OF WALKING AND PLUGGING

I did this for "Electric Literature"

You can see at their website, along with much other fine stuff
https://electricliterature.com/9-walking-books-that-let-you-follow-in-literary-footsteps-3880d1eaaaa4

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9 Walking Books That Let You Follow in Literary Footsteps

From Dublin to Panama to your own backyard, these books lay out a path for walking around the world

My new novel The Miranda features a lead character who wants to walk around the world but doesn’t want to leave his own backyard, so he decides to walk 25,000 miles — the circumference of the earth — by doing laps around his own garden path. However, his sinister professional past proves difficult to walk away from.

I join a very long line of writers who have walked, and walkers who have written. I’m not in competition with my predecessors, either as a writer or as a walker, but here are some works by a few of my favorite literary fellow travelers. Some of these are fiction, some non-fiction—although all the fiction contains autobiographical elements, and there’s considerable invention in all the memoir.

Dublin: Ulysses, James Joyce

An obvious one to start with: the novel follows Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus as they spend a day wandering around Dublin, pursuing their separate, then crossed, destinies. There are endless books, guides, maps, organized walking tours to help you follow the characters’ routes in the real world. And the great thing is that any of these walks can easily be turned into a pub crawl. Ulysses also contains what I think is one of the truly great statements about walking: “We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-law. But always meeting ourselves.”

Munich to Paris: Of Walking In Ice, Werner Herzog

In the winter of 1974, Herzog walked the 500-plus miles from Munich to Paris in the firm belief that this walking pilgrimage would save the life of his friend, the film historian and critic Lotte Eisner, allegedly suffering from a serious illness. The walk was as arduous as you might expect, tramping through snow, sleeping in abandoned buildings, and Herzog is his usual heroically gloomy self. But the surprising thing is (or maybe we shouldn’t be surprised at all) — it worked. Lotte Eisner lived for another decade.

Tierra del Fuego to Panama: The Rucksack Man, Sebastian Snow

They don’t make ’em like Sebastian Snow anymore, and they never made many. Rejected from the army because of a knee injury incurred playing school sports, he became one of the twentieth century’s most relentless and eccentric world travelers. The Rucksack Man is his account of walking 8,700-miles from Tierra del Fuego to Panama, along the way getting his contact lenses fused to his eye balls, being bitten by a vampire bat, and having the amazing strength of character to refuse the many lifts he was offered.

Yorkshire moors: Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

The title is the name of an isolated farmhouse in the wilds of the Yorkshire Moors, the home of Heathcliff. It’s a long way from anywhere and yet the characters rarely think twice about walking the considerable distances there and back, and even a heavy snowfall only deters them slightly. Admittedly these journeys are sometimes necessary to further the plot, and of course the servants do at least twice as much walking as the property-owning classes.

New York: Open City, Teju Cole

Julius, a Nigerian student in New York, walks around Manhattan, explores the city, and tries to forget about the girlfriend he’s recently broken up with, observing the present while remembering his past in Nigeria and Belgium. This strikes me as one of the best aspects of walking: it requires you to pay attention to where you are and where you’re going, but because walking is also partly automatic, it leaves the walker’s mind free to set off in other directions.

London: Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

It would be more or less possible to track the route that Clarissa Dalloway takes — Westminster, St James Park, Piccadilly, Bond Street — as she sets out to buy flowers for a party she’s having in the evening. Like Teju Cole above, she too takes the opportunity to think about her current life and the missed opportunities of her past. For those seeking to replicate Mrs. Dalloway’s ramble, however, the route may be problematic. Critic and contrarian John Sutherland suggests that she couldn’t possibly have done the walk in the time available unless she’d taken a taxi.

Vienna: Walking, Thomas Bernhard

Two men habitually go on long walks through the streets of Vienna and have intense philosophical discussions, often about the nature of walking and the nature of thinking. But since Bernhard is one of history’s greatest misanthropes, the conversation inevitably turns to the evils of the Austrian state, madness, suicide, and a hatred for children. It is, of course, a comedy.

Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London: Flâneuse, Lauren Elkin

For all-too-obvious reasons, women walk much more cautiously than men, but there are plenty of serious women walkers, and Elkin’s book could be a sacred text for them. One of my favorite parts is her description of living in Tokyo, where she didn’t have the very best time. “What bothered me most was the certainty I felt that there was a great city out there full of places I wanted to discover, but I didn’t know where to look for them … I didn’t know where to go, where to walk.” A problem all walkers sometimes have.

Los Angeles: Westward Ho, Jim Harrison

A rarity, a Los Angeles walking story, and a novella rather than a novel, about Brown Dog, a native American, who walks the 47 miles from Cucamonga to Westwood to reclaim a bearskin taken from him by a “deeply fraudulent Indian activist.” It takes him a “leisurely” thirty-six hours to cover the distance. Google maps clocks it as 51.7 miles, and although the walk looks perfectly doable, I imagine very, very few people have ever done it.

Inside the house: Voyage Around My Room, Xavier de Maistre

And here’s one for those who want to walk but can’t to go anywhere. In 1790 de Maistre, a French aristocrat and army officer, was sentenced to forty-two days under house arrest for the crime of dueling. For those forty-two days he walked the length and breadth of his own room, treating it like a strange, newly discovered land, seeing it with new eyes, and also creating a parody of travel writing that is still extremely resonant.

About the Author

Geoff Nicholson is the acclaimed author of The City Under the Skin, Bleeding London, Bedlam Burning, and the cult classic Footsucker, among many others. His journalism has appeared in many periodicals as varied as GQ, The New York Times, Bookforum, Art Review, the London Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, and McSweeney’s. The Miranda is his most recent novel.

WALKING WITH MUFFLERS

I walked past my favorite Mufflerman down on Santa Monica Boulevard.  He’s been given a make over.  He used to look like this:

Now he looks like this:

I’m not absolutely sure it’s an improvement but no doubt he’ll get made over again before too long.

Incidentally, should you care, Lashes Ska Ruh  (the name on the mufflerman’s body in the second picture) is the name of a street artist.  This is apparently her, on the couch, behind the bandana, keeping it real.

SKA – stands for “still kicking ass,” and “suckers keep asking,” among other things.

HOLLYWOOD FOR NOW

One thing that’s confirmed by a walk around the Hollywood Forever cemetery, down on Santa Monica Boulevard: there is no relation between the size of a person’s fame and the size of their memorial.

I mean I can, more or less, understand why there’s a large and very literal statue of Johnny Ramone.  It strikes me as a strange and welcome splash of irony and subversion, though I’m never entirely sure if that’s intentional: irony and subversion are rather difficult to pull off in a graveyard.

          However, elsewhere in the cemetery is this headstone belonging to one Roman Kozlov:

Now, the internet reveals a few Roman Kozlovs, one of them is even a guitarist, but as far as I can tell, it’s not this one.  So we note the man and his headstone, and assume he must have been a guitar aficionado of some kind, and that’s about it.  We’re left remembering the headstone rather than the man.  It piques your curiosity, even as it fails to satisfy it.

The thing that everybody notices at Hollywood Forever is the one in the shape of an Atlas rocket, the memorial for Carl Morgan Bigsby.  It might lead you to think he had something to do with the space program, but apparently not.  The monument says Bigsby was “a recognized leader in many phases of the graphic arts,” a pioneer, just like the Atlas rocket, suggesting that we’re dealing with a metaphor here.  Trying to track him down online reveals that he’s most famous for having this very large memorial.

And what about the above remarkably simple and rather moving cross made out of what appears to be plastic irrigation pipe.  Is this austerity a deliberate rejection of the extravagance all around it?  Was the loved one a gardener, a plumber?  A put the question to my Russian-speaking friends. 

Polyglot pal Kevin Kinsella tells me that  "упок господи" is standard Russian Orthodox tombstone copy. Something like "Welcome, O my God, Nicholas Vitte", in this case. or "God, meet Nicholas."  And “drozdovets” means that he was White as opposed to Red Russian.  “I think it's like a point of honor among the emigre community,” says Kevin

My other pal Anna Paton offers, "Upokoj gospodi" means "Lord give peace" more religious form of R.I.P.

So still no indication of why the cross is made of plastic pipe.

Hollywood Forever is divided into a series of areas, mostly designated as "gardens."  There’s the Garden of Memory, the Garden of Eternal Love, the Chandler Garden (no, not Raymond).

And for headliners, there’s the Garden of Legends, that’s where Johnny Ramone is, and fame being the fleeting thing it is, some of the people buried there are now very obscure, so even having been a legend doesn’t necessarily mean a big memorial.  Here for example is the headstone of Virginia Rappe, complete with tribute footwear:

Poor Virginia really never got a break, a small-time actress and model, chiefly famous for the circumstances in which she died – of a ruptured bladder and peritonitis after attending a Fatty Arbuckle party.  So you can perhaps understand why the grave is modest. 

On first inspection it looks as though Jayne Mansfield’s headstone is equally modest too.  

And I thought there was something appealing about this, that if you’ve led a gaudy life, then it’s only appropriate to have a quiet, dignified headstone.  But I was wrong.  I discover that the stone in Hollywood Forever is just a stone. Jayne Mansfield is actually buried in Pennsylvania in a grave with a huge, heart-shaped headstone.

When I first when to Hollywood Forever, a long time ago now, I was amazed to see peacocks strutting about the place, but the time before last time when I went there I didn’t see any at all.  I feared they might be gone, but no, I did see one this time, and also a peahen.

I also saw, and maybe they were there all along and I never spotted them before, a colony of cats. I saw half a dozen though there could easily be more. They look vaguely feral, although more relaxed and less skittish than most feral cats.  Clearly somebody’s feeding and sheltering them, possibly the same people who feed the peacocks.

To be honest I’m not sure I’ll ever have a grave of my own, and if I do it almost certainly won’t be in Hollywood Forever, but if I did, I think I should be very happy to have it surrounded and walked on by graveyards cats.

THE MAN OUT OF THE CROWD

Cat owners walking to, or possibly from, auditions for the Corman/Poe movie Tales of Terror, c. 1962. 

Poe Walking High Bridge,  B. J. Rosenmeyer, c. 1930

SUSPICIOUS MINDS

We’ve talked before about trap streets – fake locations that cartographers put on their maps so that if somebody else reuses the map and claims it as their own, then it’s obvious where it came from. The culprits can then be hounded down and prosecuted for copyright theft. Trap streets have figured in a Dr Who series and a China Mieville novel.

Prosecutions seem to be incredibly rare.  True, in 2001 the British Automobile Association paid £20 million to Ordnance Survey because they’d been misusing O.S. maps, but they weren’t caught by trap streets, rather by cartographic “fingerprints” of distinctive design elements.

A little while back I found, posted by a Facebook Psychogeography group, the above image of what may or may not be a trap, though it’s a place rather than a street.  It’s on an O.S. map and the post said it refers to a field in Suffolk. The only Lover’s Lane in Suffolk that I can find on Google maps is in Leiston, site of the Household Waste Recycling Centre.

Now, life being as it is, I used to live fairly close to Leiston, walked around there from time to time, and I still own a copy of the map O.S. Pathfinder 987 Leiston, and a good look reveals this same Fiscal Policy, right on the fold.  The map is copyright 1983, and there’s no indication that it’s been updated.

       Since it’s not a street, there’s some speculation that it might be an Argleton – the name given to phantom settlements that appear on Google maps.  However, although a look at Google maps and Google satellite images locates Lover’s Lane and the other features, thereby confirming that this is the right place, Google doesn't label any site as  Fiscal Policy.  Go pick the cartographic gristle out of that one. 

Need I say that in the days when I walked in and around Leiston, I never noticed the name Fiscal Policy on the map I often carried.  If I had done, I’d have been off like a shot looking for it. 

In one sense, I suppose I’d never have found it.