THE WELL WORN WALKER

A.E. Housman is not an open book to me, and much of what I know about him comes from an essay I read by Alan Bennett. And the most interesting thing in that essay runs as follows, “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.”

The curious part of that sentence is the word “all.” Just how much, how many kinds, of underwear did he (or they) wear?  More than just vest and underpants?  Combinations? Drawers? Something more exotic?  This kind of thing?

 

        

 

If a work of statuary can be believed, Housman did look like a walker.

Swinburne on the other hand looks like a man who’s got his knickers in a twist.  

Though this is how Swinburne looks in a portrait by Robert M.B. Paxton, at the National Portrait Gallery, which is much more persuasive.

Alan Bennett does look convincingly like a walker.  

His underwear arrangements, to date, must remain a private matter, and personally I prefer it that way.

GONE FOR A BURTON

I’ve been walking in Dublin.  I was there for the 7^thSir Richard Francis Burton Conference, where my pal Anthony Miller and I were presenting a paper (possibly just having an on stage conversation) under the title “Burton as Psychogeographer and Walker.” We looked like this: 

 

PHOTO BY CAROLINE GANNON

I don’t think there was anything controversial about this paper.  Most travelers are psychogeographers to the extent that they “study (or at least experience) the effects of the geographical environment, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.”  And one way or another they often end up doing a fair amount of walking, when the car breaks down, when the bus drops you off in the wrong place, or in Burton’s case when the camel dies under you.  This is Burton walking in his own garden in Trieste - I guess he had to hold still for the camera.

 

I’d thought there must be some connection to be made between Burton and Joyce, and no doubt there is, but as part of my research I tracked down an entry in Harold Nicolson’s diary dated 30^thJuly 1931. Nicolson was lunching with a group of literati including his publisher from Putnam, in order to meet James Joyce.  Joyce was “not a very convenient guest at luncheon” and they struggled for conversation.  

Knowing that Joyce had lived in Trieste where Burton had once been consul, one of the guests, Desmond McCarthy, asked Joyce, “Are you interested in Burton?”

“Not in the very least,” Joyce replied.

 

Still, the conference gave me, and everyone else, plenty of time for walking around the city, and it seems hard to go anywhere without getting the feeling that you’re walking in Joyce’s footsteps, which is no bad thing.

A walker doesn’t necessarily need a project but, I found myself noticing and photographing various “establishments,” whether in business or abandoned or somewhere in between, and in some cases I managed to photograph other walkers, walking past these places.  This kind of thing:

Of course we psychogeographers do love a good map and it was easy to find free maps in Dublin, offered by various tourist attractions but this one, not free, and very hard to slip into your pocket, is one of the best 3-D maps I’ve even seen, metal and stone, about two feet across, depicting (unless I'm mistaken) the outline of Dublin Castle.  I mean you probably wouldn’t use it to get anywhere but as a topographical object it’s hard to beat.

Oh and here’s a thing you might like.  As discussed earlier elsewhere, if you go to the Burton archive at Orleans House in Richmond you’ll see a plaster caster of one of Burton’s hands and one of his feet.

 

And if you were drifting around the Dublin streets up by the Glasnevin Cemetery, you might well see this cast of a foot in the window of a shop called Crafty Studio. 

 

Coincidence?  Synchronicity?  The universe sending me a message?  Nah, there’s no such thing.

 

WALKING AND DIFFERENCE

 This is a photograph of Jaques Derrida walking:

Derrida has been on my mind, well, more than usual, because I just read a review in the LRB, 10 October 2024, by Jonathan Rée, discussing the recent translations of Derrida’s  Hospitality, Volumes 1 and 2.

 

Rée writes “Derrida had a marvellous literary range, and a sharp eye for details that might elude the rest of us.  (Reading him reminds me of taking a walk with a friend who will spot a ghost orchid, a heath fritillary and an alpine swift while I am just enjoying a companionable stroll.”

 

This is a ghost orchid:

This is a heath fritillary: 

 

This is an alpine swift:

Speaking as someone who couldn’t identify any of those things, I do wonder whether it might not be rather annoying to walk with somebody who was constantly pointing out things that I didn’t recognize.  

Though I suppose being with Derrida might create other irritations, such as his obvious vulnerability outside off stump.

WALKING WITH WORDS

 

I remember when I was a kid, when I was first learning to read, there was an occasion when I was walking with my dad, and we were in a part of Sheffield by the steel works, and I looked up at a big yellow sign, full of text, black on yellow and advertising Hillfoot Steel as I remember, and I stared at all those words and said to my dad, ‘I’m never going to be able to read all that.’  He did his best to put my mind at rest and said I’d learn soon enough.  And I suppose he was right.

 

One way or another, I’ve made my life out of words, and today when I walk through a city, I love the fact that I’m surrounded, beset, by language, by signs, by names, by advertising, by instructions, by warnings, by prohibitions, telling me what I should and shouldn’t do.  Of course there are also graffiti but I think that gets enough publicity.

 

Some of the words may be on street signs, for instance, though it seems to me there are rarely enough of those.  Here's an exception:

Some of these words express opinions, enthusiasms, philosophies, belief systems, though inevitably most of this isn’t very nuanced.

Some of it is downright inscrutable, which is perhaps to say that it’s not intended for everyone, such as me.  

Some of it, of course, is only directed at drivers.

 

As a walker I particular enjoy those messages that are directed specifically at pedestrians, some of which might make you think that walking is a hazardous, risky and confusing business. And you know, sometimes it really is.

EVERYBODY WALKS IN LA.

‘To perceive differences within the homogenous elements of the cultivated and inhabited urban landscape, I eschewed the common means of transportation, the automobile, and explored the entire area on foot … I closely engaged with people of different ages, occupations, social positions, and origins, I gathered oral narratives from people who seemed reliable and whom I encountered on my walks in different neighborhoods.’

These are the words of Anton Wagner, writing about his explorations of Los Angeles in the 1930s.

 

Until about three days ago I would have said I’d never heard of Anton Wagner.  He was a German geographer, who as a result of his LA explorations published a book in 1935, titled Los Angeles: Werden, Leben und Gestalt der Zweimillionenstadt in Südkalifornien, only now translated into English as Los Angeles: The Development, Life, and Structure of the City of Two Million in Southern California.

 

I’ve only heard of Wagner now because I read about the book in the Los Angeles Review of Architecture, in a piece by Namik Mackic.  The book’s published by the Getty Research Institute and It costs 60 quid in paperback, so reviews are as close as I’m likely to get. It looks like this:

 

The publisher’s blurb says ‘Although widely reviewed upon its initial publication, his (Wagner’s) book was largely forgotten until reintroduced by architectural historian Reyner Banham in his 1971 classic Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies.’ This was news to me, and I like to think I know that book reasonably well.

 

So I dug out my copy, the Pelican edition, and there’s one citation for Anton Wagner in the index – page 230 - but when you look at that page his name doesn’t appear. Only by going to Banham’s last chapter titled ‘Towards A Drive-In Bibliography’ will you find a mention of Wagner, which reads in part, ‘The only comprehensive view of Los Angeles as a built environment … The result is one of the few works of urban exploration that comes within sight of Rasmussen’s London: the Unique City, ’ – a book I’m pretty sure I own a copy of, though I’m damned if I can find it at the moment.

 

Anton Wagner, it seems, was something of a photographer and the California Historical Society has digitised a large number of his photographs.  He doesn’t appear in any of the histories of photography I’ve consulted, so I don’t know what kind of methodology or indeed camera he used, but the pictures are terrific.  They show a city that’s occasionally familiar but mostly alien, a city coming into being. Many of the photographs take a broad, distant, sometimes god-like look at Los Angeles, long and broad views, very few of them taken from ground level.

 

Now, if you’re a walker in Los Angeles, as I was for 15 years or so, you tend to meet other walkers, but I’m not sure that Wagner did.  There are remarkably few people in the pictures, even fewer people you can easily identify as walkers, which make the few who appear all the more intriguing, such as these people you can just about make out walking in, or through, Pershing Square.

And this is my current favourite, a single walker crossing a very quiet street, behind him a metal silo that looks like the kind of thing Bernd and Hilla Becher would have fallen in love with.  

 

The caption reads 'Looking north on South Andrews Place from south of West 62nd Street.' And thanks to Google we can see what it looks like now.  Still very quiet, in a different way, and not a single pedestrian in sight.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ldest oil derricks, Mexican neighborhood

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE SOLACE OF WALKING

I was in Faversham last Saturday for the Literary Festival, being an author, and I was on stage with Sonia Overall, author of Heavy Time: A Psychogeographer’s Pilgrimage.  

 

Photo by Caroline Gannon

Among the many things we discussed and agreed on, was that a large part of walking and drifting is about noticing.  You walk, you see things, you record them in some way, in memory or a notebook or a photograph. and later, somewhere along the line, they become something else – a book, an essay, even a blog post.

 

After the event, the inamorata and I stayed in Whitstable for a couple of nights with pals Jacqueline and Nick (thanks kids), and it seemed only natural that we should all go for a walk and a drift Sunday morning and do some noticing. So that’s what we did.

 

And what did we notice?  Well I noticed this sign:

 I’m not sure that we actually walked along the Crab and Winkle Way – we certainly didn’t get as far as Canterbury - but we may have covered some small section of it

 

And I can’t speak for anybody else but one of the things I noticed was the the intersection of what we might call nature with what we might call the built environment.

 

We saw gardens including this one decorated with a stone bearing the message ‘One Who Plants a Garden Plants Happiness.’ 

Now you could argue that one who plants a garden is just as likely to plant frustration, disappointment and thankless labour, but I don’t want to rain on anybody’s gardening parade.

 

There was nature creeping up the walls of houses:

We even saw a couple of Nicholsons:

We saw some interesting ruin:

 

And we saw this classic VW bus – every drift is better when it includes a VW bus:

There was also this very noticeable mural of Somerset Maugham:

 

Now, I didn’t know that Somerset Maugham was a Whistable lad: he was born in the British Embassy in Paris.  But after both his parents died he was sent to England to live with his uncle Henry MacDonald Maugham, vicar of Whitstable.   

 

You know it’s a good while since I read any Somerset Maugham – I think the last book I read was Ashendenwhich I really enjoyed, so Maugham is definitely all right with me, but even so, from what I know of his life, I think perhaps he found some forms of solace even more supreme than writing.