AURAL WALKING

 There’s a line by Pauline Oliveros, the avant-garde musician, composer and theorist, that gets quoted surprising often.  It runs “Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.”

 

In fact it’s one of Oliveros listening exercises, titled 'Native' from her small volume Sonic Meditations. 

To be fair Oliveros was more concerned with listening than walking.  In fact she was more concerned with listening than just about anything else, an advocate of ‘Deep Listening’.  And yes OK, I get that the piece is no doubt metaphoric, but I’ve been thinking how weirdit would be if the bottoms of my feet became ears.  

 

I mean they’d be inside my socks and inside my shoes: they wouldn’t hear much of anything.  And if you say, as some people do, that it’s always best to walk barefoot, well that’d be even worse, wouldn’t it?  These new ears would be constantly pressed hard against the ground. They might hear things in a new way but you wouldn’t have to walk very far before they got really, really sore.

 

 

WALKING OUT OF MY HEAD

 

If you’ve been watching Adam Curtis’s multi-part documentary I Can’t Get You Out Of My 

(and if not, why not?) you may have been reminded, or minded for the first time, of 

Eduard (sometimes Edward) Limonov. 

 

He was a Russian poet, novelist, memoirist, newspaper editor, and a dissident, although his dissent was not of the standard anti-Soviet kind that went down so well in the United States, to which he moved in 1974.  He was also a politician, though his politics were all over the place.  He was (almost certainly unjustly) charged in Russia with terrorism and spent two years in jail.  He also seemed to be – and this may have been the final nail in his political coffin - a pal of war criminal Radovan Karadzic (not a good look).

 

Limonov’s appearance in the Curtis film shows him with Karadzic, apparently firing a machine gun towards the besieged city of Sarajevo (an even worse look), though Limonov claimed he was a victim of creative editing, and was in fact just shooting at a target.  

 

As a writer Limonov is probably best known for It’s Me, Eddie, a ‘fictional memoir’ about his life in New York in the mid to late 70s - hence the Ramones t-shirt below, I suppose (though I can't swear this is in New York) 

 

Also, sometimes he did a Saturday Night Fever thing, which again is not a good look. 

If the book’s to be believed he (and/or his fictional protagonist) did an awful lot of walking in New York, at a time when it wasn’t the safest city in the world, which is why he’s here in this blog.

 

He writes, “All I was doing was sitting, lying, smoking, drinking from a bottle in a paper bag, sleeping in the street. I would go two or three weeks bumming around New York on foot, sometimes walking two hundred and fifty blocks a day, bumming around in neighborhoods both dangerous and safe, without talking to anyone.”

                                          

There are about 20 blocks in a miles (depending on the block) so that’s about 12 and a half miles. Quite impressive. Then he upped his game.

 

“I once covered more than three hundred blocks in one day, on foot. Why? I was out for a walk. I generally go almost everywhere on foot. Out of my $278 a month I begrudge spending fifty cents to ride anywhere, especially since my sorties have no set destination, or the destination is indefinite. For example, a place to buy myself a notebook of a particular format. They don't have it at Woolworth's or at another Woolworth's or at Alexander's, and I march down to the sidewalk markets on Canal Street to scrounge up the right notebook. All other formats irritate me.

“I am very fond of tramping around. Really, without exaggeration, I probably walk more than anybody else in New York. Unless there's some tramp who walks more than I do, but I doubt it. So far as I can see, bums are all immobile, more apt to lie still or putter sluggishly about in their rags.”

 

There’s a lot of this in the book, also a certain amount of talk about ‘pederasty’ – he was in favour of it.

 

For some of his time in New York he lived in the Winslow Hotel on 55^thStreet and Madison Avenue.  In 1982 the building was turned into an office block, with shops on the ground floor.  One of the shops, at least before Covid, was The Walking Company, just a shoe shop, but for some of us a reminder of the walking contradiction that was Eduard Limonov.

GRAVITY'S SUBURB

      I’ve been working on, and have very nearly finished, a book about Suburbia.  Before and between lockdowns I made a few expeditions, you might call them field trips, to various suburbs in England.  Most of this material will find its way into the book, but inevitably some of it ended up on the editing room floor.  Not being a man to waste effort or words, I thought I’d use a bit of it here, in much edited form.  

Here’s a description of a visit I made with my occasional drifting pal Jonathan Taylor to Staveley Road, Chiswick, London, W4, 

 

         Now read on:

 

Staveley Road is part of the Chiswick Park Estate, built in the late 1920s and early 1930s.  It’s a prime example of a well-to-do suburban street, as are many of the other streets nearby.  There are small front gardens, some of them surprisingly exuberant, some showing tropical influence, lots of yuccas and palm trees.  

 

And we saw this one neatly decked out with hardboard. I imagine it didn’t stay like that, but I’m not sure what they were up to.

 

         What sets Staveley Road apart is that it’s where the first German V-2 flying bomb, both a rocket, and a ballistic missile, landed and exploded at about a quarter to seven on September 8th 1944.  Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow has the time as 6.43.16 Double British Summer Time, which sounds wonderfully precise, though it may just be the precision of fiction.  We know for certain that three people were killed instantly: Rosemary Clarke, Sapper Bernard Browning, and Ada Harrison, whose husband William survived the immediate blast but subsequently died of his injures.

Other bits of information are harder to come by.   You can find sources that tell you 19 people were injured, others say it was 11 or 22.  Some sources will tell you that 6 houses, or 11 or 18, were completely destroyed and another 6 or 15 or 27 were severely damaged, in some cases so badly that they had to be demolished. The government of the day has at least some responsibility for the lack of clarity, done in the name of keeping up wartime morale. The official story was that a gas main had exploded, though of course the locals knew better.  Churchill didn’t even publically acknowledge the existence of the V-2 until he mentioned it in Parliament, in early November.

The truth is, I knew next to nothing about the V-2 before I read Gravity’s Rainbow, a book that has lived with me for a long time now, and I’ve since seen V-2s close up in a museum at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.  

 

         I knew there was a monument in Staveley Road, marking that first V-2 attack, but I’d been careful not to over-research it. I didn’t want my field trip simply to confirm what I’d already found and seen online.  Given that we were in deepest suburbia, I wasn’t expecting anything very Rococo or avant-garde but I was expecting a little more than I found. The monument looks like this:

 

A modest piece then, made more modest still by its siting on a tiny patch of ground in front of a chainlink fence that an electricity substation, with two mysterious mechanical lumps sitting on it.  The whole thing originally belongs to Scottish and Southern Electricity, and they donated the tiny patch of land where the memorial stands.

 

 It seemed a bit too modest, but what would I have preferred?  A scale model of a V-2?  A full size replica?  No, I can see the locals wouldn’t want anything like that in a suburban street.  But what about something by Tracey Emin?  Or perhaps more likely Jake and Dinos Chapman? They could surely have come up something suitable, or at least something that suited me: again the folks of Staveley Road might have thought otherwise.

 

However, thinking about it later, it occurred to me that perhaps the street itself and its continuing existence is a kind of memorial. Clearly it doesn’t look exactly the same as it did in 1944, much less the way it did in 1931, but it can’t be so verydifferent.  As so often in the suburbs, it was instructive to look at the older houses and observe how no two of them currently look exactly alike.  It’s the usual variations you find in any suburb; new porches, differing paint jobs, the additions of garages, extensions, loft conversions, but here it seems more significant.  You’d have a hard time telling which houses date from the original development, and which ones were built or rebuilt after the war as replacements for those bombed and demolished.  

 

         This living memorial of brick and mortar, wood and tile and glass, reveals an endurance, a consistency and stability, a continuation of daily domestic life that persists however much, and however harshly, it has to confront change, decay and destruction.  Of course if you were building a suburb today it wouldn’t look like this, this street is not timeless, it’s very definitely of its time, but it doesn’t seem particularly old-fashioned or quaint or retro.  Here are elements of suburban life that have in some sense remained constant for the best part of a century.  

 

         Jonathan was the ideal companion for this walk because he used to live in the neighbourhood.  He was able to direct us to this fabulous ice house in Grove Park, originally on the land belonging to Sutton Court Manor:

 

And afterwards we walked on to Chiswick Park and Gardens.  If you want obelisks, and we did, then this isn’t a bad place to look.  There’s this one:

 

and this one

 

         And as we wandered away from the scene of our drift we came to a quite amazing garden, complete with obelisk.  It is not exactly what the ancient Egyptians would have recognized as an obelisk, but as a piece of garden decoration it was outstanding.

 

BALTIC-RELATED FUN

 

When I lived in California, as I did until comparatively recently, people often said to 

me, ‘Oh but you’re English, don’t you miss the seasons?’

And I always said, ‘No I bloody don’t.’

 

I was born and brought up in Sheffield, which is built on seven hills.  The school I went to was two bus rides away from where I lived. The first bus took me down from the heights of Longley, then Gleadless when we moved, into the centre of town where I took another bus up a different, less steep, hill to school.  

 

However bad the snow was, I could usually get to school: it was getting home that was the problem.  After school, the bus came down the shortish hill into the centre of town but then I had to get up the other, much steeper hill to get home.  Because of ice, snow, bad road conditions, and perhaps the occasional disgruntled driver, buses were delayed or canceled and sometimes I had to walk – yes WALK - all the way home.  Up hill in the snow and ice.  Arguably it turned me into a flaneur but at the time I could have done without it.  

 

By the time I went to university in the softer, warmer south I was more than happy to leave all the snow and all the hassle behind.

 

And now, after more than a decade and a half in LA, I find myself living in Essex, hardly the frozen wastes, but we are currently experiencing Storm Darcy – the Bitch from the Baltic - and yes we have snow.  This does not fill me with joy.

 

Still, the ground here is fairly level and I don’t have to rely on buses so of course on a snowy Sunday a man, or a woman, has to go out walking.  It was OK, really, honestly, not bitterly cold and the snow was still soft and not frozen into ice slicks. I didn’t fall down even once.

 

There was a walk to be had, there were pictures to be taken, there was something to write about.  This makes many things tolerable.  I did what I could. 

 

Do you want to see a picture of me in the snow in California?  Of course you do.  The photo below was taken in Death Valley, one January.  I am on high ground and not overdressed, the sun is shining, and just a short drive down the hill there is warmth, dunes, and a not terrible motel.

 

How very different from the home life of our own dear Sheffielders.

 

 

SOME NEW OLD OBELISKS

If you happen to be visiting a patient in the Cirencester Community Hospital in Gloucestershire, you might well feel like having a walk after the visit.  If you go one way, the easier route, you’ll pass through the staff car park and see this sign:

Did you know the NHS was in the business of creating forests and orchards?  I didn’t, and I don’t think many others do either, but if you follow the signs you’ll find yourself in a gloriously ramshackle bit of land, with apple trees and pear trees, with a few benches to sit on, though nettles tend to be growing up through many of them, so you’ll probably keep on walking, and chances are you won’t see another soul.  It would be nice to think that patients from the hospital wander here as part of their recovery but I saw no actual evidence of this.

If you walk the other way from the hospital, you go through Querns Wood, where you might see evidence of guitar hero worship among the tree cutters:

And before long you’ll arrive at the Circencester Amphitheatre, a Roman creation, now reduced to a circle of hills forming a grassy bowl.  Once it held about 8000 people, now it’s a place where kids run up and down exhausting themselves while parents watch.

However if you walk around the side of the amphitheatre you can find yourself at the Circencester Obelisk, which is a very big, very impressive and slightly mysterious construction.

The sources say it’s ‘probably’ 18^thcentury, and probably erected for Earl Bathurst in what was, at the time, the grounds of Cirencester Park Mansion. Alexander Pope may have had some input.  Bathurst wrote to Pope in 1736, ‘I have also begun to level the hill before the house, and an obelisk shall terminate the view’.  Pope didn’t think an obelisk was quite the right thing for that spot, though signficantly, or not, Pope did erect an obelisk as a memorial to his mother.

My trip to Gloucestershire wasn’t a walking expedition but, thanks to my plucky chaffeuse I was able to walk (after a car ride) in the graveyard of the church of St James’s, Sevenhampton (which is actually in Wiltshire), famous chiefly as the place where Ian Fleming, his wife Anne and their son Caspar are buried.  

The Flemings bought Sevenhampton Place in 1959 and spent four years having it restored and remodeled. It had forty bedrooms, a billiard room and a ballroom. Does anybody in the world have 39 friends they’d want to have stay with them? Anne love the place, Fleming not so much.  Maybe after spending so much time in Goldeneye, in Jamaica, an English country house didn’t seem so appealing.

The Fleming grave is in a beautiful spot, overlooked by a field of cows and marked by (you probably guessed, if you didn’t know already) an obelisk, which is very elegant and surprisingly modest: traits that we only partly associate with Ian Fleming.