BLACK FLAG WALKING

Here’s something from Henry Rollins’ column in this week’s LA Weekly:

“I don't do much walking in Los Angeles. I am sure there is a lot to enjoy as a pedestrian in our city, it just never occurs to me to do it. Years ago, when I lived in Silver Lake, I used to walk for miles all the time. As I would make these epic, biped journeys into Hollywood to see shows, I always had the same feeling that I wasn't really going anywhere except deeper into the seemingly endless sprawl of Sargassoid stucco.

“In Washington, D.C., I walk for hours, take a break for food or writing and then set out again. Most of my walks are referential, having to do with music. Places I saw bands, places where bands used to practice, houses I used to hang out in and listen to records. I go to these places over and over again, decade after decade. I know that sounds strange and it probably is, but to me, it's like a Kata or a meditation. The walk, the arrival at the spot. A moment to dwell on the significance and then to walk elsewhere, is to me what it means to be 'poetry in motion.'"

I think any even half-way serious walker would completely agree with what he says in the second paragraph; I think we’re talking psychogeography, or deep topography, or conceivably Proustian remembrance.  I’ll drink to that.

But I wonder if I get his point in the first para. “Endless sprawl of Sargassoid stucco” is a nice, if slightly opaque, phrase, and I assume it’s a reference to the Sargasso Sea: a two million square mile gyre (another nice phrase) – i.e. rotating currents - in the middle of the North Atlantic. It’s a seaweed-choked place of mystery, discovered by Columbus, where ships have historically been becalmed and where uncanny things have happened.  These days apparently it’s also a vortex of swirling plastic waste, much like the North Atlantic Garbage Patch.  So, not much walking to be done there.

Still, be that as it may, I think I’m enthralled by the idea of walking “deeper into the seemingly endless sprawl of Sargassoid stucco,” in fact I think it’s what much what I do it all the time.  Here’s a pictures of Henry Rollins, walking (sort of), not in seaweed, but on the red carpet:

PROOF

... if proof were needed, that Dwight Garner "a book critic" (his employer's nomenclature) for the New York Times, leads a charmed life.

I suspect that for readers of this blog, the connections between walking, writing and reading don't need much explication, and here is Dwight, earlier this year, writing in the Times, and making a persuasive case for audio books.

He writes, “Keep an audio book or two on your iPhone. Periodically I take the largest of my family’s dogs on long walks, and I stick my iPhone in my shirt pocket, its tiny speaker facing up. I’ve listened to Saul Bellow’s “Herzog” this way. The shirt pocket method is better than using ear buds, which block out the natural world. My wife tucks her phone into her bra, on long walks, and listens to Dickens novels. I find this unbearably sexy.”

Above is a picture of the wife in question, Cree LeFavour.  No sign of audiobook, nor bra for that matter. 

YOUNG AND RESTLESS

We know that Oliver Sacks is not a man who does things by half.  Some people might trip and fall while out walking, and end up with a twisted ankle. When Dr. Sacks falls, the results are dramatically catastrophic.  In his book A Leg to Stand On he meets a bull while walking on a mountain path in Norway.  He turns and runs, falls down the mountain, tears off his quadriceps, crawls for an hour or three, is found by reindeer hunters, stretchered to safety, goes back to England, has a big operation, and tumbles into an existential tail spin.  This of course is good for the writing even as it may be bad for the body and mind.

And things haven’t got any better with age for Sacks.  In his new book Hallucinations he’s walking across his office, trips over a box of books, falls headlong and breaks his hip.  Thus: “I thought I have plenty of time to put out my hand to break the fall, but then – suddenly, I was on the floor, and as I hit, I felt the crunch in my hip.  With near-hallucinatory vividness in the next few weeks, I reexperienced my fall; it replayed itself in my mind and body.” Well, of course it did, Dr. Sacks.

 I’ve also been reading Neil Young’s Waging Heavy Peace, which is sometimes kind of annoying but sometimes very readable and once in a while very moving.  And walking is occasionally involved.  Neil’s father, who was a journalist and a pretty good dad by all accounts, eventually suffered from Alzheimer’s, becoming in Young’s words “there and not there” and after a while he was “just gone.”

        

Young writes, “Last time we were at the farm we went for one of our many walks.  We always took long walks in the forest together when I visited him, at the farm or anywhere … On that day when we were back on the farm walking, Daddy got lost.  That really was the last walk we went on together.”

I haven't been able to find an image of Oliver Sacks walking, but above is one of him at least standing up. It seems, incidentally, that Oliver Sacks gets lost all the time.  In an interview with the New York Times he said, “A friend gave me a hat with a built-in compass, since I have no sense of direction. It beeps when you face north and the intensity of the beeps shows how close you are. I like to think it’s improving my awareness but truthfully, I don’t think I’m getting any better. And I get a little embarrassed wearing a hat that beeps.”

It was actually easier than I thought to find an image of Neil Young walking.  Here he is by the Berlin wall in the early 80s.  BUt perhaps I shouldn't be surprised.  After all, Neil Young did write a song titled Walk On.  The chorus runs as follows:

     Walk on, walk on,

     Walk on, walk on.

MORE DRIFTING THAN WALKING

No, no, the title isn’t a reference either to Guy Debord or Scott Walker, though I suppose by saying that, I’ve sort of turned it into one.  Rather it’s a reference to David Goodis.  That’s him above.

This being the season of good will and good cheer, any man with blood in his veins is likely need a bit of hairy-chested, noir fiction, to remind himself of other possibilities.  And so, over the weekend, I read Goodis’s “Black Pudding” in Manhunt magazine, December 1953.  That’s it below.

The magazine describes it as a “novelette” though I think most of us would say it was a short story of fairly average length.  The metaphor lodged in that title is slightly lost on me: one of the characters says, “It’s a choice you have to make.  Either you’ll drink bitter poison or you’ll taste that sweet black pudding.”  That would be the sweet black pudding of revenge, but you know, still ....  Apparently there’s a TV adaptation starring Kelly Lynch as Hilda.

Goodis was a massively prolific writer which no doubt explains why his output is so mixed, but I think there’s a pretty top notch noir paragraph right before the climax of “Black Pudding.” The hero, Kenneth Rockland, watches his ex-wife, Hilda, from outside the house she’s holed up in.

“She moved with a slow weaving of her shoulders and a flow of her hips that was more drifting than walking.  He thought.  She still has it, that certain way of moving around, using her body like a long-stemmed lily in a quiet breeze.  That’s what got you the first time you laid eyes on her.  The way she moves.  And one time you said to her, ‘To set me on fire, all you have to do is walk across a room.’”

OK, I could probably do without the long-stemmed lily, but otherwise, I like that.  I like that a lot.  There is actually a far more overwrought reference to walking in Goodis’s The Burglar.  In which the hero and his woman are strolling on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, watching the other strollers.  He says, "Look at them walking. When they take a walk, they take a walk, and that's all. But you and I, when we take a walk it's like crawling through a pitch black tunnel."