Читать книгу Working the Room - Geoff Dyer - Страница 7

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 to quite a few books, either re-issued literary classics or photographic monographs and catalogues. I love doing this and am especially grateful to the editors who somehow got wind of the idea that I was interested in Rebecca West or Richard Avedon or whoever and gave me the chance to get between the covers of a shared volume with them. This seems to me the greatest privilege that can be afforded any reader (even if it slightly undermines the idea of being – as I claim in a piece to be found later in this volume – a gatecrasher).

Booksellers and customers often complain about the difficulty of knowing where to stock or find my books. A similar problem crops up here. There is, inevitably, a fair bit of seepage between the various categories on the contents page – Visuals, Personals etc. – but, overall, this seemed the least unsatisfactory way of organising the material. To make things a little less rigid these category headings are not indicated within the pages of the text itself, so that the very personal piece on ghost bikes is followed, without warning, by the first categorically Personal piece. Like this there are only invisible, ghostly residues of division in the unfolding continuity of the book.

There is also, inevitably, a bit of repetition. I see I keep coming back to Rebecca West or John Cheever or D.H. Lawrence when I’m writing about other people: they constitute the core of my personal canon, the writers I can’t do without. The fact that Robert Frank keeps coming up as a point of comparison when I’m talking about other photographers might be a symptom of the author’s inadequate frame of reference; or perhaps it shows that there is no getting away from him (I meant Frank but perhaps the same is true of the author).

I originally intended using ‘My Life as a Gatecrasher’ as the title for the whole collection but discarded it for the reason mentioned above. The current title crops up in the essay on Susan Sontag – ‘Critics are always working the room’ – but although it was absolutely perfect I couldn’t use it because Jonathan Lethem had told me, a couple of years earlier, that he had the phrase laid away as the intended title of a future collection of his critical writings. I dropped him a line anyway and asked if he would consider loaning it to me. He agreed, and I’m extremely grateful to him for that characteristic bit of generosity.

G. D., London, June 2010