Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews, 1989-2010 BY Geoff Dyer (Graywolf Press, 2011) From the Publisher: “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 sculptor Zadkine and the saxophonist David Murray (in the same essay), on his heroes Rebecca West and Ryszard Kapuscinski, 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.”

Geoff Dyer is an intellectually self-made man. He has won his awards and the invitation to write about what he likes by succeeding. Otherwise Known As the Human Condition is a testament to his two decades of success at writing about photography, art, literature and music all the while creating the main character in the semi-documentary of himself – the working class only-child Englishman who went up to Oxford and found working for a living intolerable. His persona is the jet-age wandering lonesome romantic writer type, difficult to please, looking for the next inspiration. He is not, as he proudly puts it, “the Something Professor of Anything at the University of Whatever.” He can write a very funny essay about sex in hotels or the donuts of New York as experienced in Tokyo or unpacking his library (without apologies to Walter Benjamin, whom he often quotes) without flashing credentials as a bibliophile, travel writer or a food critic. As British as he is, this self-made bohemian mask makes him practically American. These are not windows one would expect to provide the most interesting views on the world, but Dyer makes these open niches into exceptional views by bringing to them an exceptional vision. Generally fiction writers write nonfiction either to make a living or to express something, well, not fictional. And nonfiction writers write novels because they want to be, well, more artistic. Geoff Dyer is an exception to both these rules. His publications include four novels but his five nonfiction books are “genre-defying,” which makes them “hard to find” because you can’t figure out what shelf they might be on in a physical bookstore. Though most of his essays are neither criticism nor limited to the subject of literature, I found my copy in the generally-unpromising Literary Criticism shelf. Perhaps this is because bookstores have no shelf reserved for a selection of concisely expressed ideas derived from the process of making a living as a writer. As miscellaneous as the collection is, there is a unifying subject: being intensely engaged in reading, looking and listening. This desire for intensity motivates Dyer to fill the page with writing that is witty, fluid and thoughtful. He opens the reader’s mind to just how much can be seen, heard and felt about the subject. Dyer is at his best when he is engaged by something that he really likes. Like is a light but loaded four-letter word. Anyone involved in social networks – and this includes a very large portion of the world’s population in 2011 – has the power to like things all the time. That little thumbs-up like button – how many times have you pressed it? And how many times have you added a comment or chose to answer the open-ended question “What’s on your mind?” Dyer is the kind of person who does not resort to pressing buttons on social networks to express what he likes. He uses a form he characterizes as “semi-learned” essays. He has managed to insert these essays into three open windows of print media: magazine articles, art catalogs, and book introductions. These are not windows one would expect to provide the most interesting views on the world, but Dyer makes these open niches into exceptional views by bringing to them an exceptional vision.

To keep the reader focused on one enthusiasm at a time, the book is divided into “Visuals,” “Verbals,” “Musicals,” “Variables” and “Personals.” In each of these venues Dyer is totally engaged as a man in the audience making sense out of his notes rather than a lecturing authority leading the tour. This point of view even manages to find its way into “Personals,” where he is writing about himself. In “My Life as a Gate-Crasher” he is challenged by a librarian at the Institute of Jazz Studies to explain his “credentials for writing a book about jazz” to which he replies: “I don’t have any,” I said. “Except I like listening to it” (p. 382).

At its best, reading a Geoff Dyer essay is like watching a magician who really does have nothing up his sleeve. You know you have just read something surprising and beautiful, perhaps even wise, and you wonder, ‘How did he do that?’

There’s that four-letter word again. This never-ending search for things to like is an antidote for professionalism. His lack of qualification is an absence of buy-in, a very contemporary form of beatnik abstraction from the social norm. His greatest strength is not his impatience with his task, though he certainly expresses it often enough, but his distance from his subjects. The distance works best when his chosen subject is photographers and early twentieth century writers. His obsessions with and impressions of D.H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Rebecca West, Alec Soth, William Gedney, Robert Capa, Enrique Metinides, Richard Avedon – to name a few of the subjects covered in these essays – link together the visual and the verbal in remarkable ways. Dyer has found a way to like things and to work hard at discovering why he likes them. He does the research, travels to the places, he pulls the quotes together. As anti-traditional and anti-academic as he is, he has read every book – and every notebook and letter – by his chosen authors and looked at every photograph by his chosen photographers.

“The Awakening of Stones: Rodin” is a wonderful example of what he accomplishes. It was originally published as an introduction to Jennifer Gough-Cooper’s Apropos Rodin. It begins:

And we’re off. John Berger on the sculpture’s relation to space. Rilke arriving in Paris, writing a book about Rodin, returning to become Rodin’s secretary and writing a poem where we find “the awakening of stones”. Rodin’s relationship to photography and Edward Steichen’s photographs of Rodin’s Balzac. And the subject of the essay: Dyer’s response to contemporary photographs of Rodin’s sculptures of naked female torsos.

As an introduction, the essay might or might not be noticed as a thoughtful compliment to the color images in which Gough-Cooper makes us see marble torsos as flesh. In this collection, with the single reproduction of a black and white image, Dyer’s text transforms any subsequent visit to Rodin’s sculptures, on the page or in the stony flesh, into a new experience.

Dyer establishes the freedom to be intensely interested in and impressed by novelists, journalists, photographers, musicians and the foreignness of France and America without developing a thesis to feed the envy of his colleagues back at the “University of Whatever.” He is sharing his insights into what happened to him, whether he is remembering a painting by Turner at the Tate Britain or attending a Def Leppard concert in Seoul. This stance puts nothing above his reach or beneath his notice.

At its best, reading a Geoff Dyer essay is like watching a magician who really does have nothing up his sleeve. You know you have just read something surprising and beautiful, perhaps even wise, and you wonder, “How did he do that?”