SOME WALKING GOSSIP

First: John Hayward (who was wheelchair-bound because of muscular dystrophy, and who was known, not always affectionately, as Tarantula) talking about TS Eliot, quoted by John Malcolm Brennan:

“On the day Time magazine came out with his face on the cover he walked for hours looking for wherever he might find it, shamelessly taking peeks at himself.”

       This is the Time cover, with portrait by Boris Michael Artzybasheff, and yes, that is a martini rising behind Eliot's right ear:

It’s remarkably hard to find a picture of T.S. Eliot walking, but there’s this one from the University of St Andrews, captioned “T. S. Eliot and others in North Street, St Andrews, 1953; photograph by George Cowie.”

Secondly: here’s Mark E Smith writing (or being ghostwritten) in Renegade his amazingly (and perhaps unexpectedly) good, not-quite memoir. It seems he was a walker of the suburbs at the time of making the album Perverted by Language.

“Walking the same places, skint, you see a lot of hidden sores when you’re having an off day.  Your eyes have changed and the simple actions of other people take on a significance that may not be truly there.  These are extreme moments …

“I’d be walking around wondering how I could finance everything and there’s be a fellow in an ill-fitting pair of slacks adding dabs of white paint to the white paint that was already there.”

        

It’s not too hard to find a picture of Mark E. Smith walking, this one’s by Natasha Bright:

It’s not even hard to find one of him in a wheelchair either:

Much harder to find one of John Hayward, but here is with Rose Macaulay and others.

WAKE WALKING

You don’t need to be much of a Joycean (and I’m certainly not much of one) to

know that James Joyce was a good and enthusiastic walker, and yet it still took me by surprise, dipping again into Ellmann’s biography to read the following:  “He brought home from Clongowes, Stanislaus attests, a variety of cups for his prowess in hurdling and walking.” 

Well, I’ve never claimed to have a photographic memory, but even so I thought I might have remembered that.

Stanislaus Joyce

Stanislaus is, of course, Joyce’s brother, and the information comes from his memoir My Brother’s Keeper, where there’s just a little more detail:  “When after four years or so he left Clongowes, we had at home a sideboard full of cups and a “silver” (electro-plate) teapot and coffee pot that he had won in the school hurdles and walking events.” 

 

Clongowes playing field

I assume this was race walking but I’m not altogether sure.  And we all know that times have changed, but even so I find it hard to imagine a world in which young schoolboys – Joyce was ten years old when he left Clongowes - won silver teapots for walking, even if only electro-plated.

Trying to find out more I have discovered two other surprising, if not wholly relevant, things.  First, there’s an annual event called The James Joyce Ramble, a 10-kilometer race held in Dedham, Massachusetts, an event for runners and walkers alike.

It was created in 1984, by Martin Casimir Hanley who was reading Finnegans Wake and found the book as arduous as running a road race.  Well, you can pay your money and take your choice on that one.  Apparently actors are positioned along the course and recite the works of Joyce as runners and walkers pass by.

The other thing: did you know there’s a street in London called James Joyce Walk?  I didn’t, and I really feel I should have.  It’s in Brixton, just off Shakespeare Road, but it really doesn’t look all that Joycean.

WALKING IN EDENS

I’ve been re-reading parts of the book Robert Irwin Getty Garden, and discovered this passage in which Irwin, an “artist who isn’t a gardener” describes walking in the garden with Jim Duggan, a “gardener who isn’t an artist” (that's a quotation from the San Diego Union Tribune).

Irwin says, “Well, one thing that Jim’s been doing as we go through the year (the book was published 2002) is, he lists every single plant.  We’ve been walking through the garden together on an average once every two weeks, and he takes notes, giving each plant a rating, like one star, two stars, up to five stars.  In January, a plant might get one star, then it’s a two star and then it’s a three star and then it’s a four star and then it’s a five star – it stays five stars for whatever, and then it becomes a four and a three and a two and we plan its replacement, and then we take it out.”

Well, what a very singular way of walking through a garden, and what a formidable display of ruthlessness.  It must make you feel like a god, or perhaps like Ernst Stavro Blofeld, as he appears in the novel You Only Live Twice.  

I first read it a long time ago, when I was barely a teenager, and I’m really not sure I ever saw the movie, but I gather that book and film resemble each other only in passing.  What has stayed with me from the book for all these years is the Garden of Death, a place in the grounds of a castle on a Japanese island, a place full of deadly plants where people go to commit suicide.  There’s a pool of piranhas in there too.  The whole thing moved my thirteen year old’s heart in ways I don’t understand even now.

So I just reread You Only Live Twice, and frankly it’s a bit ropey, Fleming’s eleventh and penultimate novel, written at a time when he was ailing.  Bond is in Japan for one reason or another. Blofeld has disguised himself as Dr. Guntram Shatterhand, a man internationally praised for his knowledge of plants but the Japanese authorities find his Garden of Death a bit of an embarrassment (which sounds extremely unlike the Japanese, to me) and so Bond’s mission is to disguise himself as a Japanese deaf mute (!?), get inside the castle and kill Shatterhand.  Spoiler alert - he succeeds.

     

Walking in the garden is considered a bit of a liability, but Bond’s Japanese connection, Tiger Tanaka, tells him the garden is full of hiding places.

    “Thanks very much,” says Bond.  “In one of those poison bushes or up one of those trees.  I don’t want to blind myself or go mad.”

    “The ninja clothing will give you complete protection.  You will have a black suit for night and a camouflage one for the day.  You will wear the swimming goggles to protect your eyes.”

    Actually it’s not all that easy to see how deadly this garden is.  Sure, Fleming gives us a list of the deadly plants growing there, including castor bean, ipecacuahana, and Mexican wild potato, all of which are certainly dangerous, but it’s not as if a wild potato is going to leap from the ground and force you to eat it, is it now?  

It makes you wonder who the gardeners were, and whether they went around giving plants star ratings.  I’m guessing not.

        

 In recent years the Aokigahara Forest, also known as Yukai forest “the Sea of Trees,” has been getting a lot of publicity and there are some truly gruesome pictures online. Like Blofeld’s garden, it’s a place where people go to commit suicide; somewhere between 70 and a 100 per year is the accepted number.  People walk in and never walk out, and of course they take their fate in their own hands without having to rely on deadly plants or any Bond villain.  Hanging is the most frequently used suicide method, followed by poisoning and overdose.

 I can’t make up my mind whether this is a good or a bad thing.  In general, I think people have every right to kill themselves, not that “rights” come into it much. I don’t claim to have any expertise in the matter, but of the friends I’ve known who’ve killed themselves, at least two of them did it while out walking.

     There are no gardeners in the Aokigahara Forest as far as I know, though there are volunteer counselors who position themselves in the forest and try to talk potential suicides into changing their mind.   The photographs above and below are by Pieter ten Hoopen who has documented the place in a less grisly fashion that many.  The picture below shows Azusa Hayano, a geologist who has apparently talked hundreds of people out of ending it all.  Of course he’s also found a certain number of bodies.

Well there was none of that a few days ago when I went to the James Irvine Japanese Garden at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center in downtown LA, one of those places that’s always on lists of “LA’s best kept secrets” thereby ensuring it’s no longer secret.  James Irvine, or at least his foundation, was the major sponsor, and it was designed by Takeo Uesugi, who for several decades was the go-to guy if you wanted a Japanese garden in southern California: he died in January 2016

You can see into the garden from the street, just about, but it’s sunk down into the earth and there are locked and forbidding gates.  It’s open to the public, but they don’t exactly beckon you in.  You have to go into the community center, and confront a stern Japanese woman who will quite literally look you up and down to make sure you’re worthy, and if you are (it seemed touch and go in my own case, but I just made it), then you sign in, and are allowed go down in a elevator, thread your way along corridors between office doors, and there you are in a Japanese garden surrounded on all sides by the skyscrapers of LA..

It’s not large but it has most of what you want and need in a Japanese garden – there’s a stream, footbridges, some ferns, some redwoods, and a very great number of plants I couldn’t tell you the name of.  I don’t believe any of them were overtly deadly. There wasn’t a lot going, which is want you want in a Japanese garden.  A few people came and went while I was there – but for much of the time I was the only one.

Interestingly there are no benches in the garden, which may have been another attempt to make sure the riffraff don’t linger too long, and it meant that if you wanted to sit you had to find a rock to accommodate your buttocks, or, as in my own choice, you could keep on walking around the paths.

LINGER ON THE SIDEWALK ...

When I first arrived in Los Angeles it seemed to me that neon was everywhere. Somehow you feel safe walking at night when there’s neon around, glowing above your head. I’m not sure that you are, but it feels that way.

One Sunday afternoon, in those early LA days, I even visited the Museum of Neon Art which at that point was in a bleak stretch of downtown, on a block where I was the only walker.  The museum closed down not long thereafter.

I tend to think of neon signs being especially used by bars, restaurants and motels, and maybe the auto trade, but the image below shows there was a time when it could be used for just about anything.

Anyway, I settled down in L.A., and then I stopped noticing the neon.  Did it go into decline, or did I just become immured to it?  Both, I think.  But lately I seem to see an increasing amount of neon.

And now the Museum of Neon Art has reopend in shiny new premises in Glendale (so not really LA, if we’re being pedantic).  I’d been meaning to go for a while but finally got there at the weekend.

It wasn’t so very long since I last went to Glendale but boy, it’s changed.  Even a few years back much of Brand Boulevard was a reasonable approximation of a classic main street:

But now it’s rapidly turning into one giant corporate mall.  Arguably this could be said to have made the place more “pedestrian-friendly,” though personally I found it about as friendly as a pit full of komodo dragons. The fact that the temperature in Glendale is generally five to ten degrees F hotter than Los Angeles is no great encouragement to walkers either.

Well the Museum of Neon Art is great, which is to say that the neon exhibits there are great: classic, nostalgic, witty, well-crafted, smart, optimistic. Here are a few of them:

Of course I wanted more, and there is room for the exhibition space to expand, but I wanted much, much more, I wanted to be able to walk among thousands of exhibits arranged over hundreds of acres.   Of course I wanted too much, but it was the museum that put the idea into my head.

I also came out of there with an urge for a drink and some economy meat, although that may not have been entirely because of the neon.

.

 In fact there’s a newish, hipsterish bar that’s opened in my neighbourhood, The Know Where, well within walking distance.  I’d probably have gone there in any case, but it was definitely that neon sign that first drew me in.

 

MYSTERIANS?

Can’t help thinking that the guys involved in replacing the pipes in my street may have lost their way.  Yes, we know it’s all a mystery down there but spraying question marks on the ground looks a bit like admitting defeat.