WALKING IN CIRCLES WITH GEOFF NICHOLSON

 On Saturday October 22^nd at 6 pm I’m leading a walk in Sheffield as part of the Off The Shelf Literary Festival. In order to make life difficult for myself, and I hope to make the walk more interesting, I’ve decided to turn it into a “project” that invokes mapping, memory and “emotion recollected in tranquility” – all the great Romantic pedestrian virtues.

The project is an apparently simple one.  I go for a walk near my current home in Los Angeles.  Then some weeks later, accompanied by festival-goers, I go for a walk in Sheffield, the city where I was born and brought up, and where, in my time, I’ve done a great deal of walking, but which is now partly (and increasingly) unfamiliar to me.

The idea is that the two routes should, in one sense, be as similar to each other as possible: the same length, taking the same amount of time, walking the same “shape” on the map of each city. 

I decided that the two walks should be as “circular” as possible, i.e. beginning and ending in the same place, and attempting to carve a circle through the geography of each place.  You can make up your own mind about the deeper symbolism of this.

So I began with a map of Los Angeles, specifically of Hollywood, and I traced a circle on the map, using the very latest hi tech cartographical methods – I drew round the rim of an inverted martini glass.

Of course you can’t literally walk in a circle on the streets of Los Angeles because much of the city is built on a grid, but I designed a route that was as close to circular as possible.  In fact, as you see below, it wasn’t really very close, or very circular at all, but that’s the nature of the enterprise: the best laid walking plans are always confounded by the situation on the ground.  The map (as they say) is not the territory.  This map, like all the others, is clickable and will then enlarge.

The Hollywood walk is now done, things have been seen, notes have been made, photographs have been taken, some of which are visible below.

The walk was arbitrary to a degree and it isn’t exactly a tourist route, but I thought it best to include one or two places that people are likely to have heard of even if they’re unfamiliar with LA: Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood Boulevard, Vine Street, and it was a route that from time to time gave views of the Hollywood Sign.  

Having done the Hollywood walk, I traced the shape of that route on a sheet of transparent plastic.

I then placed that sheet over the map of Sheffield, and that will be the route I’ll try to walk there on Saturday the 22nd.

Of course the geography of Sheffield, the layout of the streets, doesn’t conform to the geography of Los Angeles, so the shape of the walk will have to be modified again according to local topography.  The circle becomes ever less circular.  So here’s the route I’m actually proposing for the Sheffield Walk.

The idea, always subject to change and decay, is that as I walk the route in Sheffield I’ll consult the map, the notes, the photographs of my Hollywood walk.  I’ll be able to say things like, “If you were at this point on the route in Hollywood you’d be looking at the Capitol Records building or a marijuana dispensary, or whatever.  And we’ll compare and contrast this experience with conditions on the ground in Sheffield.

I realize that in many ways this is walking made needlessly complicated, perhaps even made absurd, but in the end, on the day, in Sheffield, we’ll simply be going for a walk, seeing what happens, seeing what there is to see.

Below is another map of the Hollywood walk, this time with numbers that correspond to the specific points where I took photographs. 

OK, I admit it, not all the photographs were taken on the very day of the walk, and one of them was “borrowed” from an online source because I couldn’t get a good shot.

1 – Why a lot of people like it in Hollywood: sunshine, palm trees and the Hollywood sign looming in the distance and legal medical marijuana. 

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2 – An actual Hollywood walker – pushing (I imagine) a large proportion of his worldly goods in that rather stylish pram.

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3- The Capitol Records building – one of Hollywood’s most famous “programmatic” pieces of architecture.  It looks like a stack of 7 inch vinyl singles, if anyone knows what that is anymore.

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4 – A graffito painted on a wall under the Hollywood Freeway.  I walk past here all the time, graffiti appear regularly and within days city crews come and paint them over.

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5 – Right in Hollywood, right by the freeway, the Vedanta Church, sometimes called the Vedanta Temple, the home of the Vedanta religion in Southern California – Aldous Huxley was a big fan.

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6 – The coming together of concrete and greenery.  I always wonder how long it would take “nature” to reassert itself if mankind miraculously disappeared from the face of the earth.  Not long at all, I’m imagining.

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7 – Pla-Boy Liquor – I love the name, I love the signs, and this is supposedly where Ed Wood bought booze in the later years of his life.  People who’ve live nearby also assure me it’s one of the more scary, crime-ridden corners in Hollywood.

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8 – The question of when graffiti become murals, and when murals become street art is a vexed one, but I think most of us would call this one art, but on the other hand, we now know that every damn thing is art if somebody says it is.

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9 – Mannequins in one of the many stores on Hollywood Boulevard designed to satisfy all your stripper needs.

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10 – A movie theater in a geodesic dome, and an inflatable Spiderman on the roof.  Does it get more Hollywood than this?

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WALKING AND CRUISING

So I have been to New York, I have appeared at the Brooklyn Book Festival and I have done a fair amount of walking.  In fact I walked from the hotel on 39^th Street in Manhattan, across the Manhattan Bridge and the East River, into Brooklyn to Borough Hall where the event was taking place; a modest four and a half miles or so.

The best thing about the Manhattan Bridge is that it gives you a fairly close view of the Brooklyn Bridge and a fairly distant one, over the rooftops, of the Williamsburg Bridge.  The worst thing about it is that although there are allegedly separate paths across the bridge for walkers and bikers, bastards on bikes still belt along the walkway.  On a different occasion they would have felt the rough edge of my tongue, and possibly my elbow, but who wants to get into a fight on the way to a literary panel?

Teju Cole, Sergio Chefjec and I were “moderated” by Edmund White.  His introductory remarks went something like this:

EW: It seems there are a great many books that involve walking, in fact I once wrote one myself.  It was called ... oh, what was it now ...?

(Longish Pause)

GN: (Helpfully)  The Flaneur?

EW: Well yes, there is that one, but I wrote another one as well ...

It says much for Edmund White’s twinkly charm that this came across as warmly human rather than simply befuddled.  He did a fine job of moderating, though he did have a disarming tendency to say things like, “So Geoff, tell us about Iain Sinclair and Psychogeography.”  I did what I could.

He also encouraged me to tell the story about Erik Satie and the streetlamps, and I obliged.  Satie was a great walker as well as a great composer.  Every day he left his home in the suburb of Arcueil and walked to his studio in the center of Paris, then at night walked back again: six miles in each direction.  He did a lot of composing on his nocturnal homeward walks.  He would create music in his head, then stop from time to time under a convenient streetlamp and write it down in a notebook.  But then, during the First World War a lot of Parisian streetlamps were turned off, and his productivity was much reduced.  The gaps between sources of light were too great.  By the time he got to an illuminated streetlamp much of the music had evaporated from his head.

This allowed Edmund White to tell his own story about picking up a “boy” in a gay bar and as they walked home the boy would talk quite happily for a while but then regularly fall into complete silence.  White eventually worked out that the boy was deaf and he was lip-reading.  This was fine when they were near a streetlamp, but as they went into the dark areas between lights he fell silent because he couldn’t see what White was saying.

By then we’d discovered that the book he couldn’t remember the title of was City Boy subtitled “My life in New York during the 1960s and 70s.”  AIDs was unknown and he was an "apostle of promiscuity", living on steak, amphetamine, alcohol and cigarettes, while enjoying "industrial quantities of sex."  Partners were invariably picked up on the street. “We had to seek out most of our men on the hoof,” he writes.

Back in the mid 1970s I was living in London, doing my first real job, and I had a friend who was studying drama at the Webber Douglas Academy.  He had the the most active gay sex life (sex life of any sort) that I’d ever heard of.  Every day as he walked to and from classes at drama school, a walk of not more than fifteen minutes, he would unfailingly pick up a sex partner, sometimes more than one.  At the time this seemed both impressive and improbable.  And of course, as we now know, extremely risky.  My friend was most definitely not having safe sex. 

But that problem still lay in wait.  At the time I was just fascinated to know how he did it.  He was a fairly ordinary-looking man, and to a heterosexual eye didn’t even seem all that conspicuously gay.  What was the secret of his “success”?  He said it was all to do the eye contact, with the way he looked at other men.  For a long time I had to take his word for it.

And then there was an occasion when I needed to move a large oil painting I owned, maybe four feet square, from my old flat to a new one.  I was too poor, and too mean, to hire a van, so Martin offered to help me carry it through the streets.  We walked, one of us at either end of the painting, him in front, me bringing up the rear, so that I had a view of him as we walked.  And I saw that he kept giving the “look” to men we passed. 

It didn’t seem at all sexual to me.  It looked threatening and aggressive, as if spoiling for a fight, and I’d have thought quite likely to get you beaten up in that “Who do you think you’re looking at?” kind of way.  But apparently not.  When we got to journey’s end he assured me this was the look that worked so well for him, and if he hadn’t been with me and carrying a painting he could certainly have scored a couple of times in the course of the walk.  The men he’d looked at had looked back.

Oh how I wished these techniques were available to the heterosexual male.  In general, with very few exceptions, I really don’t think they are, but I do have friends of friends who knew Tyrese (later Tyrese Gibson) in the period when he was somewhat known as a successful male model but before he became an actor and starred in movies such as 2 Fast 2 Furious.  I have it on reasonable authority that he spent most of his spare time wandering the streets of New York picking up women or every kind.  He made out like a bandit, as they say.  I’m not sure what kind of “look” Tyrese used as he walked the streets. Maybe the one below.

THE REFOUND ART

Oh and here's a thing to celebrate, and demonstrate my "international" status. While I'm in  New  York, the small format mass market UK edition of The Lost Art of Walking will be published.  Amazon.co.uk seems to have got the info all up the spout and they say it's not published till  October 1st, but they're wrong.  My publisher assures me September 19th is the real publication date.  

It's a slender, handsome volume now, and fits easily in the pocket and can therefore accompany you on your walks over hill and dale, and especially through dark alleys.  In due course it will make a lovely Xmas present too.  The Economist reckons it's "bewitchingly informative."

THE MYSTERIES OF WALKING

If you Google “walking,” “New York” and “quotation,” one that regularly pops up is Janice Dickinson’s remark, "I was lusted after walking down the streets of New York."  I can’t tell whether she now thinks this was a good thing or a bad thing, but she seems to have enjoyed it at the time.

Life being like that, on Saturday I’ll be flying two and a half thousand miles to New York to do a bit of walking (and indeed talking).  To be precise I’m going there to be on a panel at the Brooklyn Book Festival.  And to be strictly accurate I’m not going all that way solely to be on the panel.  I was planning a trip to New York anyway and it made sense that it would coincide with the gig.  A report will follow.  The details as follow:

1:00 P.M. Walker in the City.  Nigerian author Teju Cole (Open City) British writer Geoff Nicholson (The Lost Art of Walking) and Argentine Sergio Chejfec (My Two Worlds) read from their books and discuss the distance characters cover—geographic and metaphysical—as they walk through and around cities. 
Moderated by Edmund White.

WALKING IN HEELS

It’s been a strange week here in Los Angeles.  The temperature hit 100 degrees on Wednesday, and although I may be a mad dog and an Englishman even I know my limits.  In addition to that, I’ve been demolished by some hideous bug I must have picked up on the plane, and even getting out of the chair to walk to the bookcase has seemed like quite an expedition.

So, thus immobilized, I have been reading Joan Didion’s forthcoming memoir Blue Nights, and watching a rough cut of a forthcoming documentary titled Betty Page Reveals All.  You might think that Betty Page and Joan Didion were some way from being soul sisters, and yet, and yet …

It's hard to think of Didion without picturing those famous photographs showing her with her Corvette, and outside her house on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood.  She just doesn’t look like a woman who does a lot of walking. 

But she also lived in New York for long periods of her life, and most people in New York are forced to be walkers one way or another.  Her book The Year of Magical Thinking contains a few references to walking in the city in general and Central Park in particular, and she mentions at one point that she stops wearing sandals because they catch in the pavement and starts wearing Puma sneakers instead.  I had never tried to image what these Didion sandals actually looked like, but if I had done I’d have assumed they might be at best “sensible.”  

But now I read in Blue Nights, “I had lived my entire life to date without seriously believing that I would age.  I had no doubt that I would continue to wear the red suede sandals with four-inch heels that I had always preferred.”  If any pictures of these preferred sandals exist I, alas, have never seen them.

Did Joan Didion really walk the streets of Manhattan wearing red suede sandals with four-inch heels?  Or is that further evidence that she didn’t really do much walking at all?  Maybe she just posed around in them.  There are very few women who can walk happily in four inch heels, though Bettie Page was one of them.

In the documentary, someone points out, and footage proves the point, that Bettie Page could walk every bit as easily in high heels as out of them.  There was no wobbling or teetering for Bettie, though there was no shortage of strutting.  True, in the movies she didn’t walk very far, often confined to a very small stage or set, but you felt she could have covered huge distances should the need have arisen.

It may have had something to do with her hips.  They were extremely broad in relation to her waist and maybe that gave her added stability.  She also looks as though she had very strong legs. And she was initially discovered while walking on the beach at Coney Island, though whether in heels, I don’t know.

Joan Didion, to all appearances, does not have broad hips or strong legs, though she has always been light - eighty pounds for most of her life - a little less now, or so she reports in Blue Nights.  I’m told that being light makes walking in heels much easier too.

Bettie Page ended her modeling career abruptly in 1959.  There were good reasons: a Senate Committee was investigating the world of S&M and bondage photographs, she was getting older  - mid 30s - though it seems she’d always lied about her age anyway, and whether cause or effect, she also became a devout Christian.  She “disappeared” and had a hard life that included periods of madness and incarceration.   But she could never leave the pin-up world behind her, or rather it would not leave her, and in the end – with some help from Hugh Hefner – she decided to embrace her cult status, though (with a few late exceptions) she chose not to be photographed.

It was Joan Didion who wrote, in A Book Of Common Prayer, "You have to pick the places you don't walk away from."

WALKING WITH GERRIES

Sometimes you watch a movie and you think, “Wow, this movie has been made with exactly me in mind.”  The corollary may be that sometimes you think you might be the only person who actually wants to see it.   In the case of Gus Van Sant’s “Gerry” this isn’t literally true: the Internet reveals a few diehard fans, but there are a great many more who hate it with a hard and gemlike flame. 

If imdb is to be believed, it cost $3.5 million to make and brought in $26,000 dollars on its opening weekend, which will surely come as no surprise to anybody who’s seen it: this is not a movies destined to pack them into the multiplexes.  The most amazing thing may be that the movie ever got made at all.  According to some sources, people “walked out in droves” at early screenings.  I don’t believe I’ve ever “walked out in a drove”

The movie was recommended to me by a reader of “The Lost Art of Walking” - Will Stone, a man who works for the Morning Star – and he thought, rightly enough, that I would be intrigued by a movie, the “action’ of which consists almost entirely of walking in the desert (actually several deserts).

The plot is pretty straightforward.  Two guys – Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, who refer to each other as Gerry though that may well not be their "real" names - go for a walk in the desert, going down a “wilderness trail” in order to see “the thing” at the end.   They get lost, try to find their way back – and that’s pretty much it for the next 90 minutes or so. 

There’s a lot of walking and not much talking. The guys have no food or water with them, and they don’t find any, and although it’s not clear how long they’re actually lost, you can’t help thinking they’d be dead, or at least incapacitated, very soon indeed, in which case there’d be no movie.  But that’s an over-literal response.  This desert walk is metaphysical rather than geographical.  One wag on Rotten Tomatoes describes it as “Hiking With Godot.”

They walk in certain desert places that are recognizable to me – Death Valley and the salt flats of Utah.  However, and I only worked this out afterwards from the credits, they actually set out in Argentina, which was where they started shooting the movie, but Van Sant was dissatisfied.  Certainly the desert in the early part of the movie is much less picturesque than that in the States.

The movie is probably genuinely and intentionally “boring,” though I’ve certainly been more bored by movies in which much more happened.  However, since the two stars are Hollywood actors, I kept fearing that they, or Van Sant, or somebody, would lose their nerve and the movie would go all “Hollywood” at the end.  It doesn’t.  Everybody keeps his nerve; more or less.

Another surprising thing is that the movie was “based on a true story,” that of David Coughlin and Raffi Kodikian, two hikers who in 1999 got lost (rather less symbolically, though no less existentially) in Rattlesnake Canyon, part of Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico.

Kodikian and Coughlin were actually better equipped than the Gerries of the Van Sant movie. They had three pints of water and a pint of Gatorade, and they did have a map, though it seems they didn’t know how to use it. And they got far more desperate than the Gerries; licking rocks, eating cactus fruit, drinking their own urine. Anyway it all ended very badly in a “mercy killing.”  After 3 days Coughlin was dehydrated and vomiting and begged Kodikian to kill him, which he did. 

According to Kodikian’s journal “I killed & burried (sic) my best friend today. Dave had been in pain all night. At around 5 or 6, he turned to me and begged that I put my knife through his chest. I did, and a second time when he wouldn't die.”  The general opinion of the autopsy reports is that this was very premature.  Both guys were dehydrated, but survivably so, as Kodikian demonstrated.

Kodikian was found guilty of second degree murder, sentenced to 15 years, all but two of them suspended, and he actually served 16 months.  At the risk of a spoiler, this isn’t exactly what happens in “Gerry.”

Having been lost (mercifully, briefly) in the desert I'm not at all smug, and I’m well aware how quickly a casual walk can turn into a nightmare, but the word online is that Rattlesnake Canyon is an amazingly benign piece of territory, an easy trail, with water and toilets nearby, easily walkable with your nine year old grandson.  Interestingly, nobody seems to mention the presence of rattlesnakes.

Of course this apparent benign quality is often part of the problem, and I’m not being metaphysical here. I simply mean that when you know you’re walking somewhere dangerous, you tend to be on your mettle, to be careful, tend not to take chances.  Any damn fool who visits Death Valley, for instance, is surely well aware of the distances, the isolation, the punishing and potentially lethal heat.

Which brings me to the four German tourists who died in Death Valley in the summer of 1996.  There always seem to be quite a few Germans driving around the American deserts, but few of them to do it with such reckless abandon as Cornelia Meyer and Egbert Rimkus, and their two children.  They were on vacation in the States, rented a minivan in Los Angeles and headed for Death Valley.   They disappeared in late July, in a week when temperatures reached over 120 F.

In October that year their van was found in sand in a ravine off Anvil Spring Canyon, probably not a route to tackle in a minivan.  All four tires were wrecked: the van was locked.  Clothes, sleeping bags, rolls of exposed film, and a couple of beers, had been left in the vehicle, but the tourists had taken their personal belongings - such as passports, wallets and air tickets - with them.  They had evidently decided to walk out of there.  There were no tracks showing which way they’d gone, although a beer bottle, similar to the ones in the car, was found half a mile away.  A major search operation began, that included the use of horses and helicopters, but all involved would have known they were months too late, and in the event they found nothing.

And indeed nothing was found at all for the next 13 years until late 2009 when a couple of hikers, actually two members of the Riverside Mountain Rescue team, found skeletal remains and identification, just a few miles from the abandoned van, which only goes to prove that a full scale desert search is not guaranteed to find, much less save, you.

 Reports said the remains were found southeast of Goler Wash, and of course some of us can’t read the name Goler Wash without being reminded of Charles Manson.  The Goler Canyon Road leads to the infamous Barker Ranch where Manson and certain members of his “family” were eventually captured.

A piece appeared online recently about Manson getting a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.  It was a satire, but you couldn’t help thinking there were probably some people in the world who might not think it was such a bad idea.  An unsatirical (as far as I can tell) petition was set up to protest against the star.  I'd have signed it.  I suppose Manson isn’t doing too much walking these days, at least not outside of the exercise yard.  In 1970 he did say, “I am the beast. I am the biggest beast walking the face of the earth.”   But you know that was just self-aggrandizement.

When I tell people that I like walking in the desert, even alone, they sometimes ask, “Isn’t it scary?  Aren’t you afraid you’re going to encounter some Charles Manson type?”  The answer is no, I'm really not scared of that.  And the truth is, you’re far more likely to meet some Charles Manson type on Hollywood Boulevard that you are in Death Valley.  Out there in the desert you have far more to fear from yourself and your own failings. 

Here is a photograph of your blogger, in Death Valley, in the snow, reflecting that sometimes walking may be preferable to driving.

DECLARATIONS OF MORTALITY

And speaking of Werner Herzog, as I all too often do, I was, of course aware of his “Minnesota Declaration” which contains the line “Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.”  It’s a good line but it had never really occurred to me to wonder why Herzog was in Minnesota or what he was doing there.  Well, it appears he was at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, on April 30^th 1999, speaking about “Lessons Of Darkness,” which is one of the most compelling documentaries I’ve ever seen, showing the ruined, and often burning, oil fields of Kuwait, ignited in the wake of the first Gulf War.

In that Minnesota Declaration Herzog also says, “Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.”  I guess I don’t think taking pictures of ruins is exactly the worst thing in the world.  In Minneapolis I walked through Mill Ruins Park on the banks of the Mississippi.  The ruins belong to a flour mill that burned in 1991, having been abandoned some twenty odd years earlier: other buildings nearby are also abandoned but appear to be in fairly good shape.

Like a lot of people, I’m attracted to ruin, and I certainly enjoyed the sight of the ruined (and now carefully preserved) mill - they’ve turned it into a museum – but in fact I didn’t take any photographs of the burned out mill.  It seemed too obvious.  I photographed the abandoned but intact Gold Medal Flour elevators instead, but I don’t know if that would buy me anything in Mr. Herzog’s eyes.

I wonder if he would agree with W.S. Gilbert (as in “and Sullivan”) who wrote, “There’s a fascination frantic in a ruin that’s romantic”?  I’m guessing probably not. 

OF WALKING IN ART

I think, though I’m by no means sure, that there’s a novel, the entire “action” of which describes a walk across a room.  The notion is that you can see the universe in a grain of sand, and so a few simple steps may be as revelatory as a journey to the end of the earth.  At least I imagine that’s what the book may be about.  I’ve never read it.  In fact I've never been able to discover the title of the book, and I don’t remember where I heard about it, and for all I know it may not even exist.  At one time I thought it might be Tibor Fischer’s “Voyage To The End Of The Room” but I’ve read that, and it’s not.  In any case I thought it was a much older book than that.  Maybe I just imagined it.  Or maybe some well-informed blog-reader will now tell me the title.

When I was working on “The Lost Art of Walking” I mentioned this unknown book to my American editor, who is by no means the most crassly commercial of men, but even so he curled his lip and said, “And you thought that was a great idea for a book didya?”  Well yes, I did actually. And now I’ve been reading “My Two Worlds” (written in Spanish, as “Mis Dos Mundos”) by Sergio Chefjec, which is essentially a novel about a walk in the park.

I know very little about Mr. Chefjec – online sources tell me he’s a Jewish Argentinean, now teaching creative writing in Spanish at NYU.  He and I are supposedly going to be on a panel together at the Brooklyn Book Festival next month so I thought it could do no harm to read his book.

I certainly don’t know how autobiographical the novel is, but it does contain this remarkable passage, “… one of these ideas, among the first I assimilated so thoroughly as to make it my own, was the idealization, initially during the Romantic Era, then the Modern, of the long walk.  There must have been something wrong with me, because at the point at which I should have chosen a way of life for my future, I found nothing persuasive ... incapable of believing in almost anything ... disappointed beforehand by politics; skeptical of youth culture, despite being, at the time, young; an idle spectator at the collective race for money and so-called material success, suspicious of the benevolence of charity or of self-improvement, oblivious of the benefits of procreation … oblivious as well of the idea of following sports or any variety of spectacle … inept at … physical labor; with no belief in any religious alternative while longing to be initiated into that realm … in short, given such failings, I had no other choice but to walk, which most resembled the vacant and available mind.”

This is not exactly the story of my life (I’m rather more pro-youth culture than our narrator, and I don’t really long to be initiated into the religious realm) but it’s not a million miles away. That passage, and indeed, the rest of the book, reminded me of a whole procession of fellow travelers, fellow writers and fellow walkers: Peter Handke, Thomas Bernhard, Robert Walser, W.G. Sebald (of course),  Werner Herzog in “Of Walking In Ice.” 

These writers all have a deep strain of melancholy, and I wondered at first if that’s something that many walkers (or at least many walking writers) have in common.   But perhaps it’s more about being Germanic: Sebald and Herzog - German; Walser - German-speaking Swiss; Bernhard and Handke - Austrian.  In fact they’ve all had peripatetic lives and didn’t end up where they started, so perhaps we shouldn’t make too much of it, but in any case it seems a curious set of writers to be reminded of while reading an Argentinean writer.

“My Two Worlds” uses the word “lacustrine,” which I confess I had to look up.  It means “of or relating to lakes”: the park where the narrator walks is lacustrine.  I’m not sure it’s a word I’m going to be dropping into my conversation very often, but it so happens that last week I took a lacustrine walk of my own.  I was in Minneapolis, actually tagging along on my wife’s business trip, and so while she went off and did business things, I did some walking.

The plan was simple enough, to walk from the hotel, through downtown to the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden (described satisfyingly as “a project of the Walker Art Center”), a walk that I could see from the map would take me through Loring Park, a place with a couple of expanses of water, and indeed a spectacular (if not strictly sculptural) fountain.

The big attraction at the sculpture garden is the lakeside fountain-sculpture “Spoonbridge and Cherry” by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen; a 52 foot long spoon, and a cherry weighing 1200 pounds, with water shooting out of the top of the stem.  I’m not absolutely certain that this is the world’s biggest spoon, but if it’s not I’d certainly like to know where a bigger one is located.

There are also plenty of other sculptures by big name, art stars: Henry Moore, Richard Serra, Tony Cragg, Barry Flanagan, Louise Nevelson, Isamu Noguchi, among them.

I was there on a weekday and the garden wasn’t crowded, a lot of mothers and children, a few tourists.  We were all “walking” in some sense, but it was the kind of walking that people do when in the presence of art, halting, respectful, attentive, arrhythmic.  Many photographs were being taken, and well-intentioned parents were doing their damnedest to make their kids understand they were in a sculpture garden rather than a playground.  Mixed results there, obviously.

I left the garden and went into the Walker Art Center itself.  It was full of great stuff: an exhibition curated by John Waters, Warhol's "Blow Job" in continuous display, a slideshow of Nan Goldin’s “Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” an exhibition titled "Midnight Party" that had a whole room as a cabinet of curiosities.  It was all my kind of thing, and it was terrific.  And yet there was still something melancholic about being by myself in an art gallery.  Again it’s a specialized form of walking, and much harder work than walking purposefully on the street.

And I realized I’d done rather a lot of this kind of thing in my life.  When I was a young man I could never find people to travel with.  It wasn’t that I had no friends, but the friends I had were a stay at home bunch.  I always ended up traveling alone because if I didn’t travel alone I wouldn’t have traveled at all.  And of course this resulted in a lot of walking alone in strange cities, and I’ve always been one of those people who heads straight for a city’s museum of art gallery.  I always found the art consoling even if the experience was a lonely one. And I still sometimes find myself doing much the same today, when I travel alone to do research for a book I’m working on, for instance.

Of course I wasn’t really alone in Minneapolis.  I knew I’d be meeting up with my wife at the end of the day, but the elements of melancholy were still with me.  I left the art gallery and decided to do another circuit of the garden before heading back into town.  

This time I saw a quiet, unflashy piece of sculpture that I hadn’t noticed before.  It was in deep shadow and easy to miss. It was a life-size bronze of a middle-aged man in a raincoat: he looked a little like Nabokov.  The raincoat would have made him overdressed for the day I was there - the temperature was in the eighties - although perhaps he’d have been a bit underdressed for a real Minneapolis winter.  A mother and her little boy were standing beside the sculpture, not really paying it much attention, but the child said, referring to the sculpture, not to me, “Do we know that man?”  The implication being, I suppose, that if we didn’t know him then why had somebody bothered to make a sculpture of him?  His mother assured him that no, “we” didn’t know this man, and that seemed to be explanation enough for the kid.

I read on a nearby plaque that the work was “Walking Man” by George Segal, from 1988.   The Walker Art Center website tells me, “This solitary figure captures an overwhelming sense of the isolation one can encounter in contemporary society,” which strikes me as a bit over deterministic, but I’d agree that there’s something melancholic about the piece, partly caused by the patina and the stains on the surface of the bronze: this is a man who’s been out in the elements for a good long time.  And I think the melancholy is further emphasized by the fact that this is a walking man who isn’t ever going anywhere.  He’s frozen, staying exactly where he is, while the rest of the world walks past, in some cases barely noticing him.