Geoffrey O'Brien is a poet who has also written on film, pop music, opera, the Sixties counterculture, and the art of reading. His books include The Blue Hill (2018), In a Mist (2015), Stolen Glimpses, Captive Shadows: Writing on Film 2002-2012 (2013), The Fall of the House of Walworth (2010), and Early Autumn (2010), among others. O’Brien is the recipient of a Whiting Award in Nonfiction and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and his book The Phantom Empire: Movies in the Mind of the 20th Century was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. He is the former editor-in-chief of The Library of America and contributes frequently to The New York Review of Books.
-
Dream TimeChapters From the SixtiesFrom"Glamour"
When the future spoke—as it did every day now—it spoke through jukeboxes. In the paradise of affluence Dionne Warwick was always signing a Burt Bacharach song, as a Greek island came into view at starboard. The stars—movie actresses, pop singers, grizzled dissipated novelists, intellectual fashion designers—got hilariously drunk in ship’s bars, alternately fell half-naked down casino steps or announced their intention of filming the work of Genet or Ouspensky. The planet was their plaything. Having the power of free movement to and from anywhere, they jetted between Corfu and Bhutan and Seychelles, colliding briefly with one another to invent new psychic spaces, to share the new fun of the incandescent future.
Dream Time:Chapters From the Sixties -
Dream TimeChapters From the SixtiesFrom"The Myth of the Birth of the Hippie"
The rainbow shirts contrast effectively with the verdant lawn. The beautiful young people dance on the meadow in springtime. The pond nymph is radiant in the beflowered heat. A man sits on a rock and exhibits tranquility. Another man leaps in the air and exhibits exuberance. Man and woman and child sit naked on the grass to illustrate the familial tenderness of the new age. A goateed man, his hair in pigtails: the shaman. And so on: the juggler, the magician, the extravagant pirate, the spontaneous light-footed maiden symbolizing life energy. You get lost in the thick of it.
Dream Time:Chapters From the Sixties -
Dream TimeChapters From the SixtiesFrom"The Great Fear"
The killing and the talk of killing went on continuously now. Death, by assassination or suicide or police brutality or mistimed explosion of revolutionary matériel, had become a form of punctuation. Friends amazed themselves by making lists of the deaths. The only question was what could top what they had already witnessed. They felt ready for anything: plague, ice age, neo-Nazi putsch. Perhaps the recent cataclysms were part of a master plan to soften them up for the impending apocalypse—an event about which they grew more and more curious. If that was to be their fate, they might as well get on with it.
Dream Time:Chapters From the Sixties
“Ingenious and idiosyncratic . . . a work that somehow manages to be both a prose poem about the pleasures and distractions of movie-watching and an extremely compact history of the cinema.” —Louis Menand, The New Yorker [on The Phantom Empire]
“One of the most eccentrically engaging books to come out all year . . . The Phantom Empire is an elegy for reality, the screenplay of a celluloid culture.” —Voice Literary Supplement
"Love—love for reading, for books, for readers, for readers of his book—shimmers off nearly every page of Geoffrey O'Brien's idiosyncratic prose poem about the joys of reading. The Browser's Ecstasy has the hallucinatory beauty of a fable, or a dream . . . a hymn to the hypnotic powers of literature." —New York magazine
“No one writes more thoughtfully, fair-mindedly and elegantly about film these days than Geoffrey O’Brien. In a lucid and understated manner, he keeps piling insight upon insight until you have to gasp at his overall brilliance, erudition and mastery of the critical enterprise.” —Philip Lopate [on Castaways of the Image Planet]
Selected Works
