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."

GEOFF NICHOLSON HAS GONE FOR A WALK

THE WALKING LIFE

I don’t suppose many people go to see movies in search of “great walking scenes.”  Even I don’t do that.  But if a movie happens to contain the odd great walking scene, then so much the better.

And so it is with Seven Psychopaths, which I saw at the weekend, a movie that’s so in love with itself it’s actually rather hard to love, but which has its climax in Joshua Tree National Park.  The director has a casual disregard for distances and proximity (it’s that kind of movie, and I have no complaints on that score), but any movie that has both Colin Farrell and Christopher Walken tramping through the desert void is OK by me.

A couple of hours after I’d seen the movie I encountered a hot and bothered young woman walking along the street, flustered, apparently lost, and she asked me urgently which way was Hillhurst Avenue.  I pointed her in the right direction.

“Is it far?” she asked.

“Yes,” said, “it’s a bit of a walk.”

I didn’t specify how far.   It was probably a mile and a half, and she didn’t look like much of a walker but I didn’t want to jump to conclusions.

“Oh my fucking LIFE!” she said, to nobody in particular, certainly not to me, and walked on.  Well, I didn’t expect to be thanked …

OF WALKING AND SCALDING

We’re inclined to think that walking is a pretty simple and straightforward business, and yet as I wander through the world I find a staggering number of signs telling me how to walk, where to walk, and far more often, where not to walk.

Some of these signs are obviously intended to be useful, and actually are.  Most of us are grateful to know that there may be rattlesnakes in the area or that we’re in danger from other pedestrians and forklift trucks (a double threat if ever I heard of one).

But some seem a little superfluous, such as this one at edge of the Ubehebe

Crater in Death Valley. 

I mean, if you’re too dumb to realize that walking around the edge of a 600 foot deep volcanic crater might be a little risky, you’re probably too dumb to take any notice of the sign.

Some seem more general and philosophical – such as this one:

although if you ask me pedestrianism, and indeed life, is always about crossing the line, one way or another.

Some are more simply inscrutable.  Like this one:

 OK, so climbing on groynes may be forbidden, but the guy on the sign isn’t climbing, he’s just walking.  So does that mean that walking on groynes is OK, but climbing isn’t?  We may never know.

Some seem to contain simple philosophical truths, this one for instance, telling us that a parking lot is not a pedestrian walkway, which I’m happy to accept and agree with, but I think what they’re really saying is “keep out.”

One of my favourite, though ultimately very melancholy, signs comes from the Desert Tortoise Preserve outside of California City, a sign that is genuinely surprising and informative: 

Who knew that desert tortoises urinated if you get too close?  Who knew that urination could lead to death? That’s quite an evolutionary disadvantage I’d think, but I do like the bold use of italics and exclamation mark on DIE!

But now, just last week, I found a new favourite at the Hot Creek geothermal area up by Mammoth Lakes. 

Scalding water, unstable ground: has walking ever seemed more exciting?

WALKING WITH MITTENS AND HITCH

This may surprise you.  It certainly surprised me.  Last night I dreamt that I was walking in a strange city with Mitt Romney.  He was on some kind of political walkabout, meet and greet, but it was just me and him.  We walked together down a long narrow alley, and at the end it opened into a vast cube-shaped courtyard, with four high, windowless walls and one of them had a sign for a “Chapel of Rest.”  There was one old woman sitting on the ground with her back to us.  The walls were made of some kind of curious brickwork, very thin brittle, bricks, in many different shades of red and brown, and Romney talked about this, showing himself to be very knowledgeable about the history of bricks.  And in the dream I thought to myself well you know, a man who explores a strange city like this and knows about the history of bricks can’t be all bad.

In some oblique way I think this was related to the Kelvedon Hatch Secret Nuclear Bunker (above), in Essex, which I visited when I was England last month.  The whole place is a temple of cold war gloom and obsolete office equipment, and it has a long narrow entrance corridor, which could well have been a precursor of the long narrow alley I walked down in the dream with Mitt.

The late Christopher Hitchens was somewhere in the dream too.  He was alive, but already terminally ill, and I argued with some heckler on Hitchens’ behalf: a thing he would surely never have required in life.  I think he was there in the dream because of the time he was walking down a street in Beirut, strolling “in company … on a sunny Valentine's Day  … in search of a trinket for the beloved and perhaps some stout shoes for myself” and defaced a poster from the Syrian Social Nationalist Party because it bore what he described as a "spinning swastika," and was duly beaten by SSNP heavies.  A bit of political graffiti that actually meant something.