ULYSSES ON HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD

 It’s a good few decades since I first read the opening lines of the “Proteus” chapter in Ulysses, the chapter in which Stephen Dedalus walks along Sandymount Strand.   I read the words "Ineluctable modality of the visible," reached for the dictionary and looked up the meaning both of ineluctable and modality, and I think I was at least very slightly wiser afterwards.

Now I know, or at least I’m given to understand, that this is a reference to Aristotelian notions of form and substance, that what the eye sees is not inherent in the thing seen.  At one point Stephen closes his eyes and wonders if the world still exists, to which the all too obvious answer is “Duh.”

At the very least I suppose those words mean that we can’t escape the visual, though I’m not sure why we’d want to. 

And of course there’s a double bluff going on here, in that Joyce’s novel is transforming a visual experience (though obviously not only a visual experience) into a verbal one, into a text.  And I often think, as I walk in the world, that the separation between the verbal and the visual is largely a false one.

I’m a writer and I love words, but a lot of the time I write about what I see. And occasionally I take a photograph to capture details that I might otherwise forget, even as I accept that taking the photograph changes the nature of forgetting and remembering.

  But the fact is, the world I see when I’m walking is full of language, visible language, words in a landscape. Cities seem to be full of fragmented poetry and prose, right there on the wall or the floor, and very occasionally up in the sky.    

This isn’t why I walk, but it definitely makes the experience of walking all the more worthwhile.  Sometimes I wonder if language is ineluctable.

A DAY LATE FOR PYNCHON IN PUBLIC DAY

“Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.”  - Gravity's Rainbow.

Or possibly the beach.

Story of all our lives, right?

MEANDERING WITH MARX

Maybe everybody in Los Angeles knows this already …

Getting on the subway at Pershing Square station yesterday afternoon, the board told me I had 14 minutes to wait till the next train.  Even when I’m not being a walker I’m quite an obsessive pacer so I tramped back and forth, up and down the platform, trying to find things to look at. 

 It’s got some neon sculptures overhead which are kind of OK, but I settled on looking at the fire hoses and fire extinguishers, which are stored behind glass and frankly look as though they’d be quite a bit of trouble to access should you have need of them.  But then, imagine the joy of discovering that the extinguishers are supplied and serviced by a company named Marx Brothers.  

What could go wrong?  It made the wait, and the pacing, totally worthwhile.

SOME BENCHES

Some inhabitants of Los Angeles (I’m one of them) regularly complain about the lack of public space.  Oh sure there’s are biggish parks – Griffith Park is over 4000 acres – but going there can be a major expedition, especially when all you want is somewhere to sit for twenty minutes and eat a sandwich.  You need a little area – doesn’t have to be fancy - with a bit of grass and a bench, the kind of thing you find all over London and other cities.  This kind of thing:

For a long time there used to be a bench in my neighborhood.  It wasn’t strictly public, I think, because it was on a long thin strip of land that actually belonged to somebody’s house.  Clearly it was unusable as part of a garden, and there was no point fencing it off because that made it even less usable.  And so the land was left open, and a bench placed there for the public weal.

In ten years of walking around the local streets I believe I saw the bench being used exactly twice.  I sat on it a couple of times myself because I felt it should be embraced, but nobody could pretend it was a great local resource.  And in any case, it’s now gone.

--> Of course I noticed this a while ago on one of my daily walk, but I’d never got around to photographing the bench’s absence (for obvious reasons).  Even as a bit of negative space I realize it’s not much of a picture, but here’s the beauty part.  Until I tried to photograph the absence of the bench I hadn’t noticed the presence of that shiny new, white, replacement wooden fence behind it. 

        

Walking: I do believe it sharpens up the powers of observation.  But sometimes you need a nudge.

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DAWDLING WITH DORIS

 So Doris Roberts has died, the “mother in law in Everybody Loves Raymond,” as she was generally known.  She was aged 90 so it was hardly premature but I’m still very sorry to see her go.

The great and improbable thing about her performance in “Raymond” was that if anybody had behaved in real life the way she behaved in the show you would have truly despised and wanted to kill her, but within the show, even as the behavior still seemed both completely believable and despicable, you came away with a great fondness for her.

I didn’t know much about Doris Roberts except for that show, but I gather she’s been in a great many TV shows and movies including Remington Steele, and The Honeymoon Killers.  In the latter she played Bunny.

Since I didn’t know much about her, I obviously didn’t know that she was a walker but it seems she was.  The LA Times obituary has this quotation from a 2000 interview with her:

“Sometimes what I do for fun with friends is go on a ramble … My life is always planned.  When you ramble you choose north, south, east or west and you just go.  And when you see something you like, you stop.  It could be anything – a flea market, a restaurant.  And if you don’t like it you can just leave.”

Not just a rambler, but a psychogeographer!