Festival fanatic
Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi author Geoff Dyer. Photo: Jason Oddy.
Imagining 53 year old Dyer in a hallway hunched over the receiver trying to hear each question (the house he takes the call from is very loud), this reporter pictures him naked running around a desert festival high on a cocktail of drugs.
But that isn’t accurate. Dyer has gone to the Burning Man festival (in the Nevada Desert)five times – which he wrote about in his book Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It, and althought the festival is synonymous with people hanging out high as kites in the buff – he says he is not comfortable being naked in public. And drugs, he is not prepared to talk about.
(Burning Man is an experiment in community, radical self-expression and self-reliance. Instead of using cash, revellers give gifts to one another. There are no stages and people are encouraged to become part of the event. On the last night of the festival participants burn a wooden effigy.)
We talk about festivals in general. He loves them all, even Writers and Readers Festivals, where he will feature this week in Wellington. And not because he gets to meet his readers.
“You would have to be a bit of a dick to think of these people as ‘your readers’,” he says rolling his words. “The idea that these people are ‘my readers’ is an anathema to me. I am a reader too.”
However, we suspect many Wellingtonians wouldn’t mind being called Dyer readers. He has written on an impressive number of subjects and in various publications. He wrote about jazz in But Beautiful, D H Lawrence in Out of Sheer Rage, photography in The Ongoing Moment and travel in Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It. He also writes fiction, his most recent novel is Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (half of which is set in Venice where the character is covering the Biennale art exhibition, and the other in India where he is commissioned to write a travel piece), which won the 2009 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. And he has written for The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Esquire, and The Guardian.
The modest writer says the appeal of festivals like this one during the NZ International Arts Festival is not necessarily meeting one’s favourite writers, which he has done in the past including Lawrence Wright and Steve Cole, but what the festival becomes.
“The thing about festivals is it is a period of time in a particular place where some magical temporary community takes place. That is what I think a festival ultimately is; a special place with a communal feel.”
And the best festivals are those where there are no VIPS – like the Jaipur Literature Festival and Burning Man. “It is much bigger than me saying ‘here I am reading from a book’. It is a party that everybody is able to share in. I am very taken with that.”
It seems fitting that one reviewer has called Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi “Burning Man on the Ganges”.
Geoff Dyer – The Ongoing Moment, Embassy Theatre, 9.30am, March 11. But Beautiful – Geoff Dyer and Philip Hoare, Embassy Theatre, 12.30pm, March 11.
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