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by Geoff Nicholson, December 19, 2008 11:32 AM
When I was trying to find a form for my book, I did wonder whether I could use something like "In search of the perfect walk." But I abandoned that idea because in the end I thought there was probably no such thing as a perfect walk, and even if there were it would be completely different for each individual person. Even so, as I've publicized the book, people have been asking me what my favorite walk is, and whether I could recommend a walk for them to do, and I've done my best to come up with something intelligent, even while admitting that questions like that usually make my mind go completely blank. Then I got a call from Martin Krasnik, a Danish journalist based in London. He wanted to interview me for his newspaper, but before he did that, could I recommend a good long walk he might do in London. While we talked on the phone I dug out a map, looked at it, and started making random suggestions. Yes, he might start in Oxford Street, say by the 100 Club where the Sex Pistols played one of their few London gigs, then head east to St Paul's Cathedral, built after the Great Fire of 1666 and bearing shrapnel scars from World War Two, then head through Whitechapel, the scene of murders committed by Jack the Ripper and the Kray Brothers, and eventually go all the way to Upton Park, where in fact I used to live, one of the more grittily impoverished areas of London and home of West Ham United Football Club. Martin said he was going to do it and call me afterward. Several days passed and I didn't hear from him. The idea that someone might have set off on a walk I'd recommended, got horribly lost and never returned, well, it might have had a certain publicity value, but on balance it probably wouldn't have been a good thing. To cut a long story short, he did eventually call. With detours and meanders he reckoned he covered about 17 miles and enjoyed every minute of it, especially the parts when he was lost. I felt relieved and pleased for both our sakes. And it enabled me to come up with one notion of the perfect walk. You start where you are (cf. Lao Tsu: "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.") and you put one foot in front of another and keep going until you get good and lost. Then you find your way back again.
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Guests
by Geoff Nicholson, December 18, 2008 9:52 AM
Titles are hard. I (and my editor) went through quite a bit of agony before settling on The Lost Art of Walking. For a while it looked like the book might be called Walking Wounded; there was even a time when I considered Walking Fool. During the writing process I came across two works called The Art of Walking — one an anthology, published in the 1930s edited by Edwin Valentine Mitchell; the other, a dandyish essay by Christopher Morley, published in 1918. There are surely others. I also knew there was a book called The Lost Art of Walking on Water, which I think is a great title, but even if someone hadn't got there first it still wouldn't have suited my own book. So, I thought The Lost Art of Walking was an original enough title; as original as these things ever are. And then, quite by chance (OK I admit it, I was googling myself), I found an online reference to The Lost Art of Walking by somebody named Daniel Doan. Now, I had never heard of Daniel Doan, though I probably should have. He's the author of some classic hiking books such as 50 Hikes in the White Mountains, Dan Doan's Fitness Program for Hikers and Cross Country Skiers, and a memoir entitled Our Last Backpack. He died in 1993 and his papers are now in the Dartmouth College Library. Among them are typescripts of various unpublished works, including On Laziness, On Loafing, Thoughts on How to Stop Talking to Yourself; all very fine titles, it seems to me. And finally, in "Folder 59" of his paper, there it is: The Lost Art of Walking; typescript, 1956. I'm sorry our paths never crossed till now. Dan Doan sounds like a man and a walker (and perhaps loafer) after my own heart. Incidentally, I just got an email from that great London walker and literary sage Iain Sinclair, in which he ruminated, "It's not so much the art of walking that has been lost around here, but the landscape in which to practice that art." I wish I'd said
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by Geoff Nicholson, December 17, 2008 10:41 AM
How can you not love Amy Winehouse? But I think I love her for a different reason than most people. I love her for her associations with walking. In late 2007 the "troubled star" was seen, and photographed, walking the streets of East London, barefoot and stripped down to a bra and jeans. In some reports this was transmuted into a "nude night walk." A "source" told the British tabloid The Sun, "Amy came out and started stumbling around. She popped her head over the fence like she was looking for something. It was freezing and she had no shoes and just a red bra. She was mumbling something incomprehensible. It wasn't the behavior of someone in the right state of mind." Don't you just love a good "source"? According to msn.com the same thing happened again this year: the headline was "Winehouse goes on bizarre night walk." This time she was not (according to sources) naked, but dressed in "a stringy vest, a thin top and denim shorts" and she "walked through the streets erratically. Sometime during the walk, she collected a bottle of vodka and when she signed an autograph for a fan, she signed his name instead of her own. She looked a mess and found it hard to avoid stumbling." Well, come on, stumbling is just another form of walking, if you ask me. And Amy and her fans are equally capable of spirited walking. At a gig in Birmingham this year the crowd reacted with boos and walkouts. In the end Winehouse herself threw down the microphone and walked off stage, though not before telling the unhappy fans to "wait 'til my husband gets out of incarceration. And I mean that." I'm sure she did, but again, according to the papers, incarcerated hubby Blake Fielder-Civil was planning to do some walking of his own. He was reported as admitting that he'd turned Amy into a junkie and said he planned to walk away from the marriage in order to save her life. Still, Amy's troubles haven't kept her from winning Grammy awards: she picked up five this year, and she picked up some sympathy too. Chaka Khan said of her, "She's walking her walk. We all have a walk in life, we have hard and difficult times, and going through that chaos often leads to clarity. We have to have that room and that space, that privacy time, to be able to walk your walk." Amy Winehouse also sings a fine song called "Fuck Me Pumps" — though I guess that isn't strictly about walking. Which, of course, got me thinking about the great and now very recently late Bettie Page. Her life as a model is buttressed by two great walking moments. The first, she was walking on the beach at Coney Island when a photographer named Jerry Tibbs spotted her and asked to take her picture, thus launching her career. Then later she was on a different beach, in Key West, and saw a church with a neon cross on top. According to Bunny Yeager, "She walked into the church and never walked
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by Geoff Nicholson, December 16, 2008 9:30 AM
The following is a walking story I only discovered after my book had gone to press: if not, I'd surely have found some way of shoe-horning it. In fact, it's a story that seems just a little bit too perfect, but I very much want it to be true. It concerns Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939), author of The Good Soldier and Parade's End. His original surname wasn't Ford but Hueffer. He changed it after World War One, because he thought (rightly enough) it sounded too German: his middle name was Hermann, and there had been a period of his life when he styled himself Baron Hueffer von Aschendorf. But why did he pick the surname Ford? Legend has it that when, as Hueffer, he lived in post-war Paris, he was a great walker and wore out many pairs of shoes. He got them cheaply repaired by one Anton Defandine, a Parisian bibliophile, man of letters, and (apparently) amateur shoe repairer. The arrangement suited them both, but after a while, Hueffer's visits to Defandine stopped. His fortunes had improved, he no longer did so much walking, and he no longer needed to get his shoes repaired. He had bought a car. When Defandine at last saw him behind the wheel, he said, "Ah, so you are no longer a hoofer!" The car was a Model T
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Guests
by Geoff Nicholson, December 15, 2008 12:20 PM
Whenever I start a new writing project, especially nonfiction, I always imagine it's going to be a work of colossal, maybe infinite, length; a thousand-page giant opus that would contain every thought, every feeling, every amazing story and startling fact (in this case) on the subject of walking. This, of course, fills editors and publishers (and possibly readers) with horror, and in fact at some point it becomes that way for the author, too. In the age of online research, when so much information is so easily available to everybody, what you leave out is as important as what you cram in. Inevitably some of my favorite bits and pieces about walking finished up on the editing room floor, and of course I can live with that. But since we live in the age of the blog, I can take this opportunity to share one or two omissions. It was very hard to leave out Samuel Beckett, for instance. In 1938 he was walking at night in Paris with a group of friends when he was approached by a pimp, who offered his services. Beckett declined — with some force, I guess — and the pimp was so insulted that he stabbed Beckett in the chest, perforating his lung and very nearly killing him. The pimp, called Prudent, went briefly to jail, but Beckett didn't press charges, and later in his life he would recount the event as a comic anecdote. James Knowlson tells us that well over 30 years later, he and Beckett were walking in the street near the old people's home where Beckett was then living, when a man with a camera leapt out and took a couple of photographs of him. Beckett reacted as though he'd been stabbed. Read More»
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