geoff dyer

the exclamations are his

(haha i gave it a bad review in wire years ago and dyer still hates me)

(i compared the book unfavourably to a cure song, so poss.he is justified!!)

For what it's worth, I am a great fan of 'Out of Sheer Rage', 'Paris Trance' and the Pinefox's essay on 'The Colour of Memory'. I also liked 'But Beautiful', but I know nothing of Jazz.

what's 'Out Of Sheer Rage' like?

Name Bosko Balaban
Team Aston Villa
Total Appearances 0
Starts 0
Substituted 0
Total Minutes Played 0
Avg Minutes Played Per Start 0
Goals 0
Avg Goal Mins When Starting 0.0
Avg Mins Played/Goal Scored 0
Goals Scored As Sub 0
Number of Bookings 0
Total Booking Minutes 0
Avg Bookings Per Start 0
Number of Red Cards 0
Total Red Card Minutes 0
Avg Red Cards Per Start 0

just been informed that dyer believes keith jarrett is the greatest living musician lol

methuselah's always-valuable opinion notwithstanding i still think GD is a twerp

But Beautiful is a fantastic book and Jarrett, although maybe not the greatest living musician, is certainly one of them.

maybe i shd reread -- not done so since it came out -- but i am unpersuaded despite these encomia

co-signing. everything i've read by dyer (articles & reviews) is formless, blindly self-involved, boring. first encountered him years back in but beautiful which i tossed aside after a few chapters. i was like "don't project your dopey fantasies onto these great musicians" but of course that's totally unfair.

A little while ago, somewhere on ILX, xxyzzz linked to a pretty witless Dyer review where he slagged off free-era Coltrane and yes, bigged up Jarrett

GD's book on Tarkovsky's Stalker is mostly trash - in general, his film writing seems especially poor

in addition i fear he's the p bog to john berger's welles :|

reconstructing the roots of my dislike at the time, BB
(a) reminded me too strongly of beat-generation portraits of jazzmen (inc.my beloved pynchon's mclintock sphere -- tho TP grew out of this habit via baraka and reed, and
(b) chimed too well with too much mid-80s UK-crit cliché-sanctification of soul and jazz (ie the sensibility seemed not at all far from rattle & hum's ANGEL OF HARLEM… )

BB and R&H both 1988, not sure which came first tho: this kind of stuff was a serious foe&nuisance in those days, as a way to utterly mis-see black music of some decades' standing (hence me veering sharply off down the black science fiction route not long after this, as sign-posted of course by greg tate)

happy to cede my allergy in hindsight may be overstated -- it's not as if "afrofuturism" hasn't now become its own dreary cliche (not really my fault, let alone greg's)

Think I knew the answer before opening this thread--what does ILX think of Geoff Dyer?--but I found his Stalker book interesting when I read it a couple of years ago (felt like we had a similar relationship to the film), and I just finished The Last Days of Roger Federer and liked that, finding it moving at times. I like how he roams all over the place. Someone I play badminton and tennis with noticed the book the other day and asked to borrow it when I finished; "Sure," but I think she's going to get a lot less Roger Federer than she's hoping for.