As a prequel to our conversation with Patti Smith, Intelligence Squared’s Tony Curzon Price asked some questions to the man who’ll be interviewing Patti, cultural commentator Geoff Dyer.

The discussion takes as its starting point Dyer’s recent collection of essays Working the Room. These essays, which throw light on everything from DH Lawrence to life on the dole, work rather like Roland Barthes’ Mythologies, casting new light on old ideas and modes of behaviour while at the same time describing the bizarre and inane adventures of everyday life.

The sense of Dyer to be taken from the interview is of a man with a magpie mind. His observances are not disparate, although they might appear so at first glance. It is rather that he feels that the experience of life is not one that can be held in separate compartments. As he put it, there’s no division between what’s being studied in a scholarly way and stuff that’s going on in one’s life; there’s a lot of traffic between them. This sense of the give-and-take between ideas and realities is one that pervades his work; Andrew Motion writes that he has both “a light touch and a high seriousness.” He is just as passionate describing a painting by Turner as he is describing his quest to find the perfect donut.

This feeling for the symbiosis of ideas and experience can be found in his discussion on the presence of childhood in adult life, and in the tension he finds between reporting and imagining a story. It’s also present when he talks about the difference between community and neighbourhood. He finds the concept of neighbourhood far more attractive and inclusive than that of community, saying “communities are defined by those who are excluded from them”. Defining community as a British concern and neighbourhood as an American one he hints at how heavily he has been influenced by American ideas. He also offers
the American example as a beacon of hope when asked about the possible decline of artistic endeavour in the UK as a result of the spending cuts taking place at the moment. “State support was never an idea in the US that’s not stopped cultural production there.” Patti Smith has written about choosing art supplies over grilled cheese sandwiches during her years as a struggling artist in New York, so perhaps this is a point on which they’ll agree.