The British essayist on his U.S. Navy immersion.
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Overview
From a writer “whose genre-jumping refusal to be pinned down [makes him] an exemplar of our era” (NPR), a new book that confirms his power to astound readers.
As a child Geoff Dyer spent long hours making and blotchily painting model fighter planes. So the adult Dyer jumped at the chance of a residency aboard an aircraft carrier. Another Great Day at Sea chronicles Dyer’s experiences on the USS George H.W. Bush as he navigates the routines and protocols of “carrier-world,” from the elaborate choreography of the flight deck through miles of walkways and hatches to kitchens serving meals for a crew of five thousand to the deafening complexity of catapult and arresting gear. Meeting the Captain, the F-18 pilots and the dentists, experiencing everything from a man-overboard alert to the Steel Beach Party, Dyer guides us through the most AIE (acronym intensive environment) imaginable.
A lanky Englishman (could he really be both the tallest and the oldest person on the ship?) in a deeply American world, with its constant exhortations to improve, to do better, Dyer brilliantly records the daily life on board the ship, revealing it to be a prism for understanding a society where discipline and conformity, dedication and optimism, become forms of self-expression. In the process it becomes clear why Geoff Dyer has been widely praised as one of the most original—and funniest—voices in literature.
Another Great Day at Sea is the definitive work of an author whose books defy definition.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780307911599 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 05/20/2014 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 208 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
GEOFF DYER’s books include But Beautiful (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award); The Missing of the Somme; Out of Sheer Rage; The Ongoing Moment (winner of the ICP Infinity Award for writing on photography); Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi; and Zona. His many awards include the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and, most recently, a National Book Critics Circle Award for the essay collection Otherwise Known as the Human Condition. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and his books have been translated into twenty-four languages. Dyer currently lives in Venice, California.
Read an Excerpt
Chapter 6
For the duration of my stay the carrier remained a three-dimensional maze of walkways, stairs and hatches but at some point we always ended up back in the hangar bay—the second most interesting place on the boat (after the flight deck). We passed through there straight after our tour of the kitchen and would do so later the same day, after dark, when it was illuminated by a pale yellow light (less visible from a distance). Now the Arabian sun was peeking through the open expanse of the elevator bay, eager to get a glimpse of whatever was going on in this outpost of industrial America.
Like a buffalo brought down by a lion who then summons the rest of her pride to tuck in, an F-18 was being pecked, prodded and taken apart by a gang of mechanics and engineers. They swarmed over it, drawing metallic entrails from the fuselage, digging into its cockpit and burrowing away in the bowels of the engine. They did this with the utmost care, many of them wearing the soft suede or chamois over-shoes I’d noticed earlier—the heavy industrial equivalent of carpet slippers—to prevent damage to the plane’s delicate skin. The concern was reciprocated: little padded pouches were tied to the sharp edges of the plane’s fins and wings so that heads were not gashed as people hurried by.
A brown-shirted woman was perched on the wing, cross-legged as if at a festival of future archaeology, concentrating closely on the all-important part she was unscrewing. Having taken the component out of the wing she was now coating it with some kind of grease, glue, anti-freeze, lube or whatever. I apologize for the discrepancy between the precision of the task and the imprecision of my description of that task. I have never liked anything that involves engines, oil or fiddly intricate work even though it is, in a way, in my blood. My dad served his apprenticeship and worked at Gloster Aircraft Company, where one of the first operational jet fighters, the Gloster Meteor, was built. Some days he and his workmates would eat lunch outside, munching their bread-rationed sandwiches, watching planes take off and fly around the shirey skies. (My parents were much on my mind while I was on the boat; my mum had died four months before I came on board; my dad would die, quite suddenly, three weeks after I got back.)
A couple of planes away a fuel cell bladder was being replaced. It looked like a cross between a black python and a massively deflated paddling pool. The work was being overseen by a civilian who, like almost all the civilians on the boat, was ex-military (a Vietnam vet from helicopters, search and rescue). If you met him in the street you would guess straightaway that he had been in the military: a directness, a strength (physical, yes, but also of purpose and identity), an instinct for straight talking that is manifest even when (especially when) silent. A young woman was curled up yoga-ishly on the wing of this plane too, replacing something. The fact that she was wearing a cranial and an oil-smeared brown jersey made her eyes even more luminous. I was glad to have an excuse to talk with her. She wiped her face with the back of her hand, as you do when your fingers are oily. It wasn’t exactly a gender-reversal thing going on, but the essential choreography of the scene was being acted out in garages throughout the world: a woman being told what’s wrong with her car, in terms barely comprehensible, by a swarthy grease monkey confident of his knowledge and not embarrassed about the oil-smudged pictures of chicks, mainly blonde, who provide a silent chorus of assent when the complexity of the repair and its estimated cost is eventually revealed. No pin-ups like that here, of course: less, I think, because the women on board might find such things offensive than because any man who even considered such forms of decoration would instantly feel like a total dick. A limp dick at that. It’s striking how many of the world’s little problems—and many of its big ones too—are eliminated by the simplest of solutions: having women around. Just over a fifth of the ship’s company were women. Only men in senior positions were old enough to remember what it was like to have men-only boats. One of these explained to me that the main difference, after women came aboard, was ‘that the boat smelled a bit nicer because the guys showered more.’ Other than that, what surprised him was the speed with which resistance to the idea of gender integration was followed by two related and equally baffling questions: what had all the fuss been about—and why didn’t we do this earlier?*
A stranger to the workplace, I needed only a short time on the boat to realize that the workplace—not pubs, parties or clubs—is the great breeding ground of crushes. Over the years I’d developed a strong idea of all the things about office life that I could not tolerate—like using a shared toilet—but it occurred to me now that I couldn’t take the drain and strain of having crushes on my co-workers. One was spared that at home alone—but one was missing out on it too.
We chatted some more, me and the bright-eyed mechanic who, it turned out, was from Wyoming. (‘Wyoming!’ I trilled. ‘Really?’) It also turned out that another part of our meeting failed to conform to the usual woman-with-car-talking-to-manly-mechanic scenario. Namely that this mechanic had a husband at home who was an ex-Marine. Ah. And they had a four-year-old daughter. Her dad—the dad of the woman I was talking to, grandfather of the four-year-old—was a mechanic and she’d always wanted to be a mechanic herself. It was easy to imagine her as a teenage tomboy, able to mend punctures or tighten a climbing frame that had gone wonky. She was twenty-two now and, looking at her (which I had no desire not to do) I found it difficult to imagine anyone doing what they were doing more contentedly. I dismissed this as soon as I thought it, as soon as I looked around at everyone else, at all the other mechanics and engineers who were going about their business with such concentrated contentment. Even the people who weren’t working were working out, on the exercise bikes or in one of the fitness classes which seemed a 24/7 feature of the hangar deck. Everywhere you looked, everyone was doing something, if not working on the planes then pushing or towing things on trolleys. It was like Whitman’s ‘Song for Occupations’ in an entirely military setting (with a special emphasis on avionics): a vision of a fulfilled and industrious America, each person indispensable to the workings of the larger enterprise, no friction between the person and the task. Which made me think: why not name an aircraft carrier after Whitman? And why stop at Walt? Why not re-brand all the carriers and give them the names of poets? Show me one good reason why the USS Ronald Reagan shouldn’t be called the USS Emily Dickinson.
* I have recorded what I saw and heard, and my impressions of what I saw and heard. For an investigation of sexual abuse in the US military see Kirby Dick’s documentary The Invisible War.
Interviews
Barnes & Noble Review Interview with Geoff Dyer
The titles have always been inspired. Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D :. H. Lawrence; Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews; But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz; and many others, including the classic Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi and the travelogue Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It, which contains the immortal line "I wished I'd been doing yoga for years — in fact I'd been wishing I'd been doing yoga for years for years — but I was incapable of starting." If that sentence rubs you the right way, you may be in danger of becoming a devotee of Dyer (if not necessarily of yoga). In which case, good luck to you and yours. It's a hell of a ride.
Now comes the auspiciously titled Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H. :W. Bush, concerning two weeks Dyer spent as "writer-in-residence" aboard an American aircraft carrier in the Arabian Gulf. Sound more or less insane? To us, too, which is why we decided to ask him why and how. In keeping with the book's nautical theme, the interview took place at NYC's Maritime Hotel, though on that particular rainy morning it seemed more submarine than aircraft carrier?. —Daniel Asa Rose
The Barnes & Noble Review: Given your childhood love of "making and botchily painting Airfix models" of WWII aircraft, the concept of planting you on an American carrier makes a modicum of sense. Still, your usual turf is art, letters, your inner neuroses, sex. So whose mad idea was this?
Geoff Dyer: I was offered the chance of being writer- in-residence somewhere interesting by Alain de Botton. The choice of a carrier was mine.
BNR: Still, you must admit it's a bit counterintuitive, rather like assigning Oscar Wilde to a convention of tax accountants in Kansas City.
GD: To me it seemed entirely natural, as do any desires in one's life, however perverse they may appear to other people.
BNR: You write that you were "encountering an America [you] had not come across before, an aquatic version of the Midwest and the bible-belt South." Were you surprised by how much you seemed to enjoy them?
GD: I've always liked Americans, even when they're nuts or zealots or not of my political persuasion. There is that lovely democratic manner that stands in such contrast to the English equivalent with its class system: The Royal Navy. Merely saying that first word sets the teeth on edge, doesn't it? Besides, there's something extremely admirable about these folks.
BNR: Still, you insisted pretty hard that you had to have your own bedroom —
GD: Which was an absolute essential. It would have been intolerable without my own room. Though in the manner of all intolerable things, if I'd had to I would have tolerated it.
BNR: Ah, there it is now! Your "capacity for energetic self-contradiction." I've never read anyone with such an unlikely gift. What's that all about?
GD: I guess it's the human-all-too-human thing. Nietzsche, by the way, has never got the credit he deserves for being a wit and joker. He said he wouldn't mind being regarded as a buffoon. An excellent outlook.
BNR: In an earlier book, you go on an absolute tear against academic writing. For five pages you rant beautifully — yet at the end you disavow it completely: "I withdraw it unconditionally, but I also want to let it stand, conditionally." What kind of (non)argumentation is this?
GD: I do it for comic effect, quite largely. To be funny, to come off it a little bit. If I can spot an opportunity for a gag I'll always go for it
BNR: Yet I could see where it might drive some people round the bend. Are you ever glad you don't have to be married to yourself? How long do you think you could stand being your own wife?
GD: Oh, you need have no concerns in that department. Being married to me means my wife is in a state of permanent and unconditional bliss.
BNR: When you read other witty writers, how tolerant are you? I guess what I'm asking, specifically, is where do you think the line falls between clever and glib? The difference being, I suppose, that clever sticks to your ribs a nanosecond longer.
GD: I get tired rather quickly of witty writers like Gore Vidal. I like uproariously funny writers like Thomas Bernhard. He's absolutely hilarious. One of the funniest passages I've read in years is in The Forever War, when Dexter Filkins comes across the head of a suicide bomber in Baghdad. By contrast, I should add that it is a point of honor for me never to refer to "the Coen brothers," only to "the witless Coen brothers." To anyone who has a highly developed sense of humor they are the pits, those two.
BNR: Wow. I'd better not ask if you're ever guilty of being glib, yourself.
GD: I'm in the fortunate position of being both a profound and very funny writer.
BNR: All part of your self-denigrating charm?.
GD: Indeed!
NR: Speaking of self-denigrating, you've always been pretty hard on your physical appearance. Here you describe yourself as "a feeble streak of unshouldered manhood whose only saving grace is that he doesn't take up too much space." Are you ever going to make peace with that? You're a great-lookin' guy, even if you're not Charles Atlas?.
GD: Wow, you really are a flirt!
BNR: It was an intensely "straight" atmosphere on board the USS George H. :W. Bush, yet I still managed to get my habitual contact high from reading you. Presumably there were no drugs allowed?.
GD: No, of course not. Nor any alcohol. Just belief in their cause — a famously effective intoxicant.
BNR: Apropos of nothing, I sometimes get the feeling you wish you were more ill-tempered than you are. In your D. :H. Lawrence book, you seem to envy him his rage.
GD: No, not at all. I have learned largely to suppress the expression of my rage — i.e., resist the urge to smash my head against a wall — but I'd like to move to the next phase, of not feeling rage in the first place. It's so exhausting. BNR: Such is the fever your prose engenders that one finds oneself nodding in agreement over such hopeless over- generalizations as "Life is really no more than a search for a hot drink one likes." How do you get away with it?
GD: By being absolutely faithful to the contingencies of my own experience and the vagaries of my nature.
BNR: In your books you're often diverted by a pretty woman, but not so much in this case. Did you miss that?
GD: It wasn't the most romance-conducive environment. But, as you say, there's plenty of that in the other books.
BNR: Given the "monotony of life at sea" and that "much of what happens on a carrier is dedicated to-making sure that nothing happens," coupled with the customary "extreme courtesy, consideration and politeness of everyone onboard," how much longer could you have stood it?
GD: First I want to say that I wasn't bored for a minute. I had so much to do! But I got what I wanted or needed from this book in two weeks. If I had stayed longer I could have delved into the "dark side" — looking into the "gangs" of different factions or maybe discovering a hotbed of crushes. But two weeks was perfect for my purposes.
BNR: I've always thought you planted the secret to your success in a line buried deep in the entrails of Jeff in Venice: "it's possible to be a hundred per cent sincere and a hundred per cent ironic at the same time." That spirit served you well in this milieu.
GD: Yes, that's a key line. And I believe it absolutely.
BNR: Yet by the end you seem to have become more earnest than you expected. "I just wanted to stand there and sob," you say, before actually praying for them. Did you ever see that coming?
GD: I don't think that's being earnest. Nietzsche is absolutely right when he says that earnestness is a sure sign of a slow mind. But I was sincere in saying that. I'd hate it if being witty somehow cauterized the ability to feel things deeply or inhibited the appropriate expression of such feelings. Earnestness, for me, is never appropriate.
BNR: In your conclusion, you say it was "one of the great experiences of my life." Now that you're home, would you have any of your shipmates over for tea?
GD: Some of them I'd see whenever, wherever! But ideally not for tea; dinner and drinks would be better.
—May 27, 2014
From the B&N Reads Blog
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