My cyber pal Jane Freeman, a painter, miniaturist, author ofSmall Worlds and How to Make Them, a New Yorker who loves walking and language, sends me a limerick about walking
There was a young lady of Twickenham Whose shoes were too tight to walk quick in ’em.
She came back from a walk
Looking whiter than chalk
And took ’em both off and was sick in ’em.
You might argue that this is in fact a limerick about shoe fetishism, which is OK with me, and in fact there’s another version of the limerick extant that substitutes boots for shoes.
The limerick is credited to Oliver Herford who I’d never heard of, but I looked him up and he’s an Anglo-American writer, artist, and illustrator who also did a nice stock in one liners: ‘Many are called but few get up.’ ‘Only the young die good,’ and many more. This is one of his illustrations:
I also discover he was born, in 1860, in Sheffield, my home town, though he isn’t one of Sheffield’s more famous sons; that would be Sean Bean and Jarvis Cocker.
In other news, fellow walker Travis Elborough sends me the image below, to be found on the back of buses in Dublin apparently.
‘Just because I’m a pedestrian doesn’t mean I’m a nobody.’
I was digging through the bargain bin at Café Oto, the ‘home for creative new music that is outside the mainstream’ and came across an album which seemed to be just for me.It was titledWalk…Stay…by Yan Jun.I hadn’t heard of either the album or the artist but that title meant I had to buy it, so I did.A fiver well spent.
Yan Jun, I now know, is a Chinese musician, poet and occasional ‘dancer’ who uses noise and field records, and has been known to say, ‘I wish I was a piece of field recording.’ Well, don’t we all?
Walk…Stay…has 8 untitled tracks, and I’m quoting from the album notes here, ‘Tracks 1, 3, 5, and 7 were Recorded by Yan Jun in Liulichang and Dongsi Beidajie, Beijing; Zhujiajiao, Shanghai; and Lashihai, Yunnan, walking with an Edirol R09 digital recorder in hand. Yan Jun suggests you listen to them while taking a walk.’The other tracks are ‘sound fragments ... Most of them are residue from editing. Some are recording disorders. Yan Jun suggests you listen to them while taking a break, sitting, lying down, or daydreaming.’
Well, the CD soundsmuch as you might expect: voices, street noise, distant unidentifiable drone and whines – but you know it’s really quite listenable. I can't find any pictures of Yan Jun walking, but here he is sitting at a desk making noise.
Sound walks now seem to be everywhere, they may even be a ‘thing.’ I understand the term was first used by members of the World Soundscape Project led by R. Murray Schafer in Vancouver in the 70s.The first one I went to was in Long Beach in 2007. I still have the CD and even the map:
My memories of the event are understandably patchy, though I know I walked the whole area. I don’t play the CD very often and I don’t recognize the names of most of the performers – though one I do recognize is Steve Roden, a visual and sound artist who lives, or at least used to live, in a dome in South Pasadena, actually a ‘bubble house’ designed by Wallace Neff.
Roden, I understand, is a proponent of ‘lowercase music,’ a name that speaks eloquently for itself. I can’t say how much of a walker Roden is, though his blog, not updated recently, makes various references to walking and he quotes John Cage on elevator music ‘perhaps you did walk around inside of it (the music in the elevator): the architecturality of music is now a technical possibility and a poetic fact.’
Steve Roden
In more recent times I remember, during lockdown, an online performance by Carl Stone and a couple of other performers that involved ambient sounds recorded in Tokyo. Of course, I can’t find it now. But I do know that when Stone was first in Japan in 1988/9 he collected many hours of city sounds, that became the basis for his piece Kamiya Bar.
I can't find it online but here's a piece of Stone's that I like very much - you could definitely listen to it while walking.
And do I know from Stone’s Instagram feed, that he does a lot of walking around Tokyo at night, and I understand he still takes his mobile recorder with him. And here is walking, though not in Tokyo and not at night.
And speaking of walking in gardens (as we almost were), there’s a 1927 love letter from Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West, that some sources will tell you is one of the great love letters of our time.
In that letter Woolf writes,‘Look here Vita — throw over your man, and we’ll go to Hampton Court and dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy, and I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head, millions, myriads — They won’t stir by day, only by dark on the river. Think of that. Throw over your man, I say, and come.’
I’ve always had found this a bit confusing. When she says ‘dine on the river,’ does she mean that they should actually eat in Hampton Court Palace and then walk in the garden? And does that mean Hampton Court was open at night for dining and walking? It currently closes at 5.30, with last admission at 4.30 but no doubt it was different in those days. Or maybe the whole thing was a literary conceit.
We all know that Virginia was something of a walker, Vita perhaps less so, though there’s a radio talk she gave in 1950 titled ‘Walking Through Leaves.’ She explained that the title referred to ‘the small but intense pleasure of walking through dry leaves and kicking them up as you go, they rustle, they brustle, they crackle – and if you crunch beech nuts underfoot at the same time then so much the better”.
Ah, the nuts …
Of course we know that Vita did not throw over her man – Harold Nicolson, and he was not easily thrown. She did briefly leave him for Violet Trefusis but he was having none of that: he pursued her and brought her back home.
That was in 1920, six years before she met Virginia. In 1930 Vita and Harold moved into Sissinghurst where Vita became famous for her gardening, if rather less so for her novels and poetry. Interestingly (perhaps) there is a series of ‘walks’ within the garden: the Lime Walk, the Moat Walk and especially the Nut Walk.
In April 1930, Harold wrote in his diary about the moment he and Vita made up their minds about Sissinghurst: 'We came suddenly upon the nutwalk and that settled it.'
We’ve discussed previously whether or not Ai Weiwei is much of a walker.The jury is still out, although hard core ‘walking art’ is one of the few conceptual practices he hasn’t embraced (as far as I know – I stand to be corrected). In any case here he is at least strolling in Portugal where he now lives.
However if you go to London’s Design Museum to see the Ai Weiwei: Making Sense exhibition, you do have to do a certain amount of walking as you explore the huge space where the works are displayed and laid out.
There are video screens showing 20 hour video pieces, his photographs of liminal spaces in Peking, other photographs of the Birds Nest National Stadium on which he worked as an ‘artistic consultant’ before deciding he didn’t want to be a ‘tool of government propaganda’ – I’m quoting from the catalogue there.
And there are 5 large pieces laid out on the floor, which the Design Museum describes as ‘fields,’ rectangular expanses filled with broken teapot spouts, chunks of porcelain from Weiwei’s sculptures that were destroyed when his studio was demolished by the Chinese authorities in 2018. There are also Lego bricks, porcelain cannon balls, and my favourite by miles, rows and rows of what the museum says are Stone Age tools, some 1,600 of them.
This work is titled Still Life and I believe it was shown in a different form at the Royal Academy a few years back, and that consisted of 3,600 Stone Age items rather than 1,600.
This does, as they say, raise some interesting questions. We’ve often discussed the joy of picking up rocks, stones and detritus while walking and I would definitely pick up a Stone Age tool if I came across one on my travels. But so far I haven’t had that pleasure.
Some sources describe these items as ‘found objects’ but where exactly do you find 3,600 Stone Age tools? Where do you find even one? The Design Museum says they were bought at flea markets, and I know that Chinese culture is inscrutable, but a flea market where you can pick up a few Stone Age tools, well that's obviously a flea market unlike any most of us have ever seen.
Which reminds me somewhat of Jim Ede, the man behind, and sometimes in front of, Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge – there’s a new biography by Laura Freeman, titled Ways of Life. Ede was a collector, curator, patron of the arts, and it’s a long time since I visited Kettle’s Yards but I do clearly remember the displays of carefully arranged stones and pebbles, seen on the book cover and in the house/gallery itself.
And the result of all this was that I found myself in my shed rearranging a few of the rocks I’ve collected while walking. I’m no Ai Weiwei, but I think we already knew that.
Photo, and artistic consultancy by Caroline Gannon
I read online that yesterday was young Iain Sinclair's birthday. 80 years and still counting. So I wrote this post.
Then, incredibly, I found that not all information on the Internet is 100% correct, and his birthday is in fact on the 11th. Ah well, it's the thought that counts.
And today the postman brings me a copy of Sinclair's Agents of Oblivion, published by The Swan River Press. I don't know much more than what it says on the front flap. Four stories (not necessarily fictions), 'starting everywhere and finishing in madness' inspired by Ballard, Lovecraft, Machen and Blackwood. What more could you want? Expect a more nuanced response in due course.
And another reason I know it's gonna be good is that it comes with a bookmark and a free badge!
