PEDESTRIANIZING WITH PYNCHON

Back in the late seventies, Aloes Books was publishing Thomas Pynchon’s early, at that time uncollected, short stories.   They came as separate pamphlets, and the only place in London I knew to buy them was a bookshop called, if memory serves, Agneau Deux.  There I fell into conversation with the guy behind the counter who had it on reasonable, though apparently very hush hush, authority that Pynchon was actually living in London at that time.  There was a small but significant frisson in knowing that I was walking the same streets as the great “recluse.”

Between 1996 and 2003 I lived in New York (more or less – I mean I actually commuted between London for some of it) and obviously I walked the streets, because that’s what I do wherever I am, and it’s what people do in New York whether they want to or not.  And I did know by then that Pynchon was living in New York too.  His novel Mason and Dixon was in the works, and there had apparently been sightings of him in the corridors of his publisher, Henry Holt.  Word was that he looked pretty much like any other sixty year old novelist.  I guess I had become more cynical or realistic, and the frisson of walking the same streets as Pynchon wasn’t quite what it had been 15 or 20 years earlier.

With the newly published Bleeding Edge Pynchon has written his New York novel (a thing many novelists feel the urge to do) and to some extent his 9/11 novel (a thing that many novelists feel very, very uneasy about).

Of course Pynchon walked the streets of New York: and if we doubted it, there’s a pretty low quality picture (seen above) taken in 1998 by James Bone, then of the London Sunday Times, showing Pynchon and his son walking on the Upper West Side.  The authenticity of the picture is slightly contested, but I’m happy enough to believe it’s Pynchon, the first new picture published in over 40 years.  And yes, he looks pretty much like a 60 year old novelist.

Anyway, the book contains this pretty great description of New York pedestrianism:

“Next day, evening rush hour, it’s just starting to rain … sometimes she can’t resist, she needs to be out in the street.  What might only be a simple point on the workday cycle, a reconvergence of what the day scattered … becomes a million pedestrian dramas, each one charged with mystery, more intense than high-barometer daylight can ever allow.  Everything changes.  There’s that clean, rained-on smell.  The traffic noise gets liquefied … Average pushy Manhattan schmucks crowding the sidewalks also pick up some depth, some purpose – they smile, they slow down, even with a cellular phone stuck in their ear they are more apt to be singing to somebody than yakking.  Some are observed taking houseplants for walks in the rain.”

Gotta say I never saw anybody walking in the rain with their houseplants in New York, but I completely believe it.

Flaneurism is all over Pynchon’s works: it’s pretty much an inevitable part of any detective or “quest” novel.  Still, I do believe that this passage below is the only place in the Pynchon oeuvre (and of course I stand to be corrected) that he uses the word flaneur. One of the characters, Emma Levin, is dating Naftali a former member of Mossad, now working as a security guard for a diamond merchant: (yep Pynchon has kind of gone Jewish for this novel).

         “‘There he is.  My dreamboat.’  Naftali is pretending to lounge against a storefront, a flaneur who can be triggered silently, instantly into the wrath of God.”

         Wouldn’t we all like to that kind of flaneur? 

         Oh, and another thing, if you make it to page 354, there's an appearance by two characters, Promoman and Sandwichgrrl, described as cyberflaneurs.  But really, aren't we all flaneurs in cyberspace

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.