WALKING DUSTY (DUSTILY)

For reasons we needn’t go into, I was thinking about Dusty Springfield.  I looked her up on Wikipedia and found this sentence; ‘She enjoyed reading maps and would intentionally get lost to navigate her way out.^[11]’  Now there’s a thing.

The footnote directs you to, Kort, Michele (1999). "The Secret Life of Dusty Springfield". The Advocate. Liberation Publications (Thomson Corporation Company). Retrieved 2 July 2012. 

In the article you’ll find this, ‘DUSTY SPRINGFIELD LOVED MAPS. She liked to curl up in bed with an atlas and could follow a road map with a navigator's elan. "She was a good person to be lost with," her longtime friend and manager Vicki Wickham has said.’ 

 

Do navigators display elan?  Not the ones I've met, but let let's not argue,  The article continues, ‘Perhaps the certainty of maps, with their solid boundaries and clearly marked destinations, comforted a woman who had to carve her own path through the pop-music jungle for nearly 40 years.’

 

You see, I don’t think you have to be a psychogeographic theorist to realize that most maps DON’T contains certainties, solid boundaries and clearly marked destinations.  Many of them are incredibly inscrutable.  That’s one reason why we like them.

 

And then the Advocate article completely loses its way, ‘But while living in Los Angeles she seemed to misplace her atlas, maps, and all sense of personal geography. America had seemed like a dream to her, but it bred nightmares too.’

 

I can’t tell you whether Dusty was much of a walker.  The pictures scattered around this post suggest she did do a certain amount of walking, in parks, with dogs, on roofs, and it’s worth noting that one album of her greatest hits was called ‘Walk On By’ – make what you will of that.

WALKING FREELY

When I was a stripling, living in Sheffield, most of a lifetime ago, I was a great fan of the 

band Cream, so much so that I was a member of their fan club, which was called Cream 

Addicts Anonymous.  At the time, the drug reference went over my head.

 

I’m pretty sure it was organised by the band’s management, The Robert Stigwood Organisation, but the newsletters were written by someone called Anne Hartzen and it all felt quite homely.  And so since I was just starting to play guitar I wrote to the fan club and said ‘I’m trying to work out the chords to “I feel Free,” can you help me?’  

FYI, 'I Feel Free' does contain the lyrics, ‘I can walk down the street, there's no one there/Though the pavements are one huge crowd ..’ - but that’s not what drew me to the song.

 

In a perfect world Jack Bruce would have scribbled the chords on the back of an envelope and sent them to me, but in fact I received the sheet music, which looked (and still looks) like this:

 

I was knocked out by the photograph on the front – which (I now know) shows the band in front of the dinosaurs of Crystal Palace Park (there are 2 dinosaurs in the picture but you can only really make out one) – though I had no idea of that at the time, and it took a couple of decades before I found out.

 

It was even longer before I went and walked round Crystal Palace Park and its dinosaurs, which in fact I did last week.  I wish I’d gone sooner.  It was a great walk: chilly, bright, muddy, and the park was full of runners and people with dogs and babies.  The dinosaurs weren't hard to find:

And the pavement was not one huge crowd.  And I saw the very dinosaurs that the band were posing in front of.  These ones, though very much not from the same angle.

 

The band got much closer than I could; they’re standing on an island right next to the beasts, but that area is now out of bounds.  I don’t know whether the dinosaurs were more accessible back then or whether the band got special permission because they had a photographer with them.  And I’ve not been able to find the name of the photographer.  Can anybody help?

 

And OK, I admit that Cream were not actually going for a walk in Crystal Palace Park, though I guess they must have done some walking to get to the dinosaurs.  So here’s a picture of the lads walking elsewhere. 

NB - I did eventually own and wear a fringed jacket but (obviously) it wasn't as cool as Eric's.

 

WALKING IN COMBINATIONS

 I’ve been reading an essay by Alan Bennett on A.E. Housman, an author who is not an 

open book to me, though I know he wrote 'A Shropshire Lad,' and that he looked 

somewhat like this.

 

Bennett writes in the essay, ‘At Cambridge, where he was professor of Latin, he took a daily walk and after it would change all his underwear – a habit he shared with Swinburne.’  Swinburne is not an open book either, though I believe he looked somewhat like this:

 

But I have a few questions. The first of course is how does anybody know the details of Housman and Swinburne’s walking and underwear habits?   The answer may be that literary biography has reached such a state of perfection that we know just about everything about everybody.

 

A further question – why does Bennett say ‘all his underwear’ – as though Housman might be expected to change some of his underwear while keeping other bits on.  Which leads to the question of just how many pieces of underwear Housman and Swinburne wore. It must be more than two because otherwise Bennett would have said ‘both’ rather than ‘all.’

 

An online search for ‘Victorian Underwear’ brings up the images below: (And yes I know that both Swinburne and Housman outlived Victoria – the latter didn’t die until 1936).

 

I also suspect Housman and Swinburne didn’t do their own laundry.

This is Alan Bennett: one day literary biographers may tell us all about his underwear arrangements.

OF WALKING AND GAZING

Note the legs.

 I’ve been thinking about Music to Watch Girls By, the 1966 tune composed by Sidney ‘Sid’ Ramin and recorded as an instrumental by The Bob Crewe Generation. The trumpet on it sounds like a faux Herb Alpert.

 

Then in 1967 there was a version with lyrics by Tony Velona, recorded by Andy Williams. Some of the lyrics run

‘The boys watch the girls while the girls watch the boys who watch the girls go by
Eye to eye, they solemnly convene to make the scene’ 

 

Words from a different age obviously – how rarely anybody ‘makes the scene’ these days - And we all know that the male gaze is bad and wrong, but here I guess there’s a certain gender equality – the male gaze encounters the returning female gaze.  Cool.

 

Music to Watch Girls By  was, in some sense, a kind of update of the song

Standing on the Corner 

by Frank Loesser from the 1956 musical The Most Happy Fella, originally recorded by a group called the Four Lads.  The girls were no doubt walking, the men just mooching.

 

The lyrics here run

Standing on the corner watching all the girls go by
Standing on the corner watching all the girls go by
Brother you don't know a nicer occupation
Matter of fact, neither do I

 

Sounds innocent enough, it even sounds ‘nice,’ but is it?  Later lyrics in the song run:

Brother, you can't go to jail
For what you're thinking
Or for the woo look in your eye

But it seems possible that you can.  Here’s a sign that was up in the tube station at Walthamstow. I assume it must be in other places too:

 

‘Intrusive staring of a sexual nature is sexual harassment and is not tolerated.’  I’m sure our courts will make some clear and prudent definitions of when a look becomes a stare, and when a stare becomes an ‘intrusive stare.’ 

 

ART WALKS (THOUGH SOMETIMES IT STAYS RIGHT WHERE IT IS)

 It’s good to see art when you’re walking.

 

At least I think it is.

 

Recently in Essex we had one of those art trails, you know the kind of thing.   In this case people (possibly artists) decorated octopus models, and placed them around the county. The scheme was called Octopus Ahoy and it had some connection with the 400^th anniversary of the Mayflower’s sailing from Harwich.

 

The octopi were were all over the place.  The ones I saw were at Colchester Station, in Liverpool Street in London, and this one by the Walls in Manningtree. Mondrian would be thrilled, right?

 

And then later the octopi were auctioned off for charity, generally bought by businesses, and I gather they raised a substantial amount of money, which can't be bad.

 

I was walking in Harwich the other day and I saw this pair that currently live outside a pub called The Pier. (Google Maps photo).

 

But walking further around the sea wall I found this bad boy octopus made out of rubbish.  Somehow it was more telling and appealing and (and I always hesitate to use the word) ‘authentic’ than any of the fancier, artier ones. 

 

Walking further around Harwich revealed other examples of marine art.  This one possibly by Banksy (seems we're not really sure, but at least it's safe under Perspex).

 

And there was also this fishy mural. Not too arty.  Not aiming too high.  I liked it.

 

 

THE FRINTON FLANEUR

As the sharp-eyed may have noticed, I have a new book out The Suburbanist, subtitled ‘A Personal Account and Ambivalent Celebration of Life in the Suburbs with Field Notes,’ which tells you a good deal of what you need to know about the book.

 

It’s not a walking book per se, but the research (aka field trips) have involved a fair amount of slogging through suburban streets, crescents, avenues, closes and so on.

 

And at this point, some two weeks after publication, an author is beset by all sorts of ideas for what he might, and probably should, have included in the book.

And the one I currently keep thinking about is the Frinton Park Estate in Frinton on Sea, in Essex.  I left it out because so much has already been written about it already, but now I think not mentioning it was probably an omission.

 

Frinton Park Estate is widely described as the largest group of individually designed Modernist houses in England, which isn’t saying a great deal, and the group there is not large. The original idea was there’d be 1000 or so houses, all flat roofs, streamlined curves, and white walls, spread over a 200 acre site.  But in fact there are only 50 or so, maybe fewer, depending on how you count.

 

In 1934 the South Coast Investment Company Ltd, bought those 200 acres and employed Oliver Hill as consultant architect. The idea was that prospective Frintonians would buy a plot and then commission an architect to design a house, selecting from a list drawn up by Hill, a list that include Maxwell Fry and Welles Coates.  

 

Well, this worked about as well you’d imagine it.  There really weren’t 1000 people who wanted to live in a Modernist house in Frinton, in fact there were about 15, who went with the plan.  And so the speculators decided to build 50 show houses to impress prospective buyers. Only about 25 of these were built (I say ‘about’ because hard numbers are very hard to come by) with the result that the total number of houses built was somewhere between 40 and 50, but probably nearer 40. 

 

I first went there a few years back and almost got into a fight.  I was wandering around, taking pictures of the houses and I’d spoken to one or two home-owners who were happy enough to chat about the joys and occasional difficulties of living in a piece of history.

 

And then I came across what I thought was a particularly fine example.  There was a tall hedge around it, but I noticed there was a gap, so I peered through the gap, pointed my camera and stared taking pictures, at which point the proud, not to say hubristic, home-owner came running out and accused me of being a pedo.  ‘Supposing,’ he said, ‘my children had been sitting on the lawn, then you’d have been photographing them.’  But of course his children weren’tsitting on the lawn, and I pointed that out, and I thought, though I didn’t say, that if his children were as ugly as him them who the fuck would want to take their picture?

 

In the event I assured him I wasn’t a pedo, and that I liked his house, which seemed to calm him down and we did not come to blows.  Still, it’s the kind of thing that stays with you.  It might have been worth the agro if I’d got a decent picture but I didn’t. I got this: which is an interesting souvenir, and sort of arty, but not my best work.

 

Anyway I’ve been back to Frinton a few times since then, and I’ve not lost my amazement that this attempt at a Modernist architectural Utopia should be there at the Essex seaside, a town that’s famous for being staid, conservative with a very ‘mature’ population. Though, of course, like all Utopias, isn’t not a complete success.

 

And frankly the Frinton Park Estate still isn’t entirely welcoming.  A lot of the roads have private no parking signs on them, and although you can walk around easily enough, pedestrians aren’t really catered for, pavements aren’t all that common.  

 

I’ve never encountered another disgruntled home owner and my taking of photographs has, if anything, got less discreet over the years.  Last time I was there I did hear two builders having a verbal altercation.  One of them was storming away, carrying a ladder, and shouting at his co-worker, his boss  I suppose, ‘I’ve worked for 30 companies in my life, and you’re the only one who’s ever moaned at me like this.’

 

I don’t know if the current inhabitants of the Frinton Park Estate think of themselves as living in suburbia but I’d say they do, and the area’s suburban status is confirmed by all the non-Modernist homes that have been built in the large gaps between the show houses.  These are mostly conventional looking bungalows.  Nothing wrong with that, and I suppose the joy of living in one of those is that you look out your window and can see a Modernist masterpiece, whereas if you live in a Modernist Masterpiece you look out your window and see conventional suburban homes.  One thing's for you, you won't see many pedestrians.

 

WALKING IN THEORY AND IN PRACTICE, AND IN WHITSTABLE

 I was in Whitstable 

 

and I wanted to go for a walk and take a look at the house where Peter Cushing lived between 1959 and 1994 (the year of his death).  Somebody should write a song about it.

The house looked unlived in, possibly even abandoned, though I don’t suppose it was.  Houses this valuable don't get abandoned.

 

My hostess, Jacqueline, drew a map to help find the place.  It looked like this (the perforated edge represents the beach): 

 

I shall treasure that map.  I love maps of all kinds, and I was reminded of Stanley Brouwn a Dutch artist who between 1960 and 1964 created a series of art works titled ‘This Way Brouwn.’  He wandered the streets of Amsterdam and stopped strangers and asked them to draw maps directing him to other parts of the city.  These maps then became his art.

 

He also taped what the people said, and it appears somebody also took photographs – which must have disconcerted the people giving directions, I’d think.

 

And I was sent back to our old pal Michel De Certeau’s essay ‘Walking in the City’ which I always want to find more enjoyable and profound than I actually do.  Still, it contains the notion of a theoretical city – the one found in maps and official documents, as opposed to the practiced map that people actually produce and/or carry around in their heads from their own experience.

 

‘Escaping the imaginary totalizations produced by the eye, the everyday has a certain strangeness that does not surface, or whose surface is only its upper limit, outlining itself against the visible. Within this ensemble, I shall try to locate the practices that are foreign to the "geometrical" Or "geographical" space of visual, panoptic, or theoretical constructions. These practices of space refer to a specific form of operations ("ways of operating"), to "another spatiality” (an "anthropological," poetic and mythic experience of space), and to an opaque and blind mobility char­acteristic of the bustling city. A migrational, or metaphorical, city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city.”

 

Well, you’ve said a mouthful there, Michel.  And is it just me, or does he look like John Shuttleworth in that picture?

 

And then by serendipity I came this fashion photograph by Louise Dahl-Wolfe: 

 

and that got me thinking about the connections between maps and fashion (and to some extent walking).  There are a surprising number of articles of clothing that feature maps.

 

But you wouldn’t want to use one to find your way in the readable city.

 

I'VE BEEN WRITING ABOUT 'I'VE BEEN WALKING'

 

Walking in L.A.

November 12, 2021   •   By Geoff Nicholson

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I’ve Been Walking

JANET STERNBURG

“PHOTOGRAPHERS DON’T have eyes in the back of their heads. Janet Sternburg does. This book makes you understand the act of seeing and the reflection that might lead to a photograph in a whole new way. This book about the nature of photography is intense and confusing, but definitely essential.”

That’s Wim Wenders, giving Janet Sternburg a lot to live up to, in the introduction to her first book of photographs, Overspilling World (2016). She has now published a second, titled I’ve Been Walking, which is the occasion and inspiration for this essay.

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My work is about revealing an interpenetrating world. To that end, I use no manipulation whatsoever. I work with single-use and iPhone cameras because their limitations give me what I want, images that are close to the way our minds work. I want to encourage in myself and in others a kind of perception that leads to deeper reflection, which in turn leads to thinking about what matters personally and socially.

That’s a quotation, and an explanation, and perhaps even a manifesto, that appears prominently on Janet Sternburg’s website. Sternburg is also, as LARB readers may well know, not only a photographer but also a poet, memoirist, playwright, and essayist, among other things. In her new book, she tells us that she’s now using a more advanced, though still low-tech, camera.

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In the introduction to I’ve Been Walking, Sternburg tells us that, for much of 2019, she couldn’t walk. It was a “year of injuries, among them serious fractures as well as surgeries.” This has led me to think that there may be some crucial connection between walking, photography, and injury.

I was once walking in Los Angeles, in Silver Lake, thinking I was part of a fine, long tradition exemplified by Benjamin, Baudelaire, Debord et al, that I was a flâneur and a psychogeographer, observing things and soaking up ambiances. I was also taking photographs. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, I lost my footing on a perfectly innocent bit of sidewalk — having eyes in the back of my head would have been no help at all — and I made a rapid, involuntary forward dive in the direction of the ground. But it was the kind of descent that still gave me enough time to do a modicum of thinking. One of my hands was free, the other held my camera, which wasn’t especially valuable but also not disposable, and I was afraid it was going to smash as I hit the ground. So, I held the camera close and put out my other arm to break my fall. This worked, to a strictly limited extent. Yes, the arm broke my fall, but in the process, I broke the arm in three places.

The surgeon who operated on me had a signed photograph of Slash on her wall, which somehow cheered me up, though I can’t absolutely swear she stitched up the great man. As for me, I now have two long, neat, and (I’ve been told) photogenic scars that run the length of my right forearm. And yes, since you ask, my camera was absolutely fine.

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I tell this story partly to prove that walking isn’t always a safe, healthy, and benign activity, and also to suggest that there are, and have long been, plenty of (for want of a better term) photo-flâneurs walking the streets of Los Angeles. If you needed to prove this to anyone, you could show them photographs taken in the city by the likes of Catherine Opie, Weegee, Max Yavno, William Claxton, Catherine Corman, Julius Shulman. I can’t swear that all these photographers are, or were, great walkers, psychogeographers, flâneurs or flâneuses, but it seems to me they must all have spent a good amount of time with their boots on the ground while taking pictures.

You might also place Garry Winogrand on that list, perhaps chiefly for a couple of famous L.A. photographs: one that shows two women walking toward the LAX Theme Building, and a second that shows a man in a wheelchair on Hollywood Boulevard, his head slumped, as three extravagantly coiffed women saunter out of the sun toward the camera.

As a walker in L.A., however, Winogrand is something of a special case. He was not, strictly speaking, injured while in L.A., but by the time he lived there in the early 1980s, he had serious health problems that kept him from doing much walking. He had to be driven around while shooting through the windscreen or the open car window. Nevertheless, there are a couple of photographs, one taken by David Fahey, another by Ted Pushinsky, that show Winogrand standing (if not necessarily walking) on Hollywood Boulevard, camera in hand, interacting with passersby. A man walking the streets of L.A. photographs a man walking the streets of Los Angeles taking photographs: the photographic mise en abyme.

Winogrand, you could argue (and I would), was the greatest, and perhaps the last, of the true street photographers, a form that is fading, maybe even becoming impermissible. Capturing images of strangers in public places is regarded as at best intrusive, in some cases as a cause for litigation, and don’t even think about taking a picture when there’s a child on the street. But that doesn’t stop me, and quite a few people I know, walking the streets and photographing what’s there, and if that includes a few people, well, so be it.

Internal evidence — by which I mean my own Instagram feed — suggests that there are whole armies of people wandering the streets of Los Angeles photographing things, images by people I know well, by people I know slightly, by famous photographers I don’t know at all. Some are strictly amateur (if that term still has any meaning), some are successful professionals. The Instagrammers I’m following, with some connection to L.A., include Mike Slack, John Divola, Lisa Jane Persky, Dinah Lenney, Marlene Picard, Lynell George, and indeed Janet Sternburg. I’m not sure this means much to all of them. Does John Divola feel any happier if he gets 2,000 likes as opposed to 1,999? I shouldn’t think so. It’s people like me who get a thrill when a few dozen people approve of my snaps.

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I remember having discussions, well within living memory, about whether it was better to see photographs as prints on a gallery wall or as images reproduced in a book. Of course, it didn’t have to be one or the other. The gallery print may have been more authentic, but inevitably there were some images we were only ever likely to see in books. The three volumes of The Photobook: A History (2004–’14) by Garry Badger and Martin Parr did a lot to increase the prestige of the photography book as art object.

The book and the print are, of course, still very much with us, but inevitably we encounter more photographic images online than anywhere else. There’s nothing wrong with this: accessibility has its attractions, but the printed book still has a status and a materiality that a JPEG just can’t manage.

Which brings us back to Janet Sternburg’s I’ve Been Walking.

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By 2020, the year of COVID-19, Sternburg had recovered from her injuries and surgeries, and was walking in Los Angeles (county as well as city), gloved, masked, and taking photographs. “I’m not documenting Los Angeles during a pandemic,” she writes in her introduction, “Nor am I trying to present a comprehensive view of the city. Rather I want these images to be a meeting place of my way of seeing and the world out there.”

Arguably this is what all good photographs do, but this is not just another book of L.A. photographs. By my reckoning, there are maybe four images in the book that you could say with absolute certainty were taken in Los Angeles, perhaps a dozen more that you would reasonably guess were taken there. The rest, I know, couldn’t have been taken “just anywhere,” but what we have here is a landscape without the obvious markers of the city, a vision that gives us details, fragments, reflections, superimpositions, some of which are more or less abstract, and which present a worldview as well as a world.

Sternburg writes, “I had wanted to photograph front and back, inside and outside, solid and fluid by means of reflection […] so that everything in the image would blur and interpenetrate.” So, is this street photography? Well, if you’re in the street and you press a camera shutter, you are definitely taking a photograph of the world around you, but we’re not exactly in Winogrand territory here. Rather it’s a world of details, showing a certain amount of ruin, detritus, and decay. There are no great vistas or expanses, but there is cumulative effect, depicting a city on edge, an edge we still don’t quite comprehend.

There aren’t many people in these photographs, and even fewer faces, but the people who do appear are startling: a man painting a wall that could be a work by an unknown Abstract Expressionist; an armed, camouflaged National Guardsman, who still manages to look vulnerable.

In an interview that stands as a postscript to the book, Janet Sternburg is interviewed by Jane Bennett, who asks, “There are almost no people in your work. Why is that?” Sternberg replies, “I don’t know. Years ago, I read something about objects to the effect that the poet speaks for objects that cannot speak. It just hit me: yes, objects do speak. And they interest me more.” The extension of that idea may be that the object speaks to the photographer, and she passes on the message.

Sternburg’s approach is partly about finding beauty in the quotidian and the unconsidered, but more than that, it’s about seeing the world as discrete images that may be more or less ambiguous but are connected by our perception of them. The photographs then become a kind of metaphor for a way of seeing, and perhaps a way of being. It’s not exactly showing you things you’ve never seen before, though it is about pointing and framing, about (for want of a better term) raising awareness.

And if all this sounds a bit solemn, it’s worth noting that there’s a considerable amount of wit in some of the photographs. One, titled Lone, shows a skateboarder reflected in a window, but the upper panes are pebbled glass so that only the board, and the feet and calves of the skater, are mirrored in the plain lower pane. There’s also a standout single image titled The World as Gas Tank that shows the curved end of a gas cylinder, which looks like a globe, its paint flaking and with a label on it that says, “You are here.”

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At about the same time I started living in L.A., a photobook was published titled Looking at Los Angeles (2005), edited by Marla Hamburg Kennedy and Ben Stiller. It is a large, landscape-format volume, bigger than some coffee tables. I bought a copy as part of my acclimatization process, and at the time I thought it was wonderful. It contains photographs by many of the usual suspects — Ruscha, Eggleston, Winogrand, Julian Wasser, Richard Misrach, David Hockney — and quite a few by photographers I’d never heard of at the time but have come to know and admire: Mike Slack, Ed Templeton, Jeff Brouws, Helen K. Garber, Catherine Wagner. One of the strangest elements of the book is that the photographs show very few walkers, not even many people on foot, and the overall effect is to make the city look more denuded and uninhabited than it does in Sternburg’s photographs taken during the prohibitions enforced by the pandemic.

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There is a story, true as far as I know, that Julius Shulman, whose work appears in Looking at Los Angeles, attended a panel discussion at the Cinerama Dome to celebrate the publication of the book. While everybody else was saying how great it was, Shulman said, “I think this book is crap.” Stiller tried to make a joke of it by responding, “Julius, let me thank you for your ringing endorsement of this book,” but that didn’t appease Shulman, who continued, “This book is crud. […] What is wrong with these people? That’s your favorite picture? […] Yech, that’s crap.”

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One of my very minor claims to fame is not that I walked or photographed alongside Julius Shulman, alas, but that I once helped to carry him down a flight of exposed wooden stairs. It was after a party in Lautner’s Chemosphere House (now belonging to Benedikt Taschen), which is on a steep hillside and is served by a small funicular railway. Shulman was very infirm by that stage of his life, and I can’t remember why he didn’t use the railway; maybe it was out of service or maybe he just didn’t trust it. Walking down the stairs wasn’t an option for him either, but one way or another he had to be get from the house to where the cars were parked at the bottom of the hill. I was invited to grab one of Shulman’s legs, the right, as three other people grabbed three other limbs, and we began our descent. The steps were wet and slippery, and we moved slowly, with extreme care. There are still moments when I feel a small shudder at what might have happened, but of course we accomplished our mission: if we’d dropped him, you’d have heard about it by now. It would have been a really good time to have had eyes in the back of my head, just like Janet Sternburg.

Did I, do I, walk more carefully, more “mindfully,” than I used to before I had my fall? Probably not. But at least for now, I find myself walking around looking for Sternburgian fragments, images within images. And if I’m sometimes not quite sure what I’m looking at, well, that’s part of the process, and it’s reason enough to be grateful for the work of Janet Sternburg. Long may she walk.

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A LARB contributing editor, Geoff Nicholson is the author of many books, including The Lost Art of Walking and Walking in Ruins. His new book The Suburbanist will be published later this year.