, too verbose for the aphorism, all that is left to them is the essay – the least appropriate medium for the foiled.’

Don Paterson

List of Illustrations

Introduction

Visuals

Jacques Henri Lartigue and The Discovery of India

Ruth Orkin’s ‘VE Day’

Richard Avedon

Larry Burrows

Enrique Metinides

Jacob Holdt’s America

Martin Parr’s Small World

Joel Sternfeld’s Utopian Visions

Alec Soth: Riverrun

Michael Ackerman

Trent Parke

Miroslav Tichý

Saving Grace: Todd Hido

Idris Khan

Edward Burtynsky

Turner and Memory

The Awakening of Stones: Rodin

The American Sublime

Verbals

D.H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers

D.H. Lawrence: Lady Chatterley’s Lover

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Beautiful and Damned

F. Scott Fitzgerald: Tender is the Night

James Salter: The Hunters and Light Years

Tobias Wolff: Old School

Richard Ford: The Lay of the Land

Denis Johnson: Tree of Smoke

Ian McEwan: Atonement

Alan Hollinghurst: The Line of Beauty

Lorrie Moore: A Gate at the Stairs

Don DeLillo: Point Omega

The Goncourt Journals

Rebecca West: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

John Cheever: The Journals

Ryszard Kapuściński’s African Life

W.G. Sebald, Bombing and Thomas Bernhard

Regarding the Achievement of Others: Susan Sontag

The Moral Art of War

Variables

Is Jazz Dead?

Editions of Contemporary Me

Fabulous Clothes

The 2004 Olympics

Sex and Hotels

What Will Survive of Us …

Personals

On Being an Only Child

Sacked

On the Roof

Reader’s Block

My Life as a Gatecrasher

Something Didn’t Happen

Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (with particular reference to Donut Plant donuts)

Of Course

Sources and Acknowledgements

Index

List of Illustrations

Black-and-white photographs

Roger Mattingly: ‘Larry Burrows, February 17, 1971’. By kind permission of the photographer

Enrique Metinides: ‘Mexico City, 1972’. Courtesy of Thomas Dane/Ridinghouse

Michael Ackerman: ‘Untitled’, from the series and book Fiction. By kind permission of the photographer

Idris Khan: ‘The Uncanny’, 2006, 70 x 80 inches, Lightjet Print. Courtesy of Idris Khan, Victoria Miro Gallery, London, and Yvon Lambert Gallery, New York

‘On the Roof’

Colour plates

Martin Parr: ‘Acropolis, Athens, Greece’. By kind permission of the photographer and Dewi Lewis Publishing

Joel Sternfeld: ‘Ruins of Drop City, Trinidad, Colorado, August 1995’. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

Edward Burtynsky: ‘Oil Fields #19a’, Belridge, California, USA, 2003. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

Jennifer Gough-Cooper: ‘Danaid’ from Apropos Rodin, Thames & Hudson, London 2006. By kind permission of the photographer

Introduction

This collection of essays and reviews follows right on from Anglo-English Attitudes. The last piece in that book was written in 1999; the earliest one here is from the same year. To be honest, nothing much has changed in the interim. I write about whatever happens to interest me, sometimes accepting commissions from editors, sometimes writing pieces and sending them in on spec. A decade from now, by which time I’ll be in my sixties, I hope to have enough new material to bring out a third volume. You see, I’ve got tenure on this peculiarly vacant chair – or chairs, rather. It’s a job for life; more accurately, it is a life, and hardly a day goes by without my marvelling that it is somehow feasible to lead it. As in the earlier collection, there’s no area of specialised concern or expertise; on the contrary, the pleasure, hopefully, lies in the pick ’n’ mix variety, the way one thing leads to another (often quite different) thing.

Actually, one thing has changed: in the last ten years I’ve been asked to contribute introductions

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Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction