Geoff Dyer and the Art of the Great Day

May 20, 2015, by

RM4_5819May 12th was balmy—not as hot as usual in Texas in May.  You could sit outside and feel the day slipping away. That is always a good feeling if you have done something interesting.

I mostly graded papers.  Some of it was interesting.  This is how it goes.  Still, I wanted a little more from my daylight buck.  I sat outside at Bayou Place looking straight at the Wortham Center waiting for seven o’clock to roll around.  It would be the final reading for the Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series.  I was excited:  nonfiction by the English writer Geoff Dyer.  I felt like I had read a lot of fiction during the day: “Gatsby enjoys socializing with the Buchanans and finds them so interesting!”

And, some of the English: well, dicey.

I thought: how do you grade writing anymore anyway?  I thought: how do you know if you have had a great day?  I thought: how do you know if you know what you are doing?  How do you know if you don’t?

It’s more about how you feel at that moment, right?  Well if you want to learn how to whip that up, and get it down, there are worse places to go than the writing of Geoff Dyer, and lucky for me, that is exactly where I went.  He read from his newish book Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H. W. Bush.  Continue reading