Free Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer

own free will, to call it a night. Other people's ideas of a good time underwent well-established changes as they got older. They ended up raising children, buying sheds or playing golf. Jeff had proved remarkably constant in his preferences. He'd liked drinking, taking drugs, going to parties and chasing after women who – another sign of constancy – ideally, were not too much older, now, than when he'd first started doing so. In recent years a bit more time was spent at home, zonked out in front of the TV, but that wasn't something he
wanted
to do, that was just recovery time. On occasions he was bored rigid by his idea of a good time, butnothing had come near to displacing or replacing it. And he'd never got to the stage or gone through the phase of being passionate about his work except in so far as he had always felt passionately averse to it. No wonder he had such ambiguous feelings about Ben: he was like a ruddier, portlier version of Atman himself. It was quite possible, he reasoned, to like someone you disliked and vice-versa.
    ‘I thought I might have seen you at the Iceland party last night,’ Jeff said. They both picked up more darts and stood side by side, chucking them, aimlessly, at the wall of unmissable targets.
    ‘I was at a dinner for Ed Ruscha.’
    ‘That was last night? I thought it was tomorrow.’
    ‘There's one tomorrow as well.’
    ‘So, every night there's an Ed Ruscha dinner?’
    ‘And – one hundred and eighty! – probably a breakfast every morning.’
    They threw the last of their arrows. Ben said he had it on good authority that later this afternoon, at the Venezuelan pavilion, chocolate-covered cockroaches would be served. With that they went their separate ways, Ben to the Swiss pavilion and Jeff to an installation by a Finnish artist whose name – Maaria Wirkkala – meant nothing to him.
    A simple wooden boat was adrift in a frozen sea of broken, multi-coloured Murano glass – discards and fragments, presumably, from the factories near Venice. Painted a dull red, the interior of the boat was gradually filling up with water dripping from the ceiling. Every now and again – so infrequently Jeff wondered if he was imagining it – the boat rocked slightly. He was transfixed by this, glad that he'd seen it right at the beginning of his tour, before he became punch-drunk, sated and oblivious.
    Australia and Germany were packed, so it was a relief tocome to Uruguay, where there were no queues, no crowds – and no art. They'd hung a few rags on washing lines but, even by the low standards of some of the other pavilions, this was pretty derisory. And they weren't giving away any free stuff either. Many pavilions were handing out free canvas bags, some of them rather elegant, all very useful (for stuffing in free bags from the other pavilions). Produce a press card and some places would throw in a lavish catalogue as well, but the Uruguayans were not playing the game at all.
    In the compressed geography of the Giardini Uruguay was bordered by the United States, featuring Ed Ruscha's long, horizontal paintings of buildings, some in colour, some in black and white. Fine, good, seen that. Jeff went briskly from pavilion to pavilion, using his little digital camera as an aidememoire to be consulted – in tandem with the catalogues – when he wrote his article. Extraordinary – there was all this art and yet there was very little to see, or very little worth looking at anyway. Some of it was a waste of one's eyes. Good. Because even though there was nothing to see, there was a lot of it to get round and Jeff had to at least poke his nose in at everything. Quite a bit of the work on display could have been designated conceptual, in so far as the people looking at it were conceived as having the mentality of pupils at junior school. Fair enough, except most of it looked like it was
made
by someone in primary school, albeit a primary school pupil with the ambition of a seventeen-year-old