Thursday, December 1, 2016

ONE WISE GUY



I’ve been reading some short stories by Damon Runyon.  I’d read some of his work before, but not much, and I think Runyon is one of those authors who suffers because people think they know all about him even if they’ve never read a word: blame Guys and Dolls.


Anyway, as I continue to read my Runyon, I find that he often talks about people “walking up and down.”  And sometimes he obviously means this in a perfectly literal way, and sometimes he seems to mean it in some specialized or metaphoric way that I don’t always understand.

Sometimes it seems to mean going about your business, or it can mean stepping out with a woman.  Sometimes it seems to mean being free – as in you’re walking up and down as opposed to being in jail.  But then there are times when I just don’t know what it means.  See this, from the story “The Brain Goes Home:”
“He is maybe forty years old, give or take a couple of years, and he is commencing to get a little bunchy about the middle, what with sitting down at card-tables so much and never taking any exercise outside of walking guys such as me up and down in front of Mindy's for a few hours every night.”  What exactly does it mean to walk up and down in those circumstances?



Elsewhere in Runyon, walking may be a poetic and melancholy activity.  This is from “The Lily of St Pierre:”
“When a guy has a battle with his doll, such as his sweetheart, or even his ever-loving wife, he certainly feels burnt up inside himself, and can scarcely think of anything much. In fact, I know guys who are carrying the torch to walk ten miles and never know they go an inch. It is surprising how much ground a guy can cover just walking around and about, wondering if his doll is out with some other guy.”




       And of course Runyon, and his narrator, are interested in the way the “dolls” walk as well.  This is from “The Brakeman's Daughter:”
“Well, besides black hair, this doll has a complexion like I do not know what, and little feet and ankles, and a way of walking that is very pleasant to behold. Personally, I always take a gander at a doll’s feet and ankles before I start handicapping her, because the way I look at it, the feet and ankles are the big tell in the matter of class.”


       Most of Runyon’s characters do most of their walking in New York, although there are plenty of exceptions.  Runyon himself seems to have been more of a sitter than a walker, planting himself at Lindy’s Deli and keeping his eyes and ears open. “I am the sedentary champion of the city,” he wrote. “In order to learn anything of importance, I must remain seated. Why I am the best is that I can last an entire day without causing a chair to squeak.”

Finally Runyon the man became very much like a Runyon character.  He has a wife out in the suburbs, but he fell for “a down-on-her-luck Spanish countess from Madrid named Patrice, who was, of course, actually an up-on-her-heels Mexican dancer from Tampico. She was twenty-six years younger than he was, and seems to have led him quite a life.”  That’s Adam Gopnik writing about Runyon in the New Yorker, where he also quotes Jimmy Breslin on the matter.  Patrice “sat with him about as long as the form chart for these things indicated that she would.”  Her full name was Patrice Amati del Grande, and she left him in the final year of his life when he was dying from throat cancer.  Maybe it would have been better if they’d done a little more uncomplicated walking up and down together.

Monday, November 21, 2016

WALKING, DRINKING, WRITING




If you’re walking in San Francisco, more or less in the Union Square area, there’s a reasonable chance that you’ll walk past Burritt Street, just off Bush Street, and if you keep your eyes peeled you’ll see this plaque:


 This is a real plaque commemorating a fictional murder that takes place in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon.  Is it the only plaque of its kind in the world?  I assume not, though I don’t believe I’ve ever seen or heard of another. (Actually since I wrote the above, well-wishers have made me aware of a plaque to Sherlock Holmes in Baker Street).

Now, not so very far from Burritt Street (inside The Mystic Hotel – yes, it’s really called that) you’ll find the Burritt Room and Tavern, which claims to be “heavily influenced by film noir.”


I’m not sure that Dashiell Hammett or any of his characters would have had much time for the Burritt Room’s craft cocktail menu, and gawd knows what he’d have made of the cocktail dedicated to Lemmy of Motorhead, the Ace of Spades:­ “Jack Daniel's Old No. 7, Smith + Cross, Wormwood, Complimentary Cigar Bitters

.”   Nah, I don’t know what “complimentary cigar bitters” are either and I wasn’t motivated to find out. 


Anyway, one of my companions had something called Snake Eyes “Gin, Pear Liqueur, Cactus Syrup, Absinthe, Lemon, Seltzer” (that's it on the left, below) which was declared to be a girly drink, without any bang for your buck whatsoever.  It was a “girl” who said this.  But the martini was perfectly serviceable


And you know me, whenever I wander the streets of San Francisco, even when not slightly bagged, I always seem to see a thousand and one martini signs.  This one, I think is, possibly the least promising I’ve ever seen:


This one is certainly among the best I’ve ever seen, although the place is a dive (in a good way) and I dare anybody to go in there and ask to see their craft cocktail list.


Dashiell Hammett by all accounts was a bad drunk, insulting people, falling down in the gutter, and as far as I can see he wasn’t all that much of a walker (though there are certainly walking tours of Hammett’s San Francisco).  However, I did just find a couple of anecdotes, one about drunkenness, one about walking, in Diane Johnson’s Dashiell Hammett: A Life. 



According to Hannah Weinstein (a political activist, film producer, and one of Lillian Hellman’s best friends) Hammett was once in a restaurant with her in Chicago, and was giving the waiter a hard time.  When the waiter asked what he wanted to order he replied, “How do we know till we’ve tried what you have?”  And then he ordered everything on the menu.  “I could have died of shame,” said Weinstein.




Dorothy Nebel (wife of the author Frederick Nebel) tells the story of Hammett and a group of his drinking pals in a bar in New York discussing the “the indifference of New Yorkers.”  “Someone said he could probably walk down the street naked and no one would turn to look.”  Well, Hammett didn’t try that, but he did reckon that nobody would notice if he walked down the street with an open umbrellas on what was then a beautiful clear evening.
Not the severest test, I’d have thought, but anyway he and his pal Fred walked from from the bar, up Lexington to 42nd Street over to Fifth and back to the bar “and not a single person turned to stare.”

Actually I’m not sure whether this is a mark of indifference or respect.  The typical New Yorker would surely be thinking, “Hey pal if you want to walk under an umbrella when it’s not raining you go ahead, it’s nobody’s business but yours.” Though of course he wouldn’t say it aloud.  In San Francisco it might be different, though I suppose the picture below actually shows a parasol.
           

Dashiell Hammett had a comparatively short career as a writer of fiction – five novels published between 1929 and 1934, although he wrote a lot of short stories that were repackaged in various forms, not least the Dell “map back” editions: nice pulp covers on the front and maps on the back so you could, if you chose, walk the route taken by Hammett’s characters.  There’ll be plenty of places to stop for a drink, too.










Monday, November 14, 2016

WALKING WITH WOMEN

Well it did seem a slightly improbable thing, didn’t it, that you’d be walking in the woods somewhere near the town of Chappaqua in upstate New York, a couple of days after the election, and suddenly you’d find Hillary and Bill Clinton also walking there?


That’s what Margot Gerster said happened to her, and I have no good reason to doubt her, although the claims that this was some kind of PR stunt are, I think, understandable.

Gerster wrote on her Facebook page, “'I've been feeling so heartbroken since yesterday's election and decided what better way to relax than take my girls hiking.
'So I decided to take them to one of favorite places in Chappaqua. We were the only ones there and it was so beautiful and relaxing. 
“As we were leaving, I heard a bit of rustling coming towards me and as I stepped into the clearing there she was, Hillary Clinton and Bill with their dogs doing exactly the same thing as I was. 
“I got to hug her and talk to her and tell her that one of my most proudest moments as a mother was taking Phoebe with me to vote for her. 
“She hugged me and thanked me and we exchanged some sweet pleasantries and then I let them continue their walk.”

Well what else would you do?  But still, a couple of matters arise. First, it must be said that Hillary Clinton is looking surprising cheerful given recent events, and although we do know that walking is very good for depression, I still don’t think I’d be looking quite that sunny immediately after my presidential campaign had floundered on the treacherous rocks of Trumpism.

I also wonder who took the picture.  Was it Bill?  Or was it a bodyguard?  I imagine that even in the woods near Chappaqua, the Clintons travel with a pretty serious security detail.


There’s a lot in the press lately about women walking, not least the book  by Lauren Elkin Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London  The book isn’t published yet in the United States and I’m too mean to buy a hardback copy from England but I’ll get it soon, no doubt.
The author’s website says, “Flâneuse is a cultural history of women writers and artists who have found personal freedom as well as inspiration by engaging with cities on foot, and includes chapters on Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Sophie Calle, and Agnès Varda, among others. The London Evening Standard says, “larded with examples.”


We all know that women face certain, let’s call them challenges, when out walking, especially while walking alone, although walking alone doesn't necessarily solve much.  And in one of those odd, serendipitous moments I happened to be reading a piece in the book Hoo-Hahs and Passing Frenzies,  Francis Wheen’s collected journalism from 1991-2001, in which he discusses Who’s Who and Debrett’s People of Today, and has great fun noting people’s “recreations.”


As someone who has a nodding acquaintanceship with a certain kind of literary “fame,” I wasn’t entirely surprised to find I’d had some small dealings with a couple of the people he mentions in the article, both of them in Who’s Who, both of them women, both of them apparently walkers.


One is Emma Tennant, that's her above, who simply listed “walking around” as a recreation.  It so happens I was once in the frame to write a short story for a collection she was editing.  I don’t think it ever appeared, or if it did I certainly wasn’t in it, but she invited me to her house in Notting Hill for discussions and whisky, and she and I certainly walked the length of her hall, once in each direction.

Rather more fun is Deborah Moggach – and nobody has ever denied that Deborah Moggach is a lot of fun – and she lists one of recreations as “walking around London looking into people’s windows.”  Well yes.  Who doesn’t do that given half a chance?  But how many admit it?


Ms. Moggach and I have definitely walked some short distances on the streets of London together, but we never found anybody’s window to look into.  Shame.

A long time ago I had a friend, Patrick, who was at Cambridge University at the same time as Prince Charles, in the early 1970s.  On one occasion in the early hours of the morning Patrick was walking home from some bacchanal and turned a corner and there heading towards him was Charles, also walking home from some other bacchanal.  They didn’t speak (much less exchange sweet pleasantries) but they acknowledged each other’s existence and the prince gave a shrug and a small jerk of the head indicating a man walking some twenty feet behind him: a bodyguard.  He looked deeply and suitably embarrassed.


This is pretty much the only positive story I’ve ever heard about Charles.  And I just found the picture below, taken in 1970 apparently.  There’s the prince walking with Lord Mounbatten, and behind him are couple of royal subjects.  That’s how young men looked in 1970.  Nobody has ever accused Charles of trying to appear like a man of the people.  Maybe he needed a woman to walk with.





Tuesday, November 8, 2016

HOPEFUL, RIGHT


And, on the day that the United States of America elects a new president, here’s a photograph taken in London last month at Liverpool Street Station: walkers going about their business as a familiar image and message looms overhead.


Monday, November 7, 2016

THE SHRUGGED ATLAS

 Here's a new article/essay/book review that appears in the Los Angeles Review of Books, and is at least somewhat about walking.  I kept thinking we'd come up with a better title than "The Shrugged Atlas," but as you see, we didn't.
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THE SHRUGGED ATLAS 
BY 
GEOFF NICHOLSON



“LIKE ALL MEN of the Library, I have traveled in my youth.” And some of us, no longer by any measure in our youth, are trying to keep up the good work, even as we wonder just how good it actually is.
The opening quotation, of course, is from the Borges story “The Library of Babel,” which famously imagines an infinite library containing every book that has ever been or ever could be written. It must, I suppose, therefore contain atlases and books of maps, though presumably not maps printed as single sheets.
How did Borges feel about maps? Well, he did publish a book titled Atlas, a kind of travel book, first published in 1984 in Spanish, translated into English a year later, and written “in collaboration with María Kodama,” his second wife. There they are together in the picture above.  It consists of 40 or so short pieces, mostly prose, though a few are poetry, describing places he’s visited around the world, along with some of the people he’s met on his travels. The titles include “The Temple of Poseidon,” “Robert Graves at Deya,” “The Desert,” and (perhaps inevitably) “The Labyrinth.”
There are photographs in the book, but no maps, and in the prologue Borges writes, “Each and every man is a discoverer. He begins by discovering bitterness, saltiness, concavity, smoothness, harshness, the seven colors of the rainbow and the twenty-some letters of the alphabet; he goes on to visages, maps, animals and stars.” That strikes me as a curious order for discovering things. I’d have thought maps came well after animals and stars, though only a fool would argue with Borges.
There’s also a piece in the book titled “Iceland” in which he writes, “I was, as always, in the middle of that clear haze visible to the eyes of the blind.” And if there seems to be something richly, perversely symbolic in the notion of a blind librarian, a blind cartographer raises the symbolic stakes even higher. Not that unimpaired vision is any guarantee of knowing where you are.
¤


I was walking through East Ham in London, heading for Itchycoo Park with my fellow scribe, flâneur, and chronicler of the engagingly retro and off-kilter: Travis Elborough. You might think he was a good man to have on such an expedition, being the author last year of A Walk in the Park: The Life and Times of a People’s Institution and now Atlas of Improbable Places: A Journey to the World’s Most Unusual Corners, 51 short essays on the globe’s more wayward places, with maps by Alan Horsfield. Even so, we were lost.
I’d printed off a map from Google, and Elborough had his cell phone, but we kept going astray. We were never completely and utterly lost, but much of the time we weren’t quite sure where we were or where we should be. We knew where we wanted to go but, map or no map, we couldn’t always see how to get there. Consequently, we found ourselves in various dead ends, and made a series of detours that took us through terra incognita, along streets with names such as Ruskin Avenue and Byron Avenue, and eventually around Shakespeare Crescent.
We told ourselves this meandering was all part of the psychogeographic process, and I don’t think we were entirely deceiving ourselves. In due course we did arrive at the entrance to the park. There was a large, potentially helpful map, but the plastic that covered it had become opaque, hazy, and impossible to see through. Borges might have understood.
Itchycoo Park is simultaneously a real, an imaginary, and a contested place; there should perhaps be quotation marks around all those adjectives. Primarily, it’s the title and subject of a great 1967 psychedelic pop song by the Small Faces that has the distinction of being the first song ever to be banned by the BBC because it contained drug references.

What did you do there? — I got high
What did you feel there? — Well I cried
But why the tears there? — I’ll tell you why —
It’s all too beautiful, It’s all too beautiful
It’s all too beautiful, It’s all too beautiful

And later in the song Steve Marriott sings, “I feel inclined to blow my mind.”
The ban therefore doesn’t seem all that surprising, although the band’s previous single, “Here Come the Nice,” which seems to be entirely about drug dealing and amphetamines, was broadcast to the youth of Britain without demur.
      In order to get the ban on “Itchycoo Park” lifted, the band’s management claimed it wasn’t a song about drugs at all, but about a patch of land where the band members had played as kids: as if these things were mutually exclusive. But that was enough to get the ban lifted, thereby suggesting that BBC decision-makers were even more hopelessly out of touch than previously imagined.


       A number of after-the-fact origin narratives have placed Itchycoo Park in various locations around London, and the itchiness has been attributed to wasps, nettles, or rose hips — the last of these especially itchy if dropped inside somebody’s shirt collar. Elborough and I were visiting Little Ilford Park, one of the prime geographical suspects: the Guardian’s “London Calling: a musical map of the city” unhesitatingly says that this is the place. It’s a long, thin finger of greenery tucked in beside the North Circular Road, a place with a designerish new adventure playground, a lot of flat open land that looked like it had once been playing fields, a shuttered sports pavilion, a rose garden, and a public toilet that was functional (but with smashed windows).


What did we do there? Well we didn’t get high, nor did we find it all too beautiful. Rather, we talked about maps and territories, nostalgia and modernity: which is to say we discussed Elborough’s new book.
¤


This Atlas of Improbable Places joins a small but growing number of what we might call alternative or perhaps “indie” travel guides, maybe anti-travel guides, postmodern Baedekers for those wearied by (or too hip for) the conventional itineraries. The genre includes Unruly Spaces (2004) by Alastair Bonnett, subtitled “Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies” and Tom Lutz’s And the Monkey Learned Nothing and Drinking Mare’s Milk on the Roof of the World, both published this year, subtitled “Dispatches from a Life in Transit” and “Wandering the Globe from Azerbaijan to Zanzibar.” (Full disclosure: Lutz, as you may well know, is the editor of LARB, and also, as you may well not know, the editor of this piece [I have no idea what he is getting at here, Ed.]). There’s also the recent Atlas Obscura (2016), “An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders” — yes, a lot of subtitling seems to be required in these matters.


All these books display a fascination with ambiguous or edgy or potentially dangerous places: ruins (industrial rather than classical), deranged architectural follies, environments created by outsider artists, underground or utopian or lost cities, abandoned prisons, bunkers, theme parks, relics of the Space Age and the Cold War; examples of all these appear in Elborough’s book.
     He writes about some places that will be familiar to Angelenos, such as Slab City and the Hearst Castle, but he ventures much further afield to the Aral Sea tucked between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, which has dried up to become the Aralkum Desert, to Wittenoom, a town in Western Australia caked in blue asbestos, that was closed down and removed from official maps, though it’s easy enough to find on Google. I was especially taken with his account of the “illicit tunnels” of Moose Jaw, Canada, which manages to join the dots between Walter Benjamin, Chinese immigrant laborers turned bootleggers, and J.G Ballard.
Inevitably, there’s some overlap in these alt-tourist volumes, though less than you might think. The Atlas Obscura, being partly crowd-sourced online, contains by far the greatest number of sites, and Elborough admits that it came as a shock, and maybe a threat, when he went into a store looking for his own book and found that volume instead; thick, lavishly illustrated with photographic images, full of bells and whistles, sidebars, directions, details, opening times, and whatnot. It’s a good book. You can understand his anxiety, but I’m sure there’s a readership for both. Elborough’s is by far the more serious, literary, and essayistic, and also the one with the better maps.
¤
This urge to travel to ever more outlying and freakish destinations is not hard to fathom. We’ve read Marc Augé’s Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995), so we’re familiar with the idea that the world has become a series of homogenized, globalized, interchangeable spaces. However, as Elborough says in his introduction, “claims about the growing, soul-crushing similarity of places can be overstated […] Thankfully, the world continues to be a dizzyingly diverse place. Our appetite for the unusual and the out of the ordinary has, if anything, only been heightened by new technology, the scanning and sharing of fresh information and imagery themselves a spur to further travel and post-industrialization changing the kinds of places we find intriguing, beautiful or worthy of cursory investigation.”
Of course this kind of cataloging involves exclusion as well as selection, creating a new canon, and possibly just a new tourist traps. I asked Elborough if he thought we were heading for some kind of subversive Grand Tour, whereby travelers no longer visit the Uffizi but instead go to look at, say, the ruins of the Teufelsberg spy station in Berlin? And ultimately how subversive is that likely to be anyway?
“Well,” he said, “Grand Tourers were definitely fond of a ruin, hence the presence of Venice and Rome on their itineraries, but I too wonder about just how subversive it might be. It seems to me that just as the Romantics forged a new aesthetic of beauty in the wake of industrialization, we have worked out our own criteria of interest to meet the needs of a post-industrial, digital society.”
     “Addison, when formulating the original idea of the sublime, wrote about the ‘agreeable horror’ of oceans — a description that could equally work for Battleship Island.” (That’s the deserted mining settlement crammed with high rise buildings, off the coast of Japan, seen at its best in the movie Skyfall.)
Elborough continued, “I do wonder sometimes if it might not be time to take a fresh look at, I don’t know, the Leaning Tower of Pisa or the Eiffel Tower, the absolutely ridiculously over-familiar, just as an exercise. Even I find myself dozing off when I hear the phrases ‘liminal’ or ‘edge lands’ these days … I am often left wondering about the ‘dead centers’ of cities, the bits that only tourists and increasingly only the very wealthy (and their poorly paid minions) really spend any time in.
¤


By now, we’d done a circuit of Little Ilford Park and the place was filling up with people. A lot of children had arrived with their teachers and were playing games. We speculated that they were doing this in a public park because so many British school playing fields had been sold off to property developers. We also noted that large areas of the park had been left to run wild, to let wild flora and fauna have their way, a convenient if dubious conflation of conservationist and cost-cutting interests. No doubt there were nettles, and very possibly wasps and rose hips in the tall grass, but we managed not to get stung.


We were also there to discuss an event that he and I were doing a couple of days later, organized by Elborough, at a place in London called the Horse Hospital, advertised as “an evening of spoken word, discussion, music, performance and short films about urban spaces, London and Los Angeles, sex and food, memory and maps.” It was called with a certain inevitability — “The Map is Not the Territory.”
That had me thinking of Borges again, specifically his one-paragraph story “On Exactitude in Science,” the one in which “the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it,” which of course is a variation on an idea found in Lewis Carroll’s “Sylvie and Bruno Concluded.”
“‘It has never been spread out, yet,’ said Mein Herr: ‘the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.’” Here, of course the territory is the map.

And the fact is I’ve always had some trouble with this notion that the map is not the territory. I don’t doubt that it’s true, but does it really need saying? Is there anybody in their right mind who would think otherwise?
Well, I discover belatedly that the phrase was first used by Alfred Korzybski, a Polish-American “independent scholar” who more or less invented a field of studies called general semantics which doesn’t have much to do with our usual understanding of semantics, and has overtones of self-help and behavioral therapy. His point, hardly a revolutionary one, is that the human perception of reality is not the same as reality itself. The brain is an intermediary, a translator, a cartographer. But that doesn’t make our perceptions irrelevant or redundant. Korzybski writes in Science and Sanity (1933): “A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.” I’m a little troubled by the notion of “correctness” in a map since it seems to me that all maps involve falsification to a greater or lesser degree, but it’s good to know that the phrase is a metaphor, not just a statement of the blindingly obvious.

Photo: Del Barrett

Well, the event went perfectly well. We talked about many things regarding London and Los Angeles, not least the London A to Z, generally a small paperback designed to be carried in the pocket while walking, as opposed to the Thomas Guide obviously designed to be used in a car. I bought a Thomas Guide the day I moved to Los Angeles over a decade ago, and have used it maybe three times. Nevertheless it sits in the back of the car, like a talisman or a security blanket, not that it makes me feel especially secure.
¤


Here’s Beryl Markham writing in West With The Night (1942), a book about her travels in what was then British East Africa, now Kenya. “A map says to you, ‘Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not.’ It says, ‘I am the earth in the palm of your hand. Without me, you are alone and lost.’”
Well, I wish I had her confidence. Some of us often feel especially alone and lost when we’ve got a map in the palm of our hand. It ought to tell us where we are and how to get to where we want to go, but sometimes it just doesn’t, and that can feel worse than having no map at all. When I was in Tokyo earlier this year, I always carried, and frequently consulted, a printed map, sometimes more than one. Mostly I felt as though I was carrying a superfluous and meaningless piece of paper. Sometimes, admittedly, I also consulted a superfluous and meaningless image on a cell phone screen. It rarely helped.
It was some consolation that I saw many locals who seemed to be as lost as I was. They stared at the large public maps found on many Tokyo street corners, with just as much confusion as I did. Sometimes they even photographed these maps with their cell phones, so they could carry them away with them. Not that I imagine it did much good.




Recently there has been further consolation from reading a section in Lutz’s And the Monkey Learned Nothing describing his own experiences in Japan. Lutz is indeed a man of the library, in fact a man with an urge to visit every country on Earth, and (just as important) write about them. Here he writes,
     "People who saw me looking at my map came up to help. As far as I could tell, none of them knew how to read a map. They studied mine, sometimes turning it over or sideways, never able to say where we were. But they went through the motions of being helpful very cheerfully, finally made a guess, and bowing, invariably pointed in the wrong direction."
There is quite a skill, it seems to me, whether you have a map or not, whether you know how to read it or not, in remaining cheerful even when you’re completely lost, and that may be the best way to end up in some improbable places.

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You can read it, and much else besdies, at the LARB website here:

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-shrugged-atlas/