Friday, August 18, 2017
Sunday, August 6, 2017
SAM'S WALKING WISDOM
"And having heard, or more probably read somewhere, in the days
when I thought I would be well advised to educate myself, or amuse myself, or
stupefy myself, or kill time, that when a man in a forest thinks he is going
forward in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle, I did my best
to go in a circle, hoping in this way to go in a straight line. For I stopped
being half-witted and became sly, whenever I took the trouble. And my head was
a storehouse of useful knowledge. And if I did not go in a rigorously straight
line, with my system of going in a circle, at least I did not go in a circle,
and that was something. And by going on doing this, day after day, and night
after night, I looked forward to getting out of the forest, some day."
Wednesday, August 2, 2017
OF WALKING AND WRAPPING
The days have been hot – pushing 90
degrees – and it’s been humid (that’s known as “monsoonal moisture” in these
parts), but I’ve been walking because it’s what I do. And of course I’ve been doing it early-ish or
late-ish in the day to avoid the worst of the heat, and I’ve been walking more
or less in the neighborhood, although trying to head for those streets that, for
one reason or another, I never usually walk down.
It must be a few years since I walked past
the garden below, with its blue glass decorations. It’s right alongside the street, and most of
those bottles and vases are just a stone’s throw away, and yet they remain
intact. This seems a reason to be cheerful.
They’ve been trimming – pollarding, I
suppose is the word - the trees in parts of the neighborhood – a huge
operation, big trucks, a big crew, a big mess, especially when it comes to the
ficus trees – a job that needs doing, and it doesn’t do the trees any harm, they'll be back just as big next year, but
of course it does mean there are certain sidewalks where you can’t walk at
all. And it must be said that the guys
on the crew, while by no means hostile, didn’t look very cheerful: maybe it’s the heat, and maybe the one below just
doesn’t like being photographed.
Now, I don’t know much
about the school system in Los Angeles.
Some people say it’s a disaster, some people send their kids to public
schools (which means exactly the opposite in the States than it does in
Britain) and they say they’re fine. Even
so, this sign warning drivers that there’s a school nearby, may be a symbol
that not everything is absolutely as it should be.
Of course you can’t (and shouldn’t) walk
in LA without being aware of the traffic.
Mostly it’s about avoidance, and yet my inner motorhead never quite
gives up, and when I see a truck like this one, my heart does leap just a
little.
And you know, I’m always fascinated by the
wrapped cars of Los Angeles that I see when I’m walking. I know there are wrapped cars in plenty of
other places but I’ve never seen so many as here, and I’m never sure whether
it’s for protection from the sun or to dissuade low-lifes from running a
screwdriver along your paintwork, not that one precludes the other. Sometimes
it’s a full cover:
Sometimes just half:
But how about this one, gift-wrapped, padded,
in disguise:
As you can probably work out, this is some
some kind of forthcoming model from one of the big manufacturers, being secretly
road-tested. Of course, a cynic might
think that under the disguise there’s going to be some big, ugly, penis-substitute of a pickup truck, essentially no different from any of the
other monsters on the roads. My inner
motorhead can be pretty cynical.
And of course, the Los Angeles housing
crisis rumbles on, and here’s one feller who’s found a temporary solution:
It looks like one of those “forts” that
kids build in their grandparents’ back yards, although since the guy was passed
out and there was “drug paraphernalia” visible on the mattress, the phrase “not
in my back yard” sprang rather readily to mind.
Labels:
Hollywood,
PEACE,
PITBULL,
POLLARDING,
TRUCK
Wednesday, July 26, 2017
HUNKERING HOME
Mention of Hull brings us pretty much inevitably to
Phillip Larkin. There’s the Larkin Trail
in Hull these days, in three sections, only two of them easily walkable. The Website says, "To follow in Larkin's tracks is to take not only a literary journey, but also journeys through diverse landscapes and rich architecture and, seeing the city through a poet's eyes, to gain a philosophical view of the place where Larkin lived and worked for three decades."
There’s also
the above statue, by Martin Jennings, of Larkin in Hull station. It’s supposedly inspired by Larkin’s poem
“The Whitsun Weddings” so I suppose he’s hurrying to leave Hull, which may or
may not be significant.
Walking crops up fairly often in Larkin’s works, but it’s
seldom, if ever, a joyous or uncomplicated subject for Larkin, but then what is?
Generally it’s a marker for something
much bigger that itself. This line from “New Year Poem” – “From roads where men go home I
walk apart” – which somehow reminds of the line Sheldon Cooper says in The Big
Bang Theory – “Like the proverbial cheese, I stand
alone”
There’s this from “Poetry of Departure”
So to hear it said
He walked out on the whole crowd
Leaves me flushed and stirred,
Like Then she undid her dress
Or Take that you bastard;
He walked out on the whole crowd
Leaves me flushed and stirred,
Like Then she undid her dress
Or Take that you bastard;
And there’s this from “Dockery and Son” which I suppose is,
in part, a railway poem:
I fell asleep, waking at
the fumes
And furnace-glares of Sheffield, where I changed,
And ate an awful pie, and walked along
The platform to its end
And furnace-glares of Sheffield, where I changed,
And ate an awful pie, and walked along
The platform to its end
*
And there’s this from a wonderfully gloomy letter from
to his lover, Monica Jones, “I seem to walk on a transparent surface and see
beneath me all the bones and wrecks and tentacles that will eventually claim
me: in other words, old age, incapacity, loneliness, death of others & myself...”
Larkin and Jones |
But for many in Hull, and possibly elsewhere
as well, Larkin may be most famous for the poem “Toads.” The toad is initially the poet’s daily work
which squats upon him but in the end he decides
…
something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And
cold as snow,
Now, hunker is an
interesting word. It’s a synonym for the
haunch, of course, so to hunker down is to squat on your haunches, which is in
keeping with the sense of the poem. But,
if online dictionaries are to be believed, hunkering is also a synonym for
walking, as in: “Slang: to lumber along; walk or move slowly or aimlessly.”
Was Larkin aware of
this? Who knows? Poets are tricky people when it comes to the overtones
and undertones of language.
Nor can we be
absolutely sure how Larkin would have felt about the celebration in his name “Larkin with
Toads, Hull’s largest ever public art project.”
Originally set up in 2010 it was revived in 2015 and featured 40 extra
large “artist-decorated” (how long have you got to pick the bones out of that
one?) fiberglass toads positioned in and around the city.
They formed a “walking trail” of course.
They formed a “walking trail” of course.
Thursday, July 20, 2017
TOWARDS THE DOOR WE NEVER OPENED
Since I’ve been thinking about walking in
gardens, I inevitably thought about walking in parks, which inevitably meant I
returned to Travis Elborough’s book A Walk in the Park – now out in paperback - and I find this passage:
“There are
few sights in England that can quite equal the absurd charm of the imitation
Khyber Pass in Hull’s East Park. This slice of South Asia in the East Riding
sits just a short stroll away from an animal house that is home to alpacas from
Peru and a lake where oversized swan pedalo boats bob about. The park was
planned and opened to honour Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887 and the
pass was dreamed up by its supervisor Edward Peak and fashioned in artificial
rock and material foraged from the Hull Citadel, an old fort that had once
defended the town’s port.”
Now it so happens that I know a couple of people with Hull
connections and they were familiar with East Park, and had even been walking
there, but perhaps inevitably they’d never heard of this Khyber Pass replica, despite
the presence in the park of this informative sign:
I think
you’d have to say that as replicas go it’s not the most faithful recreation you’ve
ever seen, especially since it involved the copy of an Arab doorway from Zanzibar, which doesn't seem to have a whole lot to do with the Khyber Pass.
The actual Khyber Pass
looked like this back then,
And it looks like this now:
And I began to wonder how easy it would be
to walk through dislocated or simulated geographical features of the world. The boundary wall of Piccadilly Gardens in
Manchester has been in the news lately - a Brutalist bit of concrete that locals
refer to as the Berlin Wall. It doesn’t
look so bad to me but it’s apparently “much hated” by locals, and the news is
that there are now plans to demolish it.
There used to be the Garden of Allah here in
Los Angeles, though not a garden at all, but a hotel on Sunset Boulevard run by
one Alla Nazimova (real name Adelaida Yakovlevna Leventon), and occasional home to the
likes of Errol Flynn, Dorothy Parker, Scott Fitzgerald et al. It was demolished in 1959, but a replica has
been being built at Universal Studios, Florida, and is used as a media center.
There is also the Garden of Gethsemane in
Tucson, which contains sculptures of the Last Supper and the Crucifixion which
(unless my biblical knowledge is even sketchier than I think it is) did not
take place in said garden.
The “real” Garden of Gethsemane in Jerusalem (its original location is disputed, so this may itself be a replica) looks like this:
There’s also London Bridge in Havasu
City, Arizona, which Mr. Elborough has written about at length, but that’s a
transplant of the thing itself, not a replica.
The Shoreline walking trail will take you right under it, through Rotary
Park.
So I emailed young Elborough and asked
him if he thought there was any meaningful distinction to be drawn between what constitutes a park and what constitutes a garden. He
offered this, “I think more generally public gardens tended be bequests of
existing private gardens - though not always - and usually smaller and
horticultural, lacking sports fields etc. but god knows!” That’s good enough for me, for now.
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