STRIDING WITH SEELIG

I’ve been reading Walks with Walser by Carl Seelig. Robert Walser (1878 – 1956), has been discussed elsewhere on this blog.  He was a German speaking Swiss who published quite a few things in his early life, including the long short story “The Walk,” but spent his last 27 years in a mental asylum.  He was eventually celebrated by Susan Sontag and WG Sebald but if it hadn’t been for Carl Seelig, Walser might well have slipped into an obscurity from which he couldn’t be rescued.

Seelig (1894-1962) was an editor and writer who’d read and admired Walser’s work.  He visited him at the asylum, befriended him, promoted his work, and eventually became his literary executor.

Carl Seelig walking with Albert Einstein

On these asylum visits, which took place between 1936 and 1956, Seelig took Walser out for a walk and lunch.  The book recounts these occasions, and he did some Boswell-style setting down of the things Walser had to say about his life and his work, and about the works of others.  Of course there was a war going on for some of this time and Walser was by no means oblivious to events.

Walser and Seelig sometimes took spectacularly long walks and they had some spectacular lunches. Seelig writes on April 23, 1939,

“We make our way from Herisau to Wil in three and a half hours.  We feel as if we’re on roller skates.”  Well yes.  Google maps suggest various routes, but all of them are about 14 miles long, and none of them take less than four and three quarter hours.  Anyway, the pair do arrive in Wil, and Seelig writes, “we eat at Im Hof; we are tremendously hungry and stop for a bite at one pub after another. Five in total.”

That’s quite a walk. That’s quite a pub crawl.

And then on March 21, 1941, Seelig reports Walser as saying, “I tried to visit him (the author and painter Max Dauthendey) in Munich once.  But I found only his wife, who told me that her husband happened to be in Wurzburg. I therefore took this as an opportunity to set off in that direction, in light sandals and without a collar.  I covered the distance in a little over ten hours.  That was the fastest walk I ever took.  My feet were full of blisters when I arrived.”

I would think so.  This time Google has the route as 154 miles long, and they reckon it takes 51 hours to walk, which sounds about right.  Even on roller skates Walser’s time seems unlikely.

But perhaps the most interesting thing in that entry is that Walser felt it worth mentioning that he wasn’t wearing a collar.  Of all the many items of kit that “serious” walkers find necessary these days, a collar really isn’t one of them.  The vast majority of pictures I’ve seen of Walser show him in a three piece suit with a collar and tie, sometimes there’s a hat, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a photograph of him wearing an overcoat, or anything waterproof, although he does usually carry an umbrella.

SOME WAY FROM THE BEACH

I was walking up Beachwood Drive, which leads to Beachwood Canyon, and used to give pedestrian access to the Hollywood sign, although currently it doesn’t: the neighbors complained - they had a point.  Not that this deters people from driving up there for a “good look” at the sign.

This is, in many ways, absurd. The sign is visible from miles around, and was in fact designed so that it could be seen from Wilshire Boulevard, which at its nearest point is six and a half miles away.

And, of course, tourists always think that Los Angeles is a kind of theme park and so they stand in the middle of the street and take pictures of their friends or themselves with the Hollywood sign looming behind them.

And the most annoying thing of all, nobody ever runs them down, much as I will them to.

Still there are sights to be seen on Beachwood. Obama still rules up there:

And there are Simpsons-esque amusements:

And best of all this house, which admittedly does reinforce the theme park idea, not quite a ruined castle, but close, and I guess it’s being refurbished.  

And I do wonder if they’re going to keep that hell’s mouth arch (or possibly porte-cochere) - though I suspect that may make the place harder to sell.  It reminds me of the l’Enfer Cabaret (the Surrealist met there occasionally) on Boulevard Clichy, a street I have certainly walked down a few times over the years, though I gather l’Enfer has been a Monoprix supermarket since 1950 or so, which would explain why I never saw it.

And it also reminds me of this mouth at Bomarzo (the Park of Monsters) where I still have hopes of walking one of these years.

And now, and obviously this is the actual inspiration, Mr. Matthew Licht send me this image of the facade of the Biblioteca Herziana, the German Academy, on Via Gregoriana in Rome.

WALKING WITH SLACK

I recently interviewed the Los Angeles-based photographer Mike Slack for the British Royal Photographic Society.  Inevitably a certain amount of our conversation ended up on the cutting room floor and some of that concerned walking.  

Mike is creating a series of books with the overall title Walking in Place, in which he walks around various cities, photographing what he sees.  The first book featured New Orleans.  This is a spread from the book:

Perhaps inevitably, we mentioned psychogeography in our conversation.  Now, I’ve learned from experience that when you mention psychogeography to most civilians their eyes just glaze over, so that was one of the first things to be cut, but since I imagine readers of this blog are made of sterner stuff, here’s how the exchange went:

*

GN: I see that notions of walking, maybe psychogeography, pop up in your work.  Can you say anything about that? 

MS: The aimless wandering aspect has always been a really fruitful method for seeing new things and making new pictures. An increasingly important part of it for me is the randomness, just rolling the proverbial dice and ending up somewhere and zeroing in a specific scene, a picture, at whatever scale, which always seems to link somehow to another specific picture from another time and place, and so on, all of the pictures somehow connected. I don’t know if that’s strictly a psychogeographic approach, but the “game” aspect of it is really appealing, using playful methods to tune into your immediate surrounding, and letting chance dictate the content or pathway. 

*

Here's Mr Slack with an image that appears in the New Orleans book: 

And here's the link to the RPS interview:

http://www.rps.org/regions-and-chapters/regions/headquarters/blogs/2018/may/mike-slack

COSMOPOLITAN WALKING

Perhaps you saw, a couple of weeks back, an obituary for Ninalee Allen Craig, who died in Toronto at the age of 90. If the name isn’t immediately familiar, one photograph of her is very famous indeed.  It's generally known as "American Girl in Italy."

It was taken in 1951 in Florence by Ruth Orkin.  The two women were staying in the same cheap hotel, and Orkin was working on a piece of photojournalism about American women traveling alone in Europe.  She enlisted Craig (who was known at that time as Jinx Allen) to be her model.  The end result appeared in Cosmopolitan the following year. Some sources say the title of the piece was, “When you travel alone … tips on money, men, and morals,” others say it was “Don’t Be Afraid to Travel Alone.” I’ve not been able to locate the interior of the Cosmo in question and look inside, but I think it’s this one:

         Of course the very fact that single women were being offered advice about traveling alone in Europe in 1952 is some indication of female freedom and independence, even if it was surely a minute number of women who actually did it.

The Orkin photograph seems easy enough to interpret from our current perspective: an attractive single women can’t walk down a street in Florence without being hassled by lecherous Italians, although in fact the magazine caption rather contradicted that.  It read, “Public admiration . . . shouldn’t fluster you. Ogling the ladies is a popular, harmless and flattering pastime you’ll run into in many foreign countries. The gentlemen are usually louder and more demonstrative than American men, but they mean no harm.” Well …

In later interviews Ms. Craig also felt the picture showed an essentially benign interaction. “Women look at that picture and feel indignant, angry,” she said. “They say, ‘That poor woman. We should be able to walk wherever we want to and not be threatened.’ As gently as I can, I explain I was not feeling fear. There was no danger because it was a far different time.”

No doubt it was, but there are other issues here too, I think.  The image may not strictly speaking be “staged,” but some of those men certainly appear to acting up for the camera.  But the real problem is the expression on Jinx Allen’s face.  She looks at best uncomfortable and pained, and at worst frightened.  And this too may be put on for the sake of the picture – but that only reinforces the problem.  Was she actually feeling comfortable but the photographer asked her to look pained for the sake of a good picture?

         I don’t know, neither did I know until very recently that there’s a whole bunch of other pictures by Ruth Orkin that show Jinx Allen being a solo tourist.  And the fact is she doesn’t look very comfortable in most of them, but again whether this is “natural” or a pose I can’t tell. 

You can see some of the other pictures for yourself on this website run by Ruth Orkin’s daughter:

http://www.orkinphoto.com/photographs/american-girl/

GOOSING AND STEPPING

Laura Kipnis is an interesting writer and I think an interesting character, the author of Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, about the moment when Liberalism becomes Stalinism, a contrarian perhaps, though most of what she writes makes pretty good sense to me, but that’s probably an argument for another time and place.

 

       Her appearance on a blog about walking, and I realize I’m a bit late on this, is because of a headline I saw on the Sun website that read, “LABOUR PERV - Minister ‘stuck his hand up young woman’s skirt 10 minutes after they met’.” Say what you like those tabloid guys, they know how to write a headline.

The young woman in question is, of course, Laura Kipnis, and the Sun refers to an article she wrote for the Guardian, part of which reads as follows:

“The culprit was a future MP and Europe minister, the friend of a friend. We were in a group of people heading into a restaurant, and this guy, later to become so politically illustrious, who was walking behind me, and whom I’d met maybe 10 minutes before, reached forward and goosed me.”

Goosing is a curious word, isn’t it?  It sounds kind of friendly and innocent, although I suspect that if you’ve ever been bitten in the bum by a goose you might think otherwise. 

Kipnis continues, “By goosed, I don’t mean he touched me on my butt, but in my butt, through the thin skirt I was wearing. I turned around and glared at him – I was young, jetlagged, and confused. Was this customary in Britain? What he’d done felt humiliating. I turned ahead and resolutely kept walking, whereupon he did it again.

“When I say things turned out well, what I mean is that he later went to prison. The ostensible reason was for cheating on his expenses, but I like to think it was cosmic justice for his crimes against my person.”

The best line here of course is the question “Was this customary in Britain?”  And I wonder how different things might have been if goosing had been an old British custom.  Would that have made it OK?  I don’t think so.