White sands : experiences from the outside world / Geoff Dyer.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

From "one of our most original writers" (Kathryn Schulz, New York magazine) comes an expansive and exacting book--firmly grounded but elegant, often hilarious, and always inquisitive--about travel, unexpected awareness, and the questions we ask when we step outside ourselves.

Geoff Dyer's restless search-- for what? is unclear, even to him--continues in this series of fascinating adventures and pilgrimages: with a tour guide who may not be a tour guide in the Forbidden City in Beijing; with friends in New Mexico, where D. H. Lawrence famously claimed to have had his "greatest experience from the outside world"; with a hitchhiker picked up on the way from White Sands; with Don Cherry (or a photo of him, at any rate) at the Watts Towers in Los Angeles.

Weaving stories about places to which he has recently traveled with images and memories that have persisted since childhood, Dyer tries "to work out what a certain place--a certain way of marking the landscape--means; what it's trying to tell us; what we go to it for."

With 4 pages of full-color illustrations.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Note (p. xi)
• 1 (p. 3)
• Where? What? Where? (p. 5)
• 2 (p. 39)
• Forbidden City (p. 41)
• 3 (p. 65)
• Space in Time (p. 67)
• 4 (p. 83)
• Time in Space (p. 85)
• 5 (p. 99)
• Northern Dark (p. 103)
• 6 (p. 123)
• White Sands (p. 125)
• 7 (p. 139)
• Pilgrimage (p. 141)
• 8 (p. 173)
• The Ballad of Jimmy Garrison (p. 177)
• 9 (p. 205)
• Beginning (p. 207)
• 10 (p. 225)
• Notes (p. 229)
• List of Illustrations (p. 235)
• Acknowledgements (p. 237)

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

Time in Space   Maybe it is not the natives of Texas or Arizona who fully appreciate the scale of the places where they have grown up. Perhaps you have to be British, to come from 'an island no bigger than a back garden'--in Lawrence's con­temptuous phrase--to grasp properly the immensity of the American West. So it's not surprising that Lawrence considered New Mexico 'the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had.'   The cramped paradox of English life: a tiny island that is often hard and sometimes impossible to get around. You can imagine a prospective visitor from Ari­zona studying a map of England and deciding, 'Yep, we should be able to do this little puppy in a couple of days.' But how long does it take to travel from Gloucester to Heathrow? Anything from two and a half hours to . . . Well, best to allow five to be on the safe side.   In the American West you can travel hundreds of miles and calculate your arrival time almost to the min­ute. We had turned up for our rendezvous in Quemado at one o'clock on the dot. From Quemado, Jessica and I drove 450 miles to Springdale, on the edge of Zion, in Utah. There were just two of us now, a husband-and-wife team, and we got to Springdale exactly on time for our dinner reservation. After a couple of nights in Zion we headed to the Spiral Jetty .   Yes, the Spiral Jetty --the wholly elusive grail of Land Art! Instantly iconic, it was transformed into legend by a double negative: the disappearance of the Jetty a mere two years after it was created, followed, a year later, by the premature death of its creator, Robert Smithson. Water levels at the Great Salt Lake in northern Utah were unusually low when the Jetty was built in 1970. When the water returned to its normal depth the Jetty went under. On 20 July 1973, Smithson was in a light aircraft, reconnoitering a work in progress in Amarillo, Texas. The plane ploughed into a hillside, killing every­one onboard: the pilot, a photographer, and the artist. Smithson was thirty-five. After the Jetty sank and his plane crashed, Smithson's reputation soared. For a quarter of a century the Spiral Jetty was all but invisible. There were amazing photographs of the coils of rock in the variously coloured water--reddish, pink, pale blue--and there was the Zapruder-inflected foot­age of its construction, but the Jetty had gone the way of Atlantis, sinking beneath the waveless waves of the Salt Lake. Then, in 1999, a miracle occurred. Excalibur-like, it emerged from the lake. And not only that. The Jetty was made out of earth and black lumps of basalt (six and a half thousand tonnes of it), but during the long interval of its submersion it had become covered in salt crystals. In newly resurrected form, it was pristine glit­tering white.   Even now, after this spectacular renaissance, the Spiral Jetty is not always visible. If there is exceptionally heavy snowfall, then the thaw does for the lake what the glob­ally heated polar ice pack threatens to do to the oceans. Once the snowmelt ends up in the lake, it can take months of drought and scorch to boil off the excess and leave the Jetty high and dry again. Was it worth travel­ling all this way to see something we might not be able to see? Well, pilgrims continued to turn up even during the long years when there was definitely nothing to see, so it seemed feeble not to give it a chance. (There is prob­ably a sect of art-world extremists who maintain that the best time to have visited the Spiral Jetty was during the years of its invisible submergence, when the experience became a pure manifestation of faith.)   We drove north towards Salt Lake City. No need for a compass. Everything screamed north: the grey-and-white mountains looming Canadianly in the distance, the weather deteriorating by the hour. Opting for direct­ness instead of scenery, we barrelled up the featureless expanse of I-15. Most of what there was to see was traffic-related: gas-station logos, trucks the size of freight trains, snakeskin shreds of tire on the soft ('hard' in England) shoulder. Salt Lake City did its bit, its level best, coming to meet us well before we got anywhere near it--and not quite saying goodbye even when we thought we'd got beyond it.   With all the space out west there's no incentive for cities not to sprawl. In the case of Salt Lake City, moun­tains to the east and the lake to the west mean it does most of its sprawl along a north-south ribbon. Still, there was room for the interstate to gradually assume the width, frenzy--and, eventually, stagnation--of a Los Angeles freeway. Salt Lake City merged, imperceptibly, into Ogden, where we were staying. Not a bad place: fringed by Schloss Adler mountains in at least two direc­tions and looking, on 25th Street at least, as if it was making a Spiral Jetty -style comeback from a downturn in fortunes still afflicting other parts of town. Or maybe it was just the alpine winter, which, even in mid-May, had still not shot its wad. Trees weren't convinced they'd got the all-clear; leaf-wise, none of them were ventur­ing out. ### Excerpted from Where Do We Come from? What Are We? Where Are We Going?: Experiences from the Outside World by Geoff Dyer All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

"What a certain place-a certain way of marking the landscape-means; what it's trying to tell us; what we go to it for": these are the themes that loosely connect the nine essays in Dyer's (Another Great Day at Sea) scintillating new collection. In "Where? What? Where?," Dyer discovers a village soccer field while retracing Gauguin's peregrinations in Tahiti, and reflects that "much of geographical travel is actually a form of time travel." In "Space in Time," while visiting the lightning-rod studded landscape of Walter de Maria's The Lightning Field in Quemado, N.Mex., he writes that massive outdoor art installations of this sort "have more in common with sacred or prehistoric sites than with the rival claims and fads of contemporary art." Dyer's essays are more than simple travelogues, and are about deeply personal experiences in which he serves as both a distant observer and active participant. This dichotomy is especially evident in the title essay, which recounts his unsettling encounter with a creepy hitchhiker on the road from Almogordo, N.Mex., to El Paso, Tex. Most of these pieces are distinguished by Dyer's humorous insights and caustic wit, but the book's concluding essay, "Stroke of Luck" (which recounts his temporary loss of vision after he suffers a slight stroke), is more evocative than the others, leaving the reader to appreciate the author's trained eye for details of the world's more far-flung locales. Color illus. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

Reasons to read Dyer, a critic, novelist, and creative nonfiction writer with a clutch of prestigious awards: he is an exhilaratingly superb stylist who uses his literary might and artistic and cultural erudition to express irreverent and irascible opinions and philosophical musings. And when he is in travelogue mode, as he is here, his observations are stunning in their candor about disappointment (his heart, he tells us, is prone to sinking) and acidly hilarious. Dyer interleaves brief tributes to natural places that shaped his young British self with accounts of far-flung pilgrimages in which he brazenly mixes fact and fiction. His journey to Tahiti on the centenary of painter Gauguin's death engenders a ruefully funny dismantling of the myth of paradise. A quest to see the northern lights is another extravagant exercise in smashed expectations. A retina-scorching trip to White Sands, New Mexico, turns into a tense tale about a hitchhiker. Wherever he goes (Watts Towers, the Forbidden City), Dyer reports on the glorious complexities of both outer and inner worlds with acerbity, delving intelligence, and disarming and profound wit.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

In a slender volume that contains multitudes, the award-winning critic and novelist details his travels in such far-flung places as Tahiti and the Arctic Circle. In the author's note, Dyer (Writer-in-Residence/Univ. of Southern California; Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush, 2014) proclaims the subsequent "chapters," for lack of a better word, are "a mixture of fact and fictionthe figure at the centre of the carpet and a blank space on a map." Prefacing each chapter with a brief anecdote relating to a physical landscape of memorye.g., a rock formation called Devil's Chimney at Leckhampton Hill that his uncle climbedDyer creates a pictorial framework for his digressions on place and culture. (There are also photographs throughout.) Referencing D.H. Lawrence's use of the term "nodality" and how certain places feel "temporary" and others "final," the author inflects his musings on place with a mystical quality as he recounts experiences tracking Paul Gauguin's footsteps in Tahiti, a trip to upper Norway to see the northern lights, and a pilgrimage to Theodor Adorno's Brentwood, California, house, among others. The two standout chapters focus on Dyer's adventures experiencing Walter de Maria's The Lightning Field and Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, both landmarks of the land art movement. Though the author's travels are diverse, he has an outsized fascination with the vastness of the American West. However, his interest in landscape goes beyond a sacrosanct connection to the Earth. With philosophical incisiveness, Dyer extols the virtue of landscape to conjure in himself the tangible and the mirage, the real and the illusion, the possessed object and the desired object. There is an undeniable joy throughout Dyer's writing, an affirmation that travel and the experience of placenot merely being someplace, but being present in itis a gateway to the humanity of past, present, and future. A mesmerizing compendium that reflects on time, place, and just what, exactly, we are doing here. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.