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A SERIES OF LOOPS GEOFF DYER ON TENNIS AND TENNYSON
Among many other things, this book dwells on the infirmities of aging. When did that become a preoccupation for you? I noticed that things started going wrong almost exactly from my 60th birthday. Since then, I have warned all my friends in their late fifties. Now, I always say to them, “Enjoy your youth.” The book has an unusual structure. Can you explain what it is and how you arrived at it? Nietzsche is probably the single most important figure in it, particularly his notion of the eternal recurrence. That concept started me thinking about some kind of loop or circularity thing. You divide each of the three sections into 60 chapters. Did you have the number of seconds in a minute in mind? Or the number of minutes in an hour? Both. Sixty seconds in a minute times 60 minutes in an hour gives you
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JOHN CLEESE: STILL SILLY
Geoff Dyer
3,600. Multiply that by 24 hours in a day, and you get 86,400 seconds. At the end of the book, as a sort of little treat, I point out that the book itself has 86,400 words. Can I say that’s not a coincidence? The book exhibits a tightly woven fabric of reference. How do you understand the way that you mix disparate references? I’ve always been at odds with any kind of specialization. And also, I’ve always been very resistant to this idea of some sort of separation between that which is studied and that which is lived. You can’t make sense of the things that are happening in your life properly without the support of literature. How do you make that resistance to specialization work on the page? I employ tonal elasticity. I go from one sentence making a knock-about kind of joke to a serious point and then back again. And ideally, that kind of switcheroo might even be contained within the same sentence. As a result, some
of the things are both serious and jokes at the same time. Nietzsche exemplifies this. For him, a joke is always an idea in extreme and miniature. How do you explain your success in this very personal idiom? With my books, part of the excitement of reading them is trying to work out, “What is this? Exactly what am I reading? How is it meant to be read?” What can we expect from your upcoming conversation with Sameer Pandya? It’ll be a mixture of me reading certain bits and conversation with Sameer, who, of course, is a very, very accomplished tennis player as well as being a novelist. –Charles Donelan Parallel Stories: The Last Days of Roger Federer: Considering Creativity and Aging with Geoff Dyer will take place in the SBMA’s Mary Craig Auditorium on Thursday, May 26, at 5:30 p.m. For information and to make reservations, visit sbma.net.
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THE WAR SHIRT Michael Downey’s remarkable courage and resiliency are fully on display in this intimate one-person show directed by Rod Lathim. As a gay Black man coming of age in California in the 1970s, Downey often felt out of step and ahead of his time. The “war shirt” of the show’s title refers to a Native American tradition that Downey’s father shares with him in a moment of cross-generational connection. Downey’s warm and animated delivery renders his story with great pathos and considerable humor. This virtual performance, filmed at the Marjorie Luke Theatre, can be viewed at luketheatre.org. —CD
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n his essay “The Critic as Artist,” Oscar Wilde famously declared that “the highest criticism is really the record of one’s own soul.” More delightful than history and more concrete than philosophy, for Wilde, the best kind of non-fiction writing deals with “the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind.” No 21stcentury writer has taken this advice more to heart than Geoff Dyer, the author most recently of a charming and highly idiosyncratic work of “highest criticism,” titled The Last Days of Roger Federer and Other Endings. Dyer will appear in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s (SBMA) Parallel Stories series on Thursday, May 26, conversing with novelist and UCSB professor Sameer Pandya. I spoke with Dyer recently by phone from his home in Venice Beach. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
John Cleese
John Cleese will always enjoy an exalted position in our city’s pantheon of current and former residents. In addition to making substantial contributions to the residential real estate sector, Cleese graced our society with then-wife Alyce Faye and raised his daughter Camilla here. Camilla Cleese writes and performs comedy like her father, and she will join him on Wednesday, May 25, for a performance at The Granada Theatre called An Evening of “Exceptional Silliness” with John Cleese. Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the absurdist sketch comedy program Cleese created with Graham Chapman, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, and Terry Gilliam for the BBC between 1969 and 1974, ranks among the most influential television programs of all time. Saturday Night Live, for example, is unimaginable without the Python precedent. Three additional films and many individual side projects secured lasting fame for all the group members, and none more so than Cleese. In addition to the long-awaited stage musical version of A Fish Called Wanda, Cleese told me he has started writing a stage comedy adaptation of Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Cleese considers the 1979 hit comedy about Brian Cohen, a Jewish-Roman man who must bear with being mistaken for Jesus, to be “the most important thing we ever did.” At 82, Cleese generates ideas as rapidly as he tweets. One such project, a news documentary on cancel culture, was announced by Channel 4 television last year. Cleese has been offended by how easily other people take offense at comedy in recent years. Here’s hoping that this Granada evening keeps the promise of “exceptional silliness.”For tickets and information, visit granadasb.com or call (805) 899-2222. –CD
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MAY 19, 2022
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