Wednesday, March 8, 2017

V. AND ME AND OTHERS


I’m never sure how I feel about that old psychogeographic strategy of using a map of one place while walking in another.  I mean it seems sort of interesting, but surely once you arrive at the first river or dead end then surely the conceit ends pretty abruptly.  (I could be wrong, this isn’t my area.)


But suddenly I find some psychogeography avant la lettre in a rather surprising place – in Evelyn Waugh’s travel book Labels.  It was his account of the 1929 Mediterranean cruise he took with his wife, who was of course also named Evelyn.  One of the places they visited was Malta, and Waugh bought himself a guide book titled Walks in Malta by one F. Weston.


Waugh reports that he enjoyed the book, “not only for the variety of information it supplied, but for the amusing Boy-Scout game it made of sight-seeing.  ‘Turning sharply to your left you will notice …’ Mr. Weston prefaces his comments, and there follows a minute record of detailed observation.  On one occasion when carrying his book, I landed at the Senglea quay, taking it for Vittoriosa, and walked on for some time in the wrong town, hotly following false clues and identifying ‘windows with fine old mouldings,’ ‘partially defaced escutcheons,’ ‘interesting iron-work balustrades,’ etc., for nearly a quarter of a mile, until a clearly non-existent cathedral brought me up sharp to the realization of my mistake.”

Most of us, without calling ourselves psychogeographers, have done something similar on our travels, looked for the right thing in the wrong place, found we were looking at the wrong page of the map, found we weren’t where we thought we were, and so on.  Sometimes it feels simply annoying, sometimes we see the funny side, like Waugh, and I suppose once in a while we do experience a Debordian derangement of the senses.


The Waugh episode is quoted in Paul Fussell’s Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars.  It’s a good book, but it contains, uncritically, a very odd quotation from Anthony Burgess, “Probably (as Pynchon never went to Valetta or Kafka to America) it’s best to imagine your own foreign country.  I wrote a very good account of Paris before I ever went there.  Better than the real thing.”  This comes from an interview in the Paris Review “The Art of Fiction No 48” and as far as I can tell he’s completely wrong about Pynchon, who had surely visited Malta, and especially the capital Valletta, before he wrote about it in V..  Here is a gloriously uninformative jacket:



And I did find this in the Malta Independent, 13 April 2014, an unsigned and unattributed article which describes a lecture delivered by Professor Peter Vassallo, who hails from Valletta and is described as “an eminent authority on British literature.” The article says, though it doesn’t seem to be a direct quotation from the lecturer, “It is ascertained that Pynchon as a seaman in the US navy was in Malta during the Suez build-up, so the Valletta he portrays is a town he knows well, including and especially Strait Street with its bars, brothels and latrine.”  Did it really have just the one latrine?  Maybe so.  In any case it tends to confirm my feeling that Pynchon did  know his Malta.


For what it’s worth, I too have been to Malta, with my first wife shortly after we were married.  She had lived there for a while because her father had been in the British navy and was stationed there, so she knew parts of the island pretty well.  I had certainly read Thomas Pynchon’s V. at the time, but like an idiot I didn’t let it inform my visit to Malta.  And I don’t remember us having either a map or a guide book, though surely we must have.  


I know we did a lot of traveling on local buses to far-flung bits of the island and then a lot of walking when we got there.  It was very good as I recall.  I can’t remember much about it, but I'm pretty sure we walked up Strait Street.


I took pictures the ones you see here but they seem odd to me now.  I think this was a time when I wanted to take pictures but wasn’t sure what to take pictures of.  I’m struck by how few people appear in these pictures, walking or otherwise.  The streets surely can’t have been quite as deserted as they appeared here but maybe I was a mad dog walking in the midday sun when everybody was sheltering from the heat.  I can't tell you exactly where the pictures were taken but I think most of them were in Valletta.

So now I’ve been rereading parts of V..  We have discussed elsewhere whether Pynchon is much of a flaneur, and the jury is still out, but it’s not hard to imagine him drifting through the streets of Valetta, consulting an old Baedeker as he went; it would have been the Southern Italy volume. 



And there is this passage in V., chapter 11, “Confessions of Fausto Maijstral,” describing Valletta in the blackout during the German bombardment.  I suppose a map’s no use in a blackout even if it’s of the place you happen to be.


“A city uninhabited is different. Different from what a "normal" observer, straggling in the dark - the occasional dark - would see. It is a universal sin among the false-animate or unimaginative to refuse to let well enough alone. Their compulsion to gather together, their pathological fear of loneliness extends on past the threshold of sleep; so that when they turn the corner, as we all must, as we all have done and do - some more than others - to find ourselves on the street... You know the street I mean, child. The street of the 20th Century, at whose far end or turning - we hope - is some sense of home or safety. But no guarantees. A street we are put at the wrong end of, for reasons best known to the agents who put us there. But a street we must walk.”







Thursday, March 2, 2017

A LONG CRUISE ON A SHORT STREET

 Nobody would pretend that Selma Avenue in Hollywood is one of the great walking streets, nor one of the great places for urban exploration - it runs for about a mile and a half, east/west, between and parallel to Hollywood Boulevard and Sunset Boulevard.  But it’s not without interest, because nowhere is.


Back in the day Selma used to a be a place where young men, inspired perhaps by Midnight Cowboy, hung out and plied their trade. There’s still a YMCA in the street, but you can’t stay there these days however much fun it might be.  This is John Rechy below on the steps of the First Baptist Church of Hollywood, which has stood on Selma in its present form since 1935.


Currently Selma is the site of all kinds of development and redevelopment, and I dare say a truckload of “gentrification.”  Restaurants close and are replaced by new ones that don’t necessarily look any better than the old ones, but presumably they have a better business plan.  There’s a stylish barber’s shop, a store that sells only vinyl, and there used to be a tent city of homeless people, but they were recently moved on by the cops.

There’s some curious stuff on the sidewalk:


 Some curious window treatments:


And there’s this, which may be the best reason for walking along Selma – an amazing example of scarcely improvable, ramshackle, improvised urban infrastructure.  It may possibly be a Thomasson (op cit) although possibly not because this thing, however ramshackle and improvised, is actually functional.



As I hope you can see in the above pictures (one mine, one from Google), and I know it's not easy, it’s essentially, two telegraph poles stuck together.  There’s one big, tall, fully-formed pole, supporting wires that run high across the street, and then there’s a shorter pole attached to it, accommodating wires that run in a somewhat different direction at a lower level. 


Two big, tall, fully-formed poles might have seemed the way to go but apparently the powers that be couldn’t find an extra pole of the required length.  They ended up with one that was shorter than the other, that wouldn’t even reach from ground level to the required height of the wires running crosswise.


So what would you do?  Well, what they evidently did was attach the short pole to the big pole but they had to hold it three or four feet off the ground.  In order to do that they used brackets and then a length of lumber for support.  But even the length of lumber proved too short and so they put a lump of wood underneath that as a shim.



It’s wonderful.  It works, I guess.  And frankly this is the way I personally do “handyman” projects – ham-fisted but functional.  You might imagine the powers that be in Hollywood would operate with more style and skill.  The fact that they don’t is somehow charming but also unsettling.  Is the whole of Hollywood held together with wire and string?  I think we all know the answer to that one.




Sunday, February 26, 2017

RAMBLING WITH ROBERT


I’m not sure why it’s taken me till now to find this line from Robert Mitchum about walking, “People think I have an interesting walk. Hell, I'm just trying to hold my gut in.”  It’s a great line, and the story of many of our lives as we get older.


Mitchum was talking to Earl Wilson, for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner in 1971, when he would have been aged 54.  The previous year he'd made the movie Ryan’s Daughter,(that's a still from it below), and he’s certainly not the slim young man of his youth but really he doesn’t look bad at all compared to the average 54 year old.


Even so, it had all started rather differently, as it usually does:


And he was evidently a man who liked to get his shirt off, whether he was walking or not, and I'd say that gut is being rather fiercely held in in this picture, from Going Home, actually from 1971.


Equally, Mitchum spent much of his career in a well-cut suit and/or a trenchcoat, which would hide many of the gut problems.





 Of course there are times when even a suit can’t completely get the job done, though (inevitably) he's still looking pretty good here, and certainly a lot better than Michael Winner:


And sometimes of course a man stops walking, sits back and doesn’t even try to hold it in, although that the belt is doing its very best.



And as seen here, there are some walkers who actually prefer to let it all hang out.  They ain't no Robert Mitchums.  Who the heck is?:

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Saturday, February 25, 2017

BURNING STILL

Meanwhile in Hollywood, walking under the freeway, we still feel the bern, even as we feel a bit ripped.