WALKING WITH WARNINGS

Look, I've got nothing against dogs, just so long as they’ve got nothing against me. 

But currently I’m doing most of my walking in more or less rural Essex, and I regularly encounter some unfettered hound that bounces up and sniffs me, pursued by its owner who says to me, ‘Oh, he may look like something that should be poking around in Grimpen Mire but he’s really just a bit softy.’

 

Meanwhile I continue to collect ‘beware of the dog' signs and here are a few 

(comparatively) recent ones.  

 

Are there really dogs behind these signs or are they just to scare aware intruders?  In most cases I have have no idea. As our pal Roland Barthes would say, ‘language is never innocent.’ 

BABYLONIAN CARNIVAL WALKING

Look, I know you can’t judge a book by its cover, and maybe even less by its title, but 

when you see a book titled It Walks By Night and it has an obelisk on the cover, then 

given my range of interests, it seems like a book that should be read.  So I read it.  It's by 

John Dickson Carr.

 

Spoiler alert: the plot is so preposterous, involving a ‘locked room,’ plastic surgery, decapitation, opium, and one of the characters attempting to live out the plot of Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado,’ that I pretty much gave up trying to understand it.  Suffice to say there is no obelisk in the book, and precious few mentions of walking, unless you include passages like this one, describing Inspector Bencolin, the hot shot Parisian detective:

     ‘In his hands a thousand facets came glittering out of the revolving jewel of Paris – lights and shadows, perfume and danger – the salon, the greenroom, the pits – abbey, brothel, and guillotine, a Babylonian carnival through which he walked in the name of the prefecture.’

 

No one ever accused this book of being underwritten.

And here on the last page is the heroine/murderess’s final utterance in the book: note, she has been indulging in marijuana cigarettes.

     ‘When I smoke one of those – I don’t know why – I am capable of anything. I took a taxi.  I came up to the villa by the back gate, and when I came in by the back gate, he was standing there … I struck him.  I hacked him – I was bathed in his blood.  I liked that!’  

      Pity she didn’t just go for a walk, with friends, and a map:

DANCES WITH DAFFS

 It being the beginning of March I found myself walking in Suffolk, at the very southern 

edge, along the river Orwell, in Pin Mill and Shotley Gate.

 

The first bit of the walk – in fact on a patch of land belonging to the National Trust - was suitably woody and bucolic.  Along the way I came across these – and have even managed to identify them – Daldinia concentrica:

 

They’re not edible, and not in the least psychotropic.  In fact and the reference works say they make ‘great kindling’ which seems rather a waste of a mushroom even if it’s not edible.

 

The second part of the walk was more or less industrial looking out from Shotley at Felixstowe which I gather is often very much busier than this:

 

And I was thinking about Pauline Oliveros and her notion of deep listening.  In the woods there were a lot of bird sounds – most of which I couldn’t identify though I’m pretty sure I heard a woodpecker.  There was also some distant droning, either from something on the river or traffic the A12 which wasn’t a million miles away.

This is Pauline Oliveros, apparently in some woods:

 

Shotley probably had some sounds of lapping water but mostly there was noise from the tankers being loaded and unloaded across the way: deep thuds and the occasional metallic clunk. 

 

In both places there were daffodils – these near Pin Mill

 

these at Shotley – I am very fond of plants in tyres:

 

Of course I thought of the Wordsworths.  Interestingly, or not, it was evidently much later than the beginning of March when William floated on high (or in fact walked) and saw the daffs that inspired his poem. Sister Dorothy was with him of course, and she wrote about it in her journal of April 15^th(1802).  There may have been a delay before she wrote about it, but surely not a month and a half. On the other hand, by his own account, it took William a couple of years to get round to writing the poem.

 

Dorothy wrote, ‘When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow park we saw a few daffodils close to the water side. We fancied that the lake had floated the seeds ashore and that the little colony had so sprung up. But as we went along there were more and yet more and at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road.’

 

You know, I’m quite naïve in matters of daffodil reproduction.  I always imagined the bulbs proliferated underground.  The idea that seeds floated ashore was quite a new idea to me.

 

This is a picture of Dorothy and William from Look and Learn magazine.  Dorothy seems amazingly happy with that rake.

 

 

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.