Another Friday Night and I ain't Got Nobody

Because I'm sitting in front of a computer with a job to do. An obligation to fulfill. And many distractions to keep me from the tasks at hand.

There has been a repeated them in the last year of my life that consists of me getting stacks of books to review. I sort the books first by due date then by interest. Then I read. And read. And read, ad nauseum. The books begin to move from the headboard to the computer desk. Outlines are written, research is done and reviews are written. Then re-written.

With few exception I've been taking less enjoyment from doing this then you just took from reading about it. But it worsened this week; this day.

I realized I was dreading reading.

Reading and writing have been passions of mine since I learned to string words together. Given my druthers I'd have up to five books going, three or more short stories in production and one big project at least outlined. Then reading and reading and reading started taking over doing any writing. My brain has been so saturated with the words of others my own dissipated and wallowed. Looking in my folders I saw scads of short stories and two book outlines that have been sitting with no activity. It's all still in my brain, back burnered and ignored.

No more. There is a review moratorium in place effect until at least November.

I can tell you of one book that fed my brain and actually fostered my writing.

Geoff Dyer's Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It.

It covers 11 trips to 11 places beginning in New Orleans (Dyer is in his twenties; bawdy and young) and ends in the desert of Nevada. Over twenty years have passed. One can hardly tell by Dyer's brilliant and belligerent grievances. He is a man too vigorously cerebral to know contentment but a man thoroughly entertaining in his restlessness.

As he travels from place to place and person to person, the reader experiences the streets of Paris and the beautifully decayed columns of Leptis Magna via perpetual disgruntlement mixed equally with wonder.


Here is a slice of the section entitled 'Hotel Oblivion':

In the cramped confines of the toilet I had trouble getting out of my wet trousers, which clung to my legs like a drowning man. The new ones were quite complicated too in that they had more legs than a spider; either that or they didn't have enough legs to get mine into. The numbers failed to add up. Always there was one trouser leg too many or one of my legs was left over. From the outside it may have looked like a simple toilet, but once you were locked in here the most basic rules of arithmetic no longer held true. Two into two simply would not go. It was insane, it took a terrible toll on my head. I concentrated hard, applied myself with a vengeance to the task at hand. I got one leg in. I got the other in. Hurray! A man who has finally put behind him the spectre of thirty years of unwanted celibacy-I'm in!-cannot have felt a greater surge of triumph and self-vindication than I did at that point.

Such exultation was short-lived, however, for these trousers were wet too. Somehow, I had put back on the wet pair that I had just taken off. The dry ones were still dry, waiting to be put on. I was back where I started. After all the effort of the last-how long? I could have been in here for hours-this was a crushing blow, and one that I was not sure I could recover from.

A joy to read. He plays with words, ideas and life in a way that stimulates as it entertains. I've seen it described as an existential travelogue but that's hardly a persuader. My favorite summary comes from Wendy Lesser when she says:



“What is the proper way to describe Geoff Dyer? Not deeply companionable, not viciously funny, not shockingly original, not effortlessly hip, not naively romantic, not wryly analytic, not endearingly foolish, not engagingly clever, but, perhaps, some as-yet-uninvented phrase which implies all these things at once.