The persona he presents in his work embodies a kind of independence, but not the fierce, fighting kind we’ve been trained to see as heroic. Rather, he contains a lackadaisical independence, a sort of why-bother-even-pretending-to-care independence. To hear him tell it, he’s wasted his life away, smoking pot, listening to jazz and techno, going to raves and generally doing whatever he wanted simply because there was no one there to stop him. And in the midst of all his hanging out, Dyer has produced thirteen books on subjects as disparate yet somehow connected as photography, John Berger (Ways of Telling), jazz music (But Beautiful), tourism and its discontents (Yoga for Those Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It), D.H. Lawrence (Out of Sheer Rage), trance music (Paris Trance), and on and on and on.  Sometimes they’re straight up non-fiction, sometimes they’re forthright novels, sometimes they’re a gloss between the two. It doesn’t seem to matter to Dyer. The mode of inquiry doesn’t change his mission. Not one of these books reads like a cynical exercise in career maintenance. Each seems instead to be another step in a deeply personal search for meaning. Beneath the charm of their consistently casual prose style, all of them display the same acute curiosity about the stuff of the world as he finds it and the valuable joys and life-enriching ideas to be found in this stuff. Dyer has a talent for showing his readers why and how the seemingly frivolous things he’s smart about aren’t frivolous at all, but essential, actually, imbued with the potential, if looked at closely enough, to open up new and profound modes by which the individual might take an active role in his or her experience.

Dyer’s new book, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, recently out on Graywolf Press, gathers together essays and occasional pieces he’s written over the past twenty-one years, and in the process, it touches on many of the subjects he’s concerned himself with over the course of his career. It’s a fun read, a great introduction to Dyer’s work, if you haven’t read him before, a nice overview of his progression as a thinker, an artist, and a responder to art, if you have. For me, it was a great excuse to pick his brain about some of the things that intrigue me about his work. I was able to catch up with him, briefly, via email, as he was about to fly off to Rio.

***

THE RUMPUS: Otherwise Known as the Human Condition could fairly be called a miscellany. In the introduction to the collection, you discuss your love for reading books of ‘occasional pieces,’ and the ways they give insight into the writer’s life. It seems to me to intimate a kind of ethic, a notion of what writing is and does. What sort of relationship do you hope the book will have with its readers?

GEOFF DYER: The first thing I need to do is express my gratitude to Graywolf for publishing it because such collections are, obviously, not everyone’s cup of tea. The second is to thank my friend Jaime Wolf for spotting that bit of a sentence as a great potential title. Ok, moving on, I hope that readers will find things to stimulate and entertain them even in the pieces about writers they’ve never read or photographers they’ve never heard of. And hopefully even the pieces that are most specifically about someone or something contain observations or insights that have a relevance beyond their ostensible subject. I would also hope that experts in a given field might find stuff of interest to them about their field, though perhaps that’s being over-ambitious. My own interest in collections like this is bound up with the fact that I don’t read periodicals or journals. I don’t know why but there’s something incredibly depressing about having copies of the LRB or the TLS lying around. That’s what they do: they lie around until you eventually put them in the recycling bin, whereas a book you can put on a shelf. I think that’s it: I like things that can go on shelves.

RUMPUS: You consistently invoke and test your opinions against certain writers in these essays―D.H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and of course John Berger, among others―even when the subject under discussion is not directly related to them. They seem to live in your imagination in a way that implies they’re more than just literary influences. They and their work seem to have affected your sense of self and your approach to being in the world. It reminds me of how I first came to love literature, how particular writers promised to transform my life. This passionate relationship with literature often dissipates with age, yet you seem to have held onto it. What do you look for in the books you love, and do you think contemporary writers can still have the profound effect on their readers that these writers have had on you?

DYER: Oh yes, of course. It’s entirely possible that someone could be newly turned on to literature by reading White Teeth or The Corrections in the same way that happened to me all those years back with whatever it was I was reading then. Of course I still love literature and reading but I am more difficult to please now than I was twenty years ago. And what I want has changed. I want more philosophy and metaphysics more quickly – and less entertainment. As David Shields says somewhere in Reality Hunger the unfortunate thing about most novels is that they’re primarily a form of entertainment. For entertainment I prefer the television, ideally while football is being broadcast.

RUMPUS: Does this mean that, like Shields, you’re drawn more toward memoir and non-fiction now? Or are there contemporary fiction writers whose work attains this level of contemplative honesty (if that’s the right way to put it)?

DYER: I think it’s more that I only want to read fiction of the  highest quality. I’m reading the new Alan Hollinghurst  novel, A Stranger’s Child: very traditional in a way (in fact, traditionalness is one of the things it’s about) but I am luxuriating in it, in its expansiveness, because of the consistently high quality of everything (gesture, choreography, psychology, etc.) within the overall leisureliness of  its construction. It reminds me that I really want pretty much the same thing from many different kinds of writing: to open my eyes, inwardly and outwardly.

RUMPUS: You’ve written at length about John Berger. He’s an interesting writer in so many ways, but the one that fascinates me most is how he squares his explicit political engagement with his aesthetic sense. He never lets the politics overwhelm and drive the work toward propagandistic folly. There are undercurrents of a political sensibility in your work as well. Is political engagement as important to you as it is to him? Does a political motivation seep into your work?  How so, and how do you control it?

DYER: It’s surprised me that I’ve ended up being such an apolitical writer when so many of the writers I love―Berger, Camus, Orwell, Raymond Williams, Perry Anderson―are or were deeply political engaged, or are/were actual political  commentators. By comparison I’m navel-gazing and solipsistic to the point of idiocy. It’s one of the interesting things about writing: one is not entirely in control of the kind of stuff one ends up writing. But I think your word ‘sensibility’ is well chosen because who I am is defined absolutely by coming from a working class background. And there’s something obviously political bound up with that.

RUMPUS: There’s a notion of what it means to be an individual, and how we might own our individuality, lurking inside your work. A dare of sorts. And the fact that the work itself in generally apolitical makes this dare all the more potent.  Instead of being presented in opposition to some enemy, it’s presented as another kind of normal.

British writers often come across as biased against their American counterparts, as though they still think of us as their dumb younger brothers to be laughed at and maybe sometimes condescendingly patted on the head.  You, though, seem to have a great interest in and respect for American literature. What is it about American literature that attracts you and why?

DYER: I actually disagree completely with the premise of this question. I think many British readers and writers have found American writing to be way more inspiring than British literature. I think it’s to do with the voice, that lovely demotic richness of American English. And there seems a greater freedom in US fiction to just go with the voice, to roll with it. People tend not to do that in Britain so much unless it’s a very obviously―and often history-driven―kind of ventriloquism. The great exception of course is Martin Amis which is why we are so in thrall to him. But, you know, it’s not just American writing; I love America and, in so far as one can generalize, Americans.

RUMPUS: That’s refreshing to hear. I wonder if this embrace of Americans and American literature is relatively new (by which I mean, something that rose up you’re your generation, with maybe Martin Amis at the vanguard). What kind of effect has it had on British literature?

DYER: I think it began with Amis’s and my generations―i.e. the two generations of readers turned on to Catch-22, On the Road and The Catcher in the Rye. I’m not sure what effect it’s had. I think the post-colonial, Empire-strikes-back kind of stuff has been more significant for non-American English writing generally.

RUMPUS: Over and over in these essays you grapple with society’s expectations and definitions of “success” and how you’ve striven to work around them, to redefine success on your own terms. You state, more than once, that you do what you want when you want for your own reasons and that you set out at an early age to achieve this particular form of freedom. Do you think it’s still possible for a young person to carve an uncompromising individualistic place for him or herself in the world, and what does it take to do this?

DYER: Yes, I’ve employed all manner of sophistry, cunning and ingenuity to come up with a definition of success that was compatible with what, by any normal standards, would seem dismal and serial failure. It was necessary for the survival of the Dyer species of books in the face of flop after flop! But yes, the ultimate success is the freedom to do what you want and I was smart or selfish enough to realize that one didn’t need to wait for commercial success to achieve that. In fact the commercial failure of my books meant that the stakes were quite low. But I need to stress that I was the beneficiary of a particular moment in British history when there were all sorts of provisions in place to help me, the most important of which, after a long and very agreeable stint on the dole, was getting a rent-controlled flat. That kind of provision is now very rare so the obligation to waste time earning a living is more pressing.

RUMPUS: So in the absence of a social safety net that can be abused for personal gain, young people now need to be even more cunning and sophistic to achieve this level of freedom?

DYER: But for a long while―fifteen years or more―big advances were available for young writers fresh out of the UEA creative writing MA or whatever. You could become a career novelist right from the get-go. I’d be lying if I claimed never to have found this galling. That period is apparently over now.

RUMPUS: How did your social class and upbringing contribute to your adamant devotion to leisure? I’d think having come from a family of laborers would have made it harder to break free of the worldly signifiers of success and the notions of work that this particular kind of success requires.

DYER: Work in the sense of a job just seemed like lost time to me. I grew up unaware that there were incredibly fulfilling and rewarding jobs―like being a film director, say―which offer ways of making great use of one’s time and energy. As a student at Oxford I only had to go to one tutorial a week. Then, when I left university, I had to sign on the dole once a week at first and then once a month. So I went from this working class background to being a member of the leisure class and it seemed a very easy transition to make. Freedom to use your time as you wish: that is such an enormous privilege and discipline.

RUMPUS: I’m struck by the way your writing on photography focuses as much on how photos lead the viewer to imagine his or her way into new realities as on how they document the literal real. Your essays on photography in this book veer toward exploring how, by looking at a photographer’s oeuvre, one can detect evolving narratives not just about ways of seeing the world but about ways of seeing the self―ways of understanding one’s internal reality. You read them almost like books. Is there a relationship in your mind between the way photography communicates and the way literature does?

DYER: I think there’s a very close relationship between poetry and photography for obvious reasons: brevity, precision, the implications of a moment…And often in photographs there’s a huge implied or compacted narrative which it’s quite fun and revealing to unpack and write out in longhand. But each medium comes with its particular strengths and shortcomings. At first I was interested in photographs then I became interested in the history of photography and photographers.  That’s the overarching narrative in The Ongoing Moment, I think.

RUMPUS: Throughout your career, music has been a driving force in your work―both a subject and an inspiration.  What are you listening to now and how is it affecting your current work?

DYER: It’s not in my work at all, but my wife and I are having a great time at present listening quite seriously to the Beethoven piano sonatas, lots of different versions of them. It is intellectually so challenging, just listening to them. On the box set of the Kempff that we’re listening to Beethoven is described as one of the towering figures of Western Civilization. And that’s not an exaggeration. I’m thinking of using that as a self-blurb on the cover of my new book.

RUMPUS: Something like “Geoff Dyer is one of the towering figures of western civilization”? There, it’s been said. Now you can attribute it to The Rumpus, as well.

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“Maybe my work isn’t a cry for help. It may just be a baby’s need to cry or a dog’s need to bark.”

Jonathan Ames is turning out to be among the most prolific writers of his generation. His new book—his eighth—is called The Double Life Is Twice as Good. It’s a miscellany, rounding up essays, articles, stories, and profiles of people like Marilyn Manson and Lenny Kravitz, for the amusement, and often titillation, of Ames’s ever growing legions of fans. Bored to Death, a new HBO series based on his work will premiere this fall. In The Double Life he’s as effortlessly charming, neurotic, self-aware, and kinky as ever; what’s notable here is that, as the Ames persona grows into a small industry, Ames the writer has managed to remain humble and emotionally naked—in a word, “brave”—which one suspects goes some length toward explaining his appeal.

The Rumpus had novelist Joshua Furst ask Ames a few humble questions of his own, and Ames kindly took the time to humor us.

**

The Rumpus: You’ve had a busy year—a graphic novel, an upcoming HBO show, and a new collection of stories and essays. It seems you’ve reached a kind of mid-point in your career. I’d love to hear how you’d assess the ways your work, and your objectives for your work, have grown and changed over the years.

Jonathan Ames: I think at one time, I hoped to be seen as a fine writer. With my novel, The Extra Man, I made a real effort to write a beautiful novel, and I think it was judged as such, to a certain degree, by reviewers. But then because I started writing a column about my adventures (for New York Press from 1997-2000) and performing a great deal, it seemed to me that my personality and my subject matter (at times a bit sexually outré), somehow took precedence over the writing, the prose.

All of this was of my own making, but I think this disappointed me; I’m speaking to your question about objectives; but all this was an ego objective (to be seen as a fine writer) and so, naturally, I should be disappointed: the ego can never be satisfied. So at some point, I gave up on these kind of objectives. My objective now is to simply entertain and amuse.

That said, ego is still involved—otherwise why put one’s name on a piece of art? Then again, the name, the associations with a writer’s name, can add to the reader’s entertainment and pleasure. When I read Graham Greene part of my pleasure is that I’m reading Graham Greene. So the same can be said for the handful of people that I’m trying to amuse—they like to read books written by me, with my name on the cover… Some ego is involved because I guess one wants to be perceived as a good clown and one puts one’s name on the art; but it’s so hard to do anything in life, trapped as we are in our bodies, that is purely selfless for others… somehow the self is always involved.

And now the second part—how has my work grown and changed over the years? I’m not really sure. The work changes the way your face changes and ages – it just does. Also, I have very little connection to anything I’ve written. I move on. We all move on. I don’t really know the person who wrote the things I wrote. I kind of know him, but I change so much all the time that it’s like I start fresh over and over and over and over. Writing-wise and life-wise. I feel like that character in Memento: Perpetually forgetting, with just traces of the past still clinging… well, the past clings quite a lot, but I feel like my brain is always changing… probably always dying.

One last thing on objectives—I like to make things, create things, so that’s probably been the primary objective all along, even before the ego objective—to make. To record. But why record… [that] gets back to the ego, a little. Oh, well. Making is good. I like to make things.

Rumpus: You write a lot about instability and uncertainty—psychological, emotional, sexual, economic. In both your fiction and your non-fiction the narrator often seems to be looking up from a great distance at other, seemingly more capable people with a sense of confusion as to how they’ve managed to so gracefully thrive. Would you say, at this point that you’ve found any solutions to these anxieties?

JA: Not really. No solutions. But I’m also not sure that I look up to others as knowing what the hell is going on, except maybe Andre Agassi, who, when I interviewed him, while covering the U.S. Open, seemed to know what was going on. My basic assumption is that we’re all confused all the time. Some people do act more confident, though. Maybe they aren’t confused. I am. I’m confused right now.

Rumpus: The distinction between the nonfictional “Jonathan Ames” and the various heroes who populate your fiction is extremely thin. Frequently, the only difference between the two is in the labeling. It’s as though you’re saying, “These are things that have happened to me,” and “These are things that could have happened to me.” But, as the title of the new book suggests, both are created personas to a certain extent. Does this ever become confusing for you? Do you find, sometimes, that the public selves you’ve postulated become self-perpetuating and begin to affect your lived experience?

JA: The real self and the public self are intertwined, like a tumor around an organ, and you can’t cut the tumor or you’ll kill the organ, so they live together, until the tumor chokes the organ off (but which self is the tumor?). Or it’s like something out of Star Trek. The Borg. No one I interact with—except maybe for family and strangers at the Russian baths and other weird places I may go to—is just friends or lovers with me: they also know something of my writing and this distorts their take on me

I wish I could be authentic. But I think once you open your mouth you lose authenticity. Because of the coded nature of language. Actions can be authentic. But authenticity is just for the witness. Right now, by myself, I’m authentic. Just breathing. Staying out of trouble. Alone. Don’t even need to label it authentic.

Rumpus: You mention more than once in the book that you’ve “retired from looking for love.” Has this simplified your life in a positive way? Does it imply that you’ve discovered a successful way to cope with the loneliness you so frequently write about?

Jason Schwartzman as Jonathan Ames

JA: I think one of my fictional characters may have said that. Don’t hold me to anything in the book. I’m a waffler. I like wafflers. They said John Kerry was a waffler, but I admired him for that—showed he could change his mind. Nothing wrong with changing your mind. That’s a very unwaffling thing to say: “Nothing wrong…” Who am I to say that there’s nothing wrong with it? Maybe something is wrong with changing your mind. Anyway, love is very, very difficult. I love. But probably because I hate myself on some deep, sick level, it makes loving difficult. But I do try.

Rumpus: In one essay in the book, “Middle American Gothic,” you write, “This diary and everything else I’ve ever written is actually code for one word: help!” I think this motivation pulses underneath the work of many writers—and artists in general. But of course, what happens is you end up creating a documentation of the cry for help. Readers can’t really reach out and do anything for you. They can identify, sympathize maybe, or gawk or applaud or pass judgment. If they respond deeply to the work, more often than not it’s because they feel as though you’ve answered their own cries for help. It’s a paradox. So where does the help you the writer are seeking come from? And does the writing end up just fortifying the wall between yourself and others?

JA: A lot of readers have actually helped me, been really sweet to me… So maybe my cry for help has sometimes been answered. In my last column for New York Press, which was later reprinted in my book My Less than Secret Life, I asked readers, if they saw me on the street, to give me five bucks. Not sure why I asked that, except that for years I was so broke that I knew I could always use five bucks. Maybe it was ten bucks. Anyway, a number of people have sent me checks after reading that. I don’t think I cashed them, though. Maybe I did. I can’t remember.

Maybe my work isn’t a cry for help. It may just be a baby’s need to cry or a dog’s need to bark. You know, barks that seem connected to phantom noises and cries that just come; though a baby’s cries are usually efficient—something is bothering them. Anyway, I think giving money is a sign of love. If you truly want to help someone, a lot of times giving them money is the best thing you can do. From age 23 to 44—I’m 45 now—I was always in need of money, and I was especially in need of it from 23 to about 34, and my great aunt would always give me money, a hundred bucks, every two months or so, and a lot of times that hundred bucks made a huge difference—I could eat or pay a small bill. It kept me going. She gave me money. It was very loving.

Rumpus: One of the things that has always impressed me about your work is the way your approach everyone, no matter where they stand on the social ladder, as equally fragile and worthy of respect. One example of this, among many, can be found in the essay “The Church of Surface,” when you carry on a long conversation, entirely bereft of condescension or pity, with the homeless man you’ve seen haunting the meatpacking district. What’s touching about it is the sense you convey of the homeless man being your equal, and the equal of the bankers and beautiful girls you meet elsewhere in the essay. How does one attain this level of beatitude?

JA: Wow, that’s a nice thing to say. I’m not sure that I do that, but somewhere in my brain is the statement: “Who am I to judge?” I certainly do judge, but, really, who am I to judge?

Rumpus: The first story in this collection has spawned an HBO show, Bored to Death, that will premiere this fall. Tell me about it.

JA: Oh, man, I’m running out of steam… Somehow I managed to create a whole TV show, with lots of characters and stories. It stars Jason Schwartzman, Ted Danson, and Zach Galifianakis, and lots of other interesting people, like John Hodgman, Oliver Platt, Sarah Vowell, Parker Posey, Krisin Wiig, and Patton Oswalt. I worked eighty, ninety hours a week on it and we’re nearly done, just sound-editing left, and it premieres September 20 at 9:30pm.

Rumpus: Did you consider playing yourself in the show?

JA: No. Jason Schwartzman does a much better job of playing Jonathan Ames than I do.

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“What Joshua Mohr is doing

American literature of the dispossessed, of the debased and desperate, unwashed and masochistic—gutter fiction, let’s call it, or grit lit, maybe—has become, at this late date, a trustworthy genre. The tropes of the form are all familiar now: misunderstood loners, massive doses of drugs and alcohol, equally massive doses of shame and rage, monochrome cities filled with dark rooms in which unspeakable acts occur on a daily basis, haunting childhood scars that won’t stop itching, a cruel cruel world where redemption is fleeting and, as often as not, mistaken for further humiliation.

At their best, these books propose an alternate America, a kind of tonic to the suburban middle class ideal, one where economic and spiritual poverty are endemic, ruthlessness is the norm, and everyone is a provisional survivor; the stories hit you like a tsunami of blood gushing straight out of the open vein of our culture. At their worst, they can track familiar twelve-step narratives through self-loathing to self-pity and on toward salvation.

In his first novel, Some Things that Meant the World to Me, Joshua Mohr announces his intention to work this territory before the first sentence. Two words in the epigraph—”Tom Waits”—are all it takes to know what kind of world we’re headed into. But this isn’t to say that the book is bad—it’s very good, actually, in part because it’s self-conscious about its relationship to its predecessors.

So, we have the lost man-child, Rhonda, he’s called, blinking the days away in a drunken haze. In the first chapter, he saves a hooker’s life. By the third, he’s passed out and pissed in her bed. (The dark goings on here are played for rueful laughs.) By the fifth, he’s wandering around San Francisco’s Mission District with a scrawny kid in a miner’s helmet who turns out to be him, Rhonda, too, and who spends much of the novel bossing him around. Little Rhonda tells big Rhonda to climb into a dumpster and dig through the trash, open the trapdoor at the bottom, and dive down into the earth. And that’s exactly what big Rhonda does.

What? Huh? We’re not in the land of the real any more, Dorothy.

In alternating chapters, Rhonda reminisces on various morbid scenes from his childhood in Phoenix. The time his mother ran off for a drink and didn’t come back for two weeks. The other time she did this. And that other time. The time their tract house expanded until it was miles wide, wide enough for him to hide from his mother’s boyfriend, Letch. The times the snakes protected him—and the times they didn’t. The time he spiked Letch’s Bloody Mary with antifreeze—that’s a big one.

What Rhonda finds beneath the dumpster is a glass-bottomed box through which he can watch his mother’s hapless attempts to protect and love him and his own equally hapless attempts to do the same for her. Then he resurfaces into the grimy San Francisco streets, dislocated, not so much by the surreality of his situation as by the realization that there might be something redeemable about him.

As Some Things progresses, we follow Rhonda’s tragicomic attempts to make good on this realization. The plot jolts forward in fits and starts, more a picaresque than a straightforward narrative. We meet Handa, the girl Rhonda has a humiliating crush on. We meet Vern, the old drunk Rhonda pals around with, who teaches him how to make a prison wine called pruno and longs to do him physical harm. We meet yet another Rhonda—our protagonist’s Wheel of Fortune-obsessed elderly neighbor, who cares about him more than he cares about himself.

Through it all, we watch Rhonda’s symbolic world creep outward and enshroud everything he touches. The snakes, the expanding house, the trap door in the dumpster—eventually these things become indistinguishable from the real world. When this occurs, Rhonda’s reality becomes untenable. He must return to Phoenix to purge himself of the root causes of these symbols.

Joshua Mohr

In some ways, this book is in argument with itself. There’s a conflict here between the real and the surreal. Mohr periodically inserts chapters in which Rhonda sits in front of a psychiatrist discussing (or not) his diagnosis of “depersonalization.” Which is all fine and good, if the goal is to explain the presence of the impossible within the dictates of standard realism. Why bother, though, when you’ve landed on something more interesting and ambitious outside those conventions?

This finally is the achievement of Mohr’s novel: Rhonda’s pantheon of touchstones is culled from the mundane detritus of our contemporary American landscape. As the book progresses, these touchstones accumulate not only symbolic, but also narrative weight. They flex and bend. They act. And we, as readers, learn to trust the underlying logic of their action. In this way, the altered reality of Rhonda’s perceptions comes across as true and meaningful.

What Mohr’s doing might look, on the surface, like another contribution to the mass of gutter fiction already extant, but Some Things that Meant the World to Me actually has more in common with Kafka and Lewis Carroll and Haruki Murakami, all great chroniclers of the fantastic. Instead of attempting to shock and dislocate us with the moral vacuity of his milieu, Mohr relies on our familiarity with it, our sentimental attachment to such squalor, to ground us in the safety of the known. Having done so, he can take us into the fantastic without worrying about losing us along the way. He’s interested in something weirder and less overplayed than mere sex, drugs, and degradation—what he creates is a symbolist world that, once broken, stays that way, just like the people in it, but there’s a hope here, too, that these people might be able to recognize and cherish the broken reality all around and inside them.

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