Word: dyers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...with caution. ("I would like to eventually be known as more than just that guy on YouTube," he says.) For two years, Irena Schulz has been fielding media offers for Snowball the cockatoo, whose Backstreet Boys dance has been seen nearly 3.3 million times. The former molecular biologist in Dyer, Ind., chooses shows for her bird carefully and has drafted legal agreements to make sure he'll be portrayed in a positive light. But despite appearances on The Late Show with David Letterman and Good Morning America, she says viral videos aren't a sure ticket to the good life...
...trip to the 2009 Biennale (open through October 2009), I eschewed my Fodor's guide in favor of Dyer's, but it quickly emerged that Dyer is primarily a guide to the psyche. Self-loathing and angst are the destinations he trawls, Venice merely the conveyance that takes his characters to those dark domains. The persuasive immediacy of the prose is such that it becomes all too easy to see Venice through Atman's self-consciously hip sunglasses. Pleasure dissipated from my first vaporetto ride the moment I opened the book. "You came to Venice," muses Atman...
...does. The shimmering mirage that illuminated Thomas Mann's seminal novella Death in Venice is the same today as it was when he wrote it in 1912. So too, it seems, are the characters consumed by the city's seething Dionysian urges. Nearly a century later, British author Geoff Dyer, in his latest pair of novellas, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, has returned to Venice an updated version of Mann's aging dilettante. Jeff Atman is an art critic sent from London to cover the 2003 Venice Biennale. His four-day stay - a condensed version of Mann's summer...
...Dyer's second novella is an equally intimate exploration of the psyche of an unnamed first-person narrator whose willful plunge into worldly renunciation is as terrifying as Atman's embrace of hedonism. But after a week exploring Venice with Jeff, I don't feel ready to visit Varanasi with his alter ego. In fact, I'll definitely pack the Fodor...
...little further is the village of Gansbaai, known for its shark-cage diving. Specialist operators like Great White Shark Tours, tel: (27-83) 300 2138, take you out to Dyer Island in custom-designed boats and lower you in a diving cage into the ocean. Once you're safely ensconced, deckhands start chumming bloody entrails beside the boat, attracting underwater predators from miles around. If you don't end up as their mid-afternoon refreshment, your own will be waiting for you back onboard...