Still Looking for the Lost

The Roads to Sata: A 2000-Mile Walk Through Japan arrived safely on Monday, just seven days after I ordered it from The Book Depository, so that was pretty impressive (international shipping is free, remember, although it should be noted that this doesn't apply to certain out-of-the way countries likes Bhutan).

I haven't started reading it yet as I'm still finishing off Looking for the Lost, which I'm thoroughly enjoying now after initially finding it difficult to get into. Looking for the Lost contains accounts of three different walks the author undertook in three different areas of Japan. In the second of these, Booth heads to the island of Kyushu and follows the route taken by Saigo Takamori (the real "last samurai") in 1877 when, in the dying days of the Satsuma Rebellion, he managed to evade capture by the numerically far superior government forces in Nobeoka and lead a band of several hundred followers cross country to his hometown of Kagoshima some 500km to the south, where he made his last stand on Mount Shiroyama. This part was the only part of this particular walk with which I was familiar, having hiked up Mount Shiroyama during a visit to Kagoshima in 2004.

Although my walking achievements pale into insignificance compared to those of Booth, I do feel a certain affinity with his basic approach. For a start he preferred sticking to roads, eating in restaurants, and sleeping with a roof over his head as opposed to staying away from roads and camping (he never carried a tent). He also maintained a strict rule of not using land transport of any kind during his walks, even on his rest days, a rule he called the "Protestant Walk Ethic."

In other respects our approaches to traveling on foot are very different. For example, while I enjoy having people around me I tend to keep to myself a lot while walking. Booth, on the other hand, was extremely gregarious, reveling in his encounters with all kinds of people, descriptions of which are among the most fascinating aspects of Looking for the Lost. As well, while I try to stay away from alcohol during long walks, Booth needed very little excuse to stop for a beer, often downing several bottles over the course of a day.

Booth has a Wikipedia page, but it's so perfunctory that I went searching for more information and came across this 1993 obituary from The Independent. One fact not included in the obituary but mentioned in the brief biography at the end of The Roads to Sata is that Booth had read most of Shakespeare's works by the age of ten.

Looking for the Lost

By four o'clock a thick mist had hidden the hills. And at four-thirty, in the only grocer's shop I found to rest in that cold August day, I came face to face with one of the unlikeliest creatures you can encounter nowadays in the hinterland of Japan.
She was an unmarried college graduate, twenty-two or three, very bright and very pretty, who, despite studying for two years in Tokyo and working for another year at a day-care center in Miyazaki city, had come back to live with her aging parents on the shore of this lake in the middle of nowhere and help them run their shop. It was a move that almost anyone in her position, with her attractions, would have resisted, even though her mother was ill, she told me, and spent most of her time asleep. But the young woman looked content with her situation; or at least she looked more content than her father, who sat on the raised tatami of his living room, glaring suspiciously at us through his open screens for the entire time that I hung about his shop, which was as long as I could realistically make two large bottles of beer last, all ready to leap out and separate us at the first sign I displayed of committing aggravated rape.
"Aren't you bored here?" I asked the pretty young woman.
"Oh," she said, "I was born here, you see." Then she added, as though it explained the whole of life, "And there are fireworks in the summer."
. . . .

"What do you dislike most about this place?"
"The mosquitoes," she said brightly. "They're so big and black. Don't you think they are so big and black?"
I hadn't noticed any, I confessed, and she giggled. So I took my eyes off her face for a second and glanced around the shop for mosquitoes, and saw three of them, black and silent, feasting serenely between my knuckles.
I had better stay at the Fujiya Business Hotel, the pretty young woman told me. That's where she would stay if she were me. It was about three kilometers further up the road in the village of Murasho. Of course there was an old-fashioned ryokan as well, for men who came to fish in the lake. But a person of my tastes, accustomed to city life like she was, well, I should stay at the Fujiya Business Hotel. What on earth had they built a business hotel for, out here among these dams and mists? Oh, that was simply what they called it. It was more like a pension really, with a coffee shop downstairs and a few small bedrooms with showers. Sometimes she went to the coffee shop. There were no other coffee shops for miles and miles. Yes, sometimes she went to drink milk tea there. She would stay at the Fujiya, without a doubt, if she were me.

From Looking for the Lost: Journeys Through a Vanishing Japan by Alan Booth

Keyword Analysis (The walking fool)

	Num	Perc.	Search Term
	9	12.00%	walking fool
	3	4.00%	The Sea at L'estaque
	3	4.00%	walking the tokaido
	2	2.67%	wanderlust quotes
. . .
	1	1.33%	walkin wardrobes nz
. . .
	1	1.33%	how to beat a creatinine test for kidney stones

Roads to Sata

In Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit describes Alan Booth's Roads to Sata: A 2000-Mile Walk Through Japan as "delightful" and "a milestone in how far the literature of walking had come".

Originally published in 1985, Roads to Sata is an account of the author's journey on foot from Cape Soya, the northernmost point of Japan on the island of Hokkaido, to Cape Sata, the southernmost point on the island of Kyushu. It was one of the many books I borrowed from the Christchurch Public Library as a keen, relatively young student of things Japanese in the 1980s, long before I took up walking.

Solnit's mention of Roads to Sata made me want to read it again. Unfortunately it appears the library no longer has a copy. But it's still in print (in fact it's considered something of a classic now), so I've ordered it from The Book Depository (who, unlike Amazon, offer free shipping worldwide, as pointed out by a recent commenter). In the meantime I've borrowed the sequel, Looking for the Lost: Journeys Through a Vanishing Japan, which was published posthumously in 1995 (Booth died in 1993 at the age of 46).

Writing this has made me think how interesting it would be to walk the length of Japan following the same route Booth took as a kind of experiment to see how much things have changed in the nearly 25 years since Roads to Sata was first published.

American Journeys and American exceptionalism

The young man who sought the meaning of life among the poor and in religion, and the train driver who knew nothing of the world twenty miles either side of the tracks he drove, were both in their different ways expressions of American 'exceptionalism'. [Alexis de] Tocqueville, who coined the term, would have found their like in 1831. That is to say, at some level both shared the assumption of Americans, from the Pilgrim Fathers to George W. Bush, that America is different from all other countries because America is a country - the only country - blessed by God.

The idea is essential to the doctrine behind the War on Terror, to the strength of religion, the weakness of the social security system, the pervasiveness of the flag and other symbols of the nation; to its violence, its self-deceits and hypocrisy, its inability to confront its own contradictions, its childish fears and paranoia, and its mind-numbing provincialism. It is also, very likely, the reason for its power, its creativity, its capacity for self-renewal, its numberless heroic examples and the desire of people everywhere to live in the United States.

From American Journeys by Don Watson

Manituana and American exceptionalism

You may recall my expression of puzzlement a while back at Wu Ming 1's statement in an interview that "Manituana is our novel on Iraq and the 'war on terror'". Well, things became a little clearer after I read the following exchange (from an interview on the Social Text website):

Marco Deseriis: Can you talk about Manituana in terms of political allegory relating to the War in Iraq.

Wu Ming 1: Right, because we started from a journalistic metaphor that was used in the weeks prior to the shock and awe bombing that began the 
war in Iraq. This metaphor was 
"the Atlantic Ocean is widening," with reference to the difference of opinion 
between the US and Europe about the necessity of attacking Iraq, about the
 complicity of Saddam Hussein's regime in the attacks of 9/11, and about Saddam
 having hidden weapons of mass destruction. There was complete disagreement at the UN about this. And in Europe, most of the public, even
 the right wing, was against attacking Iraq. For instance, in Italy 50% of the people are explicitly 
fascist, but if I remember the figure correctly 92% of them were against the
 war in Iraq. This marked a big 
difference with what was going on in the US at the time. The same was true throughout 
Europe. And many newspaper 
articles kept talking about the widening gap between the EU and the US, one 
that was never so great as at that moment. So we began to reflect on the history of the relationship 
between the US and Europe. And of 
course the beginning of that relationship was with the American Revolution and
 the birth of the US as a separate country. At the beginning, the project was different. We wanted to write a novel set in 1876,
 exactly one century after the revolution. 
But one set in a parallel reality in which George Washington had been 
defeated. This involved 
reinventing a completely different reality, which was very difficult to handle, to the extent that we weren't able to imagine the changes that would be 
necessary. So we came
 independently to a conclusion: why imagine an alternate reality when the
 American Revolution itself contains so many different realities, depending on 
the different point of view that you choose? If you choose the point of view of Native Americans, the
 American Revolution is something totally different. It's something really far away from what one expects. So we decided to write a novel set in 
1775, at the beginning of the revolution, and lasting the whole course of the 
war, until the Treaty of Paris, when the British Empire acknowledges the existence
 of the US as a separate country.

Ashley Dawson: And so having written the novel, what do you make of the discourse of American exceptionalism?

Wu Ming 1: It's the birth of American exceptionalism; it's reflected in all the discourses and conversations that you find in the novel.

Ashley Dawson: But did your perspective on these questions change in the writing?

Wu Ming 1: I don't know what we thought at the beginning. It's the curse of 
knowledge, that when you know something you don't remember how it was not to
 know it. But it's a book on 
American exceptionalism, seen from Europe. There are some conversations in the London section of the 
novel that are deeply allegorical of American exceptionalism, seen from a
 European perspective. And American 
exceptionalism is still there; Obama is an exceptionalist like Bush. Of course, the politics are different, 
but the exceptionalist assumptions are still there: the key role that America
 has to play on the world stage, etcetera. 
"We are the chosen ones" is the subtext underlying every discourse,
 whether it's Bush or Obama.

Think of the music

No people on earth make music like the Americans - no-one else comes close.... When anti-American feelings sneak up on you, when you think the democracy is a bit of a sham, the people are ruled by ignorance and fear and no good can come of the place - think of the music.

From American Journeys by Don Watson

Beyond bagels

The sorry state of rail travel in the United States (epitomized by the bagel episode I quoted the other day) is just one of the many topics covered in Don Watson's marvelous American Journeys, which I stumbled across by chance in my local library the other day and have been engrossed in ever since.

Most of the problems (slowness, lateness, poor service, aging equipment) stem from a lack of investment, a situation exacerbated by the reluctance of governments to subsidize passenger rail services in the neoliberal age (something all too familiar to us here in New Zealand). Another problem Amtrak, the government corporation responsible for passenger rail travel in the US, faces is that while it owns its own trains, most of the tracks are owned by the rail freight companies, so that passenger trains invariably have to give way to freight trains using the same stretch of track, leading to lengthy delays. It's probably no coincidence that Amtrak's most profitable services are in the so-called Northeast Corridor, one of the few places where the corporation owns its own track.

As Watson notes, however, the reluctance to subsidize rail travel is inconsistent to say the least in light of the huge subsidies enjoyed by road and air travel. Roads are built and maintained using public money, as are airports and the air traffic control infrastructure. As well, aircraft manufacturers in Europe and the US receive massive government assistance in the form of either direct funding or government contracts for military and space research, which subsidize the production of civilian aircraft.

Most of the journeys covered in the book are by rail, but Watson occasionally hits the road to visit places no longer served by rail (including, ironically, Chattanooga, which last saw a train in 1970). In places his writing is so beautiful, and the subject matter so moving, that it brings tears to the eyes. For example, he describes how the American bison, some fifteen million of which once roamed the plains of Wyoming, were hunted to near extinction in the 19th century (five million were killed in 1873 alone). He quotes an old hunter who explained how they took advantage of the animal's better instincts: "When a bison was hit, the others would mill around it, and if there was a hundred or so in the bunch, the hunter could get nearly all of them."

Passing through Oklahoma gives Watson the opportunity to write about one of his many American heroes, Will Rogers. He also visits the Oklahoma City National Memorial, which is dedicated to the victims of the Oklahoma bombing of 1995, which killed 168 people and injured more than 800. He is impressed by the memorial, but unsettled by the adjoining museum.

It is a strange museum: by no means all sentimental, but with a bit of the communal solipsism of daytime television shows. The memorials at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which both express the same instinctive fascination with the moment of annihilation, do it on behalf of a quarter of a million dead civilians, tens of thousands of children. Somehow at the Oklahoma Memorial a sense of scale has been lost. At the same time, in the religious homilies and the unrestrained grief, the altruistic and the narcissistic become inseparable - a paradox that just might have been the root of the evil in Timothy McVeigh.

Amtrak bagels

The Crescent came in at 11.18 pm, which meant the dining car was closed, but the snack bar was open. I tried the bagel. Amtrak bagels come in a vacuum wrapping. The whole thing is heated in a microwave, along with the cream cheese which comes inside a sort of plastic ravioli. The heating turns the bagel into rubber and the cream cheese into sour milk. They put it in a cardboard box with a plastic knife and a serviette, and when you've eaten it you have to sit quite still for an hour, like a cormorant after swallowing a salmon, and let the thing dissolve inside you.

From American Journeys by Don Watson

The Great Wall Walk

For their final work together, The Great Wall Walk (1988), radical performance artists Marina Abramović and Ulay decided to walk 2000km along the Great Wall of China, starting at opposite ends and meeting in the middle. The performance lasted for three months.

An epic rail journey

Oddly enough, reading Wanderlust: A History of Walking has kindled in me the desire not to walk but to undertake an epic journey of a different kind. The author, Rebecca Solnit, lives in San Francisco, which she describes as a place which "keeps alive the idea of a city as a place of unmediated encounters", unlike most American cities which are "designed for the noninteractions of motorists shuttling between private places rather than the interactions of pedestrians in public ones".

San Francisco is also the western terminus of the California Zephyr, the famous passenger train that runs through the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the Rockies, and the plains of Nebraska to Chicago. From Chicago one can catch another train to New York, the entire journey from coast to coast taking four or fives days.

Mrs Fool and I initially planned to do this trip in 2001 when we visited Erik in New York, but Erik cautioned against making such a long rail journey in the United States (understandably given Amtrak's reputation for slow speeds, lateness, and poor service), and we ended up flying.

My epic journey would see me fly to San Francisco, where I'd do a walking tour of the city, check out some museums and maybe some jazz spots, then ride the California Zephyr to Chicago, where I'd check out some more museums and marvel at the skyscrapers along the Magnificent Mile. I'd then ride the Lake Shore Limited to New York. I haven't thought about the return journey yet. Maybe I'll walk.

Three telegrams

Charlie Parker's telegrams to Chan Parker on hearing of the death of their two-year-old daughter Pree in March 1954.

4.11 AM
MY DARLING MY DAUGHTER'S DEATH SURPRISED ME MORE THAN IT DID YOU DON'T FULFILL FUNERAL PROCEEDINGS UNTIL I GET THERE I SHALL BE THE FIRST ONE TO WALK INTO OUR CHAPEL FORGIVE ME FOR NOT BEING THERE WITH YOU WHILE YOU WERE AT THE HOSPITAL YOURS MOST SINCERELY YOUR HUSBAND
CHARLIE PARKER

4.13 AM
MY DARLING FOR GOD'S SAKE HOLD ON TO YOURSELF
CHAS PARKER

4.15 AM
CHAN, HELP
CHARLIE PARKER

The decline of walking

I finally finished reading Wanderlust: A History of Walking last night. The final few chapters, in which author Rebecca Solnit traces the decline of walking as a mainstream activity, were particularly insightful.

According to Solnit, the golden age of walking "as a conscious cultural act rather than as a means to an end", an activity that "arose from a desire to travel through the open spaces of the world unarmored by vehicles, unafraid to mingle with different kinds of people", began in the late-18th century "in a time when cities and countryside grew safer and desire to experience that world was high" and ended "some decades ago". Today, "walking as a cultural activity, as a pleasure, as travel, as a way of getting around, is fading".

The decline of walking has coincided with the rise of the automobile and the growth of the suburbs, which "are built car-scale, with a diffuseness the unenhanced human body is inadequate to cope with". In the suburbs, places of entertainment and amenities such as schools, libraries and supermarkets are often out of walking range, and as they become more accustomed to traveling by car, people become less inclined to walk even short distances.

Today in the United States and elsewhere suburbs are being built without footpaths. Urban planners increasingly regard pedestrians as an obstacle to free traffic movement. In suburbs where the automobile is widely accepted as the only viable means of getting around, lone walkers are often regarded with suspicion.

Deprived of a living environment conducive to walking and in many cases lacking the desire to venture outside, people look to gyms to satisfy their need for exercise. "The gym," writes Solnit, "is the interior space that compensates for the disappearance of outside and a stopgap measure in the erosion of bodies."

Solnit expresses skepticism and alarm at the use of machines to provide the kind of exercise the body used to get through physical labour and more traditional forms of outdoor activity. "The body that used to have the status of a work animal now has the status of a pet: it does not provide real transport, as a horse might have; instead, the body is exercised as one might walk a dog."

What exactly is the nature of the transformation in which machines now pump our water but we go to other machines to engage in the act of pumping, not for the sake of water but for the sake of our bodies, bodies theoretically liberated by machine technology? Has something been lost when the relationship between our muscles and our world vanishes, when the water is managed by one machine and the muscles by another in two unconnected processes?

Solnit is particularly scornful of the treadmill:

The most perverse of all devices in the gym is the treadmill (and its steeper cousin, the Stairmaster). Perverse, because I can understand simulating farm labor, since the activities of rural life are not often available - but simulating walking suggests that space itself has disappeared....

The treadmill is a corollary to the suburb and the autotropolis: a device with which to go nowhere in places where there is now nowhere to go. Or no desire to go: the treadmill also accommodates the automobilized and suburbanized mind more comfortable in climate-controlled indoor space that outdoors, more comfortable with quantifiable and clearly defined activity than with the seamless engagement of mind, body, and terrain to be found walking out-of-doors.

Chinese artist gets tattoo of long march route on his back

Talk about suffering for your art! I first came across this photo back in 2007 when my Nakasendo walking buddy Erik and I were discussing ideas for making art to coincide with our walk. You can read about the artist, Qin Ga, here.

Coming together

One of my favourite authors is Hari Kunzru (The Impressionist, Transmission, My Revolutions). In this article posted last month on his blog, he discusses the films of Michael Haneke.

Also, I see from William Boyd's official website that he has a new book out. In this recent interview he describes how he got the idea for the novel:

The idea for the novel started when I read that every year in London they take 60 bodies a year out of the Thames, usually at the bend in the river near Greenwich. That's more than one a week, but you never hear about them. And then I thought immediately about the opening scenes of Dickens's Our Mutual Friend and the body being pulled out of the river. And I figured out that there was a way of writing a novel in the way that Our Mutual Friend does, from the very top of society to the very bottom. It all began to come together.

A fine and desirable thing

Several years ago I sat in on a discussion at a conference in which people were moaning about how terrible cities were and how the future of humankind and the planet depended on us all returning to a simpler way of life in the country. I sat silently, waiting for someone to speak up in defence of urban life, but no one did. I thought about all the benefits cities offer us as centres of art and culture, and what we would miss out on if cities no longer existed. For a start there would be no symphony orchestras, and probably no big bands.

Of course, no city is perfect. There are some cities I have no desire to visit at all (Los Angeles springs to mind), but of all the great cities I've visited around the world, few have left me disappointed. I was rather underwhelmed by London, but that may have been because I spent much of my brief stay there in bed with a cold.

The middle section of Manituana is set in Georgian London, where the Mohawk leader Joseph Brant travels in the hope of meeting King George III to reinforce the alliance between his Iroquois Confederation and the British crown. At the time of this visit in the 1770s (like most of the events in Manituana, it actually took place), London was a dangerous, crime-ridden city - much more dangerous than it is today, in fact - the poorly lit streets teeming with pickpockets and gangs of robbers. Brant and his colleagues, the "savages" from far-flung North America, are shocked at the squalor and poverty they encounter in the capital of the empire.

In "The Solitary Stroller and the City", the chapter on urban walking in Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit describes how London became less lawless over the following decades. "By the time Dickens was writing about homelessness in 1860," she writes, "London was many times as large, but the mob so feared in the 18th century had in the 19th century been largely domesticated as the crowd, a quiet, drab mass going about its private business in public." In the late-20th century, she further notes, New York (and Manhattan in particular) underwent a similar transformation from a city so notoriously violent that "the well-to-do feared its streets as they once had London's" into a comparatively benign city, a haven for urban walking.

One thing that all big cities offer - and this is something that strikes me whenever I visit Tokyo - is anonymity, which Virginia Woolf, who often enjoyed wandering the streets of London on foot, described as "a fine and desirable thing". The following excerpt from Wanderlust sums this up quite well, I think:

There is a subtle state most dedicated urban walkers know, a sort of basking in solitude - a dark solitude punctuated with encounters as the night sky is punctuated with stars… In the city, one is alone because the world is made up of strangers, and to be a stranger surrounded by strangers, to walk along silently bearing one's secrets and imagining those of the people one passes, is among the starkest of luxuries. The uncharted identity with its illimitable possibilities is one of the distinctive qualities of urban living, a liberatory state for those who come to emancipate themselves from family and community expectation, to experiment with subculture and identity. It is an observer's state, cool, withdrawn, with senses sharpened, a good state for anybody who needs to reflect or create. In small doses, melancholy, alienation, and introspection are among life's most refined pleasures.

Wanderlust quotes

"Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts."

"A lone walker is both present and detached from the world around, more than an audience but less than a participant."

"To hear about walking from people whose only claim on our attention is to have walked far is like getting one's advice on food from people whose only credentials come from winning pie-eating contests."

Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit

Japanese artist builds, test flies own plane

Yet more Wanderlust

I'm about a third of the way through Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust: A History of Walking. It's an interesting book, extremely readable but at the same time very educational. I'm currently reading about William Wordsworth, whose walking pedigree I was unfamiliar with, yet whose exploits Solnit deem worthy of an entire chapter (she goes as far as describing him as "the figure to whom posterity looks in tracing the history of walking in the landscape").

Among the more interesting things I've learned so far are that there's very strong evidence to suggest that it's not our consciousness that sets us apart from other animals but our ability to walk on two legs, a feat that freed our hands to do things other animals couldn't and encouraged our brains to develop (although I'm not sure where the kangaroos fit into this theory), and that galleries where originally places not for displaying art collections but for walking when the weather was inclement. "The gallery eventually became a place for displaying paintings," writes Solnit, "and though museum galleries are still a place where people stroll, the strolling is no longer the point."

On the negative side, Solnit loses points for misspelling the Tokaido (she refers to Hiroshige's Fifty-three Views on the Tokuida Road, which she describes as "a road movie from when roads were for walkers and movies were woodblock prints"), and for using the term Situationism, which anyone familiar with Situationist thought knows is a no-no (or as Guy Debord put it, "There is no such thing as situationism, which would mean a doctrine for interpreting existing conditions. The notion of situationism is obviously devised by antisituationists."). On the other hand, that Hiroshige and Debord (and yes, Werner Herzog) are mentioned at all is indicative of the scope and flavour of Wanderlust.

George Washington was a terrorist

I finished reading Manituana last Wednesday, the night before Mrs Fool and I left for Auckland. It was an enlightening, moving, and entertaining read, Wu Ming succeeding in their stated goal of presenting the American War of Independence from a fresh perspective. It will be interesting to see how audiences in the U.S. respond to the book. The authors have already taken issue with one reviewer (in Britain) who claims their account is "overly simple and too flattering towards the British".

One thing that's been puzzling me, however, is Wu Ming 1's categorical statement in the Herald Scotland interview I linked to a few posts back that "Manituana is our novel on Iraq and the 'war on terror'". Having read this statement before starting the book, I was constantly searching for close parallels between the events portrayed in the book and these ongoing conflicts, but apart from the fact that they all involved ringleaders whose first names were George (William Frederick, Washington, and Bush), more than one of whom was mentally incapacitated, I struggled to find many.

The book ends on a rather bleak note with the destruction by the "Continentals" of the homeland of the Mohawk protagonists in what became known as the Sullivan Expedition, which Wikipedia describes as a "scorched earth campaign." Included in Manituana are the chilling actual orders issued by George Washington to the leader of the expedition, General John Sullivan, on 31 May 1779:

The Expedition you are appointed to command is to be directed against the hostile tribes of the Six Nations of Indians, with their associates and adherents. The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements, and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.

I would recommend, that some post in the center of the Indian Country, should be occupied with all expedition, with a sufficient quantity of provisions whence parties should be detached to lay waste all the settlements around, with instructions to do it in the most effectual manner, that the country may not be merely overrun, but destroyed.

But you will not by any means listen to any overture of peace before the total ruinment of their settlements is effected. Our future security will be in their inability to injure us and in the terror with which the severity of the chastisement they receive will inspire them.

Auckland

Mrs Fool and I have just been up to Auckland for a couple of days. Here are some photos from our trip.

Mysterious sunken cone on the Auckland waterfront

Rangitoto Island

Giant squid at Kelly Tarlton's Underwater World

Downtown Auckland from Orakei Wharf

What a cute little dog

On the whole, Mrs Fool and I have quite different tastes in movies. This can make deciding what to see whenever we want to see a movie or DVD together difficult. Over the years I've learnt a trick or two to get Mrs Fool to watch something she wouldn’t otherwise watch. One of these is to highlight an aspect of a movie I know will appeal to her. So when I wanted to take her to see Encounters at the End of the World, for example, all I had to do was mention there were penguins in it and she was hooked.

Although not quite on the same level as her adoration of penguins, Mrs Fool is also a big fan of Juliette Binoche, which is how I got her to agree to watch Hidden a few months ago. Ever since then I've wanted to watch more of Michael Haneke's work. While at Alice in Videoland the other day I came across another Michael Haneke movie starring Juliette Binoche. Mrs Fool didn’t really enjoy Hidden, so instead of saying, "Hey look, here's an obscure European art house movie by the same guy who made that weird move without an ending we saw the other month," I said, "Hey look, here's a French movie with your favourite actress, Juliette Binoche." And so it was that a couple of Saturdays ago we sat down to watch Code Unknown.

Judging from Mrs Fool's reaction after watching Code Unknown, I think I'm going to have to come up with another trick to get her to watch movies I want to see. In fact I'm pretty sure her words were the same as those she muttered after watching Hidden: "Yoku wakaranai." ("I didn't really understand that.") To be perfectly honest, there were things about Code Unknown I didn't understand. There were also things about Hidden I couldn't work out at first, but at least in the case of that movie I was able to make sense of it over the following days. Nearly a fortnight after seeing Code Unknown, I'm still unsure what Haneke was trying to say in the movie.

Strangely enough, this doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it. In fact I enjoyed it a lot. I enjoyed the artistry of each scene, including the one with no dialogue in which Juliette Binoche stands doing her ironing, and the one in which the farmer and his son sit at a table eating stewed beets, in which the only line of dialogue is, "Beets. That's all there is." I enjoyed the climactic last scene with the drumming in the background (Haneke doesn't use background music in his films). And I enjoyed trying to piece all the scenes in the movie together in my head in a way that would give me a clue as to what the movie was about (other than the overall theme of communication, or rather miscommunication, discernible from the title).

I was thinking about this while walking back from the supermarket the other day, and decided that there are lots of examples of art that we can enjoy and appreciate on certain levels without necessarily fully understanding the intentions or thought processes of its creators. I love looking at a lot of Cezanne's paintings, but I have no real idea why he chose to paint the things he did in the way he did or what he was hoping to achieve in painting them. And how many people who enjoy looking at paintings by the old masters are aware of the religious and other symbolism these artists employed?

Creatinine confusion

Went down to my GP's this morning for a follow-up creatinine test to make sure my kidney is functioning properly. I was convinced this was a urine test, so in an effort to repeat the embarrassment I went through at the hospital the other week when it took me ages to provide a sample, I drank several glasses of water over the course of the morning to the point where I was busting to go. When I got to the doctor's the nurse informed me it was a blood test.

The horror, the horror

Bought a new bread knife. Sliced through the tip of my left index finger while cutting a loaf of Turkish bread bought from the New World supermarket. The horror, the horror.

Manituana

A portrait of Guy Johnson (or possibly his uncle and father-in-law, Sir William Johnson)

Have you ever really looked forward to getting a certain book (as a birthday or Christmas present, for example), received it, and then been reluctant to start reading it because you were afraid it might not live up to your expectations?

Early last week I took delivery of my latest Amazon order: Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and Wu Ming's Manituana. I quickly tore open the box and ripped off the plastic wrapping, then held each volume in turn, weighing it and noting how it differed from the image of it I'd created in my mind. Wanderlust was smaller than I imagined, its extremely thin cover giving the book a generally flimsy feel. It is quite literally a paperback. Manituana, on the other had, is a hardback, solid and robust. It oozed freshness, and I felt the urge to lift it to my nose and sniff it. It didn’t take me long to decide which of the two I'd start reading first.

And yet, both Wanderlust and Manituana remained on my bookshelf untouched until two nights ago. One reason is that I was near the end of another book (Gerald Seymour's Timebomb), and even though I wasn't really enjoying it, I wanted to finish it before starting Manituana (unlike some people I know, once I've started a book I almost always read it to the end, and the thought of skipping parts never enters my mind). But for some reason I was also afraid that Manituana wouldn’t live up to my expectations. Perhaps it was because I didn’t enjoy Wu Ming's last effort, 54, quite as much as their first, Q, and was afraid that a trend had been established.

Well, I'm happy to report that these concerns vanished as soon as I opened Manituana and read the opening quote (from Voltaire). I'm enjoying Manituana immensely. Have you ever started reading a book and been reluctant to read too much each day because you were afraid you'd reach the end too quickly?

The only problem I've struck so far is that, like 54, Manituana has a huge cast of characters making it difficult at times to remember who's who. Further complicating matters is the fact that many of them have the same surname. So I've adopted a practice I first employed when reading 54, which is to write down on a piece of paper the names of all the new major characters as they appear and their relationships to the other characters, so that I have a kind of family tree I can refer to whenever I get confused. It helps that many of the characters in Manituana are real and searchable on Wikipedia. So I was able to determine that Guy Johnson, for example, was not only the nephew of Sir William Johnson, but also his son-in-law.

Wu Ming 1 interview

Yay! A lengthy interview with Wu Ming 1 in The Glasgow Herald to read as I await the arrival of Manituana. From the introduction:

Over the course of a fortnight Wu Ming 1 and I traded more than 4500 words on war, literature, cognitive reality, football and why you should never refer to the group as anarchists.

The full interview is here.

Four documentaries

Before Monday's medical meltdown I managed to watch all the documentaries I'd borrowed from Alice in Videoland last week. I began with Herzog's Wheel of Time (2003), which was just beautiful. Some people have criticized Herzog for embarking on this project without adequate knowledge of the subject matter (Tibetan Buddhism, and in particular the Kalachakra initiations), but personally I found his approach, which resembled that of an impartial observer, and the quirky questions he directed at the Dalai Lama extremely engaging. Visually the movie was stunning, with lots of lingering close-ups of devotees' faces, fascinating footage of the creation (and destruction) of the Kalachakra sand mandala, and a bonus segment about the pilgrimage at Mount Kailash.

I was slightly underwhelmed by the three Wim Wenders documentaries. The first, Tokyo-Ga (1985), was my favourite, mainly because it was shot in Tokyo just a year before I first went to Japan and so felt extremely nostalgic. Much of the footage (of pachinko parlors, of golf driving ranges, of driving along neon-lit streets at night, for example), I found a bit clichéd, although I must admit I did enjoy the scenes inside the factory making wax food samples for use in restaurant display windows. The scene with Werner Herzog atop Tokyo Tower was unsubtitled, so I'm none the wiser as to what he was on about. The film included an interview with Atsuta Yuharu, who spent practically his entire career working as the cinematographer for Japanese film director Ozu Yasujiro (a hero of Wenders'). Atsuta explained how Ozu stuck to just one lens and eventually dispensed with tracking and panning altogether, preferring to film from a fixed position less than a metre off the ground. Normal tripods wouldn’t go this low, so a special tripod had to be built. Atsuta became quite emotional as he reminisced about his career with Ozu, and eventually had to ask Wenders to stop filming.

One final comment on Tokyo-Ga. At one point in the movie I think Wenders comments that Tokyo is a city best captured on video as opposed to film (the relationship between these two is a theme that crops up in all three Wenders docos), but looking at the footage of early-1980s Tokyo it struck me as still a very analogue city. There was neon, but none of the huge video screens you see on the sides of buildings throughout Tokyo now, and even the pachinko machines seemed very mechanical compared to the ones you see today (not that I'm an expert or anything). I was reminded of how much Tokyo has changed over the 25 or so years I've known it.

Fashion designer Yamamato Yohji, the subject of the second Wenders documentary, Notebook on Cities and Clothes (1989), came across as a very nice chap, but apart from the nice shots of Paris from the top of the Pompidou Centre, that's about all I remember about this rather uninspiring biopic. Perhaps it would have been more inspiring if the entire cast (designer, assistants, models) weren't dressed in black all the time.

The premise behind the third and final Wenders doco, Room 666 (1982), was certainly interesting. Wenders was concerned about the future of cinema, and so he went to Cannes during the 1982 Film Festival, hired a hotel room (room 666 was the only one available!), set up a camera and a piece of paper with a list of questions, and invited some of the world's leading film directors to go in and film their responses. In an earlier post I noted how to me movie directors often come across as extremely articulate and knowledgeable in a wide range of subjects when interviewed, so I was looking forward to the results of Wenders' experiment.

First up was Jean-Luc Godard, who certainly didn’t disappoint. According to Wenders' commentary on the DVD, Godard first asked how much film was in the camera (about 11 minutes' worth), and then proceeded to talk for exactly the amount of time required, attacking television and Hollywood among other things. The funny thing is, while his name is familiar to me, I don’t think I've ever seen any of Godard's films, although I did spot a DVD of La Chinoise on sale the other day (along with a couple of Michael Haneke movies) and briefly considered buying it.

After that it was pretty much downhill all the way, with few of the other directors having much of interest to say. At least Werner Herzog did something a bit different by taking off his shoes and socks. He was also the only interviewee to switch off the TV in the hotel room, which Wenders had left switched on before the start of each interview.

Well, whadya know. Here's the entire Jean-Luc Godard segment on YouTube. Love the music at the end!

The munted kidney

Monday, 3.10pm. I lie on a wheeled hospital bed in the Emergency Observation Area at Christchurch Hospital, the same bed I've lain on since arriving at the hospital shortly after 9am, waiting to be taken up for a CT scan. To my left is Mrs Fool, a Murakami Haruki paperback in her hand. To my right is a male nurse clutching a diagram of my urinary tract which he's just sketched on a notepad.

"It won’t be confirmed until we get the results of the CT scan, but nine times out of ten we can tell from the patient's description whether or not it's a kidney stone. The level of pain is a good indicator. They say it's enough to make a grown man cry."

"That it is," I say. "That it is"

The nurse closes the notepad and gets up to leave.

"Actually, do you mind if I keep that diagram?" I ask. "I know suckers who're prepared to pay good money for that kind of thing."

---

Monday, 6.50am. I awake and immediately become aware of a pain in my lower right abdomen. Is it the groin? Nope, the pain is too high and I can move my leg about without any trouble. I lie still for a while, hoping it will go away, but it doesn't. Moving slowly, I roll out of bed and put on my slippers and dressing gown. I feel a bit unsteady on my feet and slightly nauseous. I make it to the toilet but on the way back decide I'm in no fit state to make breakfast let alone work, so decide to head straight back to bed. The pain worsens. One of the cats jumps on to the bed and snuggles up to my head, intent on getting under the blankets. I appreciate the show of affection but my mind is on other things. Actually, it's on one thing: the pain in my abdomen.

I can't lie still, so I get up and shuffle to the bathroom. I take a Nurofen. Something tells me one won't be enough, so I take another. I walk around, try sitting down, but the pain persists. By this time Mrs Fool is worried. She follows me back to the bedroom, where I crumple onto my knees next to the bed, bury my head in my hands and in the bedclothes and start to sob. It isn't so much the pain, but the despair.

I need help. I ring my GP. The earliest he can see me is 11.15am. It's still only 8.40am. I confirm the appointment, but soon realize I won't be able to wait that long. We decide to go to A&E. As Mrs Fool gets ready, I dress and gather together a few items in case I end up being admitted. I'm able to send a brief email to a client telling them I won't be able to work today. In the car on the way to the hospital the pain worsens, and I sit clutching the handgrip above the door with both hands, moaning.

Mrs Fool drops me off at the entrance to A&E and I check in at reception while she goes to find a car park. She soon returns and together we wait to be called through to be seen by a doctor. There are about a dozen other people in the waiting area. None of them looks as bad off as me. Couldn't I go in first? It's too painful to sit. I'm most comfortable leaning over with my hands on the back of a chair.

Eventually we're called through and I'm asked to lie down in a cubicle. A doctor comes in, and after listening to my account of the morning's events and prodding my stomach, she says she thinks I have a kidney stone. A CT scan will confirm this, but first I need to provide a urine sample. Having just been to the toilet an hour or so ago, I'm unable to comply. Meanwhile I've hooked up to an intravenous drip and given several glasses of water. I've already been given paracetamol and codeine for the pain, but I'm still shaking rather badly and so I'm given morphine. A blood sample is taken. Some time later I manage to produce a small urine sample and the presence of blood in the urine backs up the initial diagnosis.

It's passed midday. I'm booked in for a CT scan at 3.15pm and taken through to the Emergency Observation Area. By this stage the pain has subsided. Mrs Fool, who'd gone home to get some lunch, returns with my iPod and a book but I don’t feel like listening to music or reading. I lie and wait.

---

Monday, 3.15pm. An orderly arrives to wheel me upstairs for my CT scan. While I'm there, I also have an x-ray. I'm wheeled down again, but I end up back at the cubicle in A&E instead of in the Emergency Observation Area where Mrs Fool is waiting. We're soon reunited. Half an hour or so later a urologist comes to give me the results. I have a 3mm stone near the end of my ureter (the tube connecting the kidney to the bladder), "high grade obstruction" and developing urinoma (an accumulation of urine around the kidney). As the chances of kidney infection are quite high in people with this latter condition, I'm admitted overnight for observation.

In bed up in the ward, I have a bite to eat then listen to music and read until I feel tired enough to sleep. I go to brush my teeth using the disposable toothbrush Mrs Fool thoughtfully brought along with the book and iPod, but when I rip open the plastic wrapping I find not a toothbrush but a hairbrush. I show it to the nurses when I go to borrow a real toothbrush, and they all have a good laugh.

I manage to sleep well until around midnight, when the pain returns. I'm given some more paracetamol and codeine, and a drug called doxazosin to assist the passage of the stone through to my bladder. I sleep on and off until breakfast time. I eat the cornflakes and fruit, but leave the cold toast.

At around 8.30am the urologist returns (with half a dozen members of her "team") and after a quick examination declares that I'm infection-free and free to go. It takes another hour for the paperwork to be done. Mrs Fool meets me at the main entrance to the hospital at 10am, by which time I've picked up my prescription, including a three-month supply of doxazosin.

---

Thursday, 2.00pm. I'm feeling remarkably well. I'm in a bit of discomfort, but I have very little pain, and I'm back to work. I'm still taking some pain medication, but more as a precautionary measure. I haven't touched the codeine they gave me. According to the discharge summary that arrived in the mail yesterday, "there is an estimated 85-90% chance this small stone will be passed spontaneously". No one has actually explained to me what will happen if it doesn't pass "spontaneously", although this post from Russell Brown's blog offers a few hints. Oh, and feel free to send in bids for the drawing.

Post-Tokaido

For a time after returning home from walking the Tokaido I was afraid I'd never walk again. When I say "walk again", I refer of course to traveling on foot over long distances. My groin and ingrown toenail problems put a damper on the first half of the Tokaido walk, and although I had them both under control by the time I reached Tokyo, the toe was quite sore for several weeks after I got back to New Zealand and this prevented me from doing any serious walking. Even after it got better, the physical and mental anguish I went through made me think I couldn’t cope with another long journey on foot.

I'm happy to report, however, that recently I've been thinking seriously about my next expedition. I briefly considered doing the Nakasendo again, this time in the opposite direction to that which we walked in 2007 (i.e. Tokyo to Kyoto). But then I thought that it would be better to tackle the remaining three old highways of Japan first, and so my attention turned to the Koshu Kaido (C on the map above), which links Tokyo with Shimo-Suwa in Nagano prefecture. Looking on a map, I saw that it would take me through some parts of Japan I've never visited before, including Kofu and the Fuji Five Lakes region (the latter not strictly on the Koshu Kaido, but close enough that I could travel there by train for a night).

A couple of weeks ago I sat down and worked out a schedule. At just over 210km, the Koshu Kaido is considerably shorter than both the Nakasendo and the Tokaido, and if I cover an average of around 20km a day I should be able to walk it in 12 days. I'm not sure when I'll do this. Ideally I'd like to be in Shimo-Suwa for the Onbashira festival, which would enable me to do some research for my movie/novel, but the next festival is in April next year, which is perhaps too soon. Then again, this festival is only held once every six years, so the next one after that won't be until 2016!

A Paradise Built in Hell

Wanderlust: A History of Walking was published in 2001. Rebecca Solnit's latest book is called A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. The following is from the Publishers Weekly review posted on Amazon:

Natural and man-made disasters can be utopias that showcase human solidarity and point the way to a freer society, according to this stimulating contrarian study. Solnit (River of Shadows) reproves civil defense planners, media alarmists and Hollywood directors who insist that disasters produce terrified mobs prone to looting, murder and cannibalism unless controlled by armed force and government expertise.

Surveying disasters from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake to 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, she shows that the typical response to calamity is spontaneous altruism, self-organization and mutual aid, with neighbors and strangers calmly rescuing, feeding and housing each other. Indeed, the main problem in such emergencies, she contends, is the elite panic of officials who clamp down with National Guardsmen and stifling regulations. Solnit falters when she generalizes her populist brief into an anarchist critique of everyday society that lapses into fuzzy what-ifs and uplifting volunteer testimonials. Still, this vividly written, cogently argued book makes a compelling—and timely—case for the ability of ordinary people to collectively surmount the direst of challenges.

Interestingly, it was his experiences during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake that finally convinced Kotoku Shusui, widely regarded as the father of Japanese anarchism, that society without government was possible. Back in Japan, Kotoku renounced parliamentarism and began advocating direct action. In 1907 he wrote, "A real social revolution cannot possibly be achieved by means of universal suffrage and a parliamentary policy. There is no way to reach our goal of socialism other than by the direct action of the workers, united as one." Kotoku was eventually arrested and executed as part of the so-called High Treason Incident. You may recall I blogged about this earlier in the year.

Your Order with Amazon.com

Delivery estimate: October 28, 2009 - November 18, 2009
Shipping estimate for these items: October 1, 2009

1 "Wanderlust: A History of Walking"
Rebecca Solnit; Paperback; $10.88
Sold by: Amazon.com, LLC

1 "Manituana"
Wu Ming; Hardcover; $17.79
Sold by: Amazon.com, LLC

The Sea at L'Estaque

Drizzle. Got up at around six thirty and watched the final hour or so of the cricket. Surprisingly considering our poor form of late and the injuries to three of our key players we beat England. We even ended up top of our pool. Better still, two of our nemeses, Sri Lanka and South Africa, are out of the tournament.

Checked my email. The work I was expecting to arrive over night hadn't come in, so I decided to go for a walk. Toyed with the idea of going to Riccarton, but eventually decided to head into town. Lovely flowers along the way. Sale at Country Road. Tried on some jackets, but nothing fit. Stopped at Alice in Videoland where I hired a Werner Herzog documentary, Wheel of Time, and a set of three Wim Wenders documentaries, including Tokyo-Ga (1985). The latter includes a scene with Werner Herzog atop Tokyo Tower. Here it is on YouTube without any subtitles. I have no idea what he's on about but it sounds important.



Went to a Japanese supermarket and bought some umeboshi for Mrs Fool, who's feeling poorly. Thinks she's coming down with a cold. Also went to the library. Surprised to find they had a copy of Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust, which I was about to order from Amazon. Unfortunately it was on loan.

On the way home I noticed how green the Port Hills looked. Green and brown. I tried to paint a copy of Paul Cézanne's The Sea at L'Estaque, but I couldn’t reproduce the colors. For years the painting (in acrylics on a large piece of cardboard) remained unfinished, hidden behind the sofa in the living room. Another project abandoned. Another dream unrealised.

Of reading and watching DVDs

The three books I ordered from Amazon at the start of August arrived early (they weren't supposed to get here until September, but they turned up in mid-August), so for a while I found myself in the highly unusual (for me) position of reading three things at the same time; two of the Amazon arrivals and Nelson deMille's The Charm School, an old favourite I was in the middle of rereading when the Amazon parcel arrived.

I've since polished off the DeMille and Werner Herzog's Of Walking in Ice. The latter, an account of the film director's 1974 journey on foot from Munich to Paris, was a little disappointing. At first I found the unusual writing style refreshing. Some of Herzog's antics also brought a smile to my face. For example, at night he usually sought shelter in barns or broke into abandoned houses or deserted holiday homes, always careful to cause as little damage as possible. In one of these homes he found a partially solved crossword puzzle on a table, which he completed before leaving the next morning. Many of the descriptions (of encounters with people he met or observed along the way, and in particular of the sense of separation that often accompanied such encounters; of aspects of the slowly passing countryside; of the state of his feet and groin) I could identify with. Some, like the following, verged on the poetic.

At the market was a boy on crutches, leaning against the wall of a house as my feet refused to cooperate anymore. With a single, brief exchange of glances we measured the degree of our relationship.

Once the novelty wore off, however, the writing style (and at times the translation) became a bit off-putting. Often it was difficult to distinguish real-time events from dreams, hallucinations, and memories of past events. Take the following passage, for example, in which Herzog describes reaching the Seine.

I could swim the rest of the way. Why not swim along the Seine? I swam with a group of people who fled from New Zealand to Australia - in fact I swam in front, being the only one who knew the route already. The only chance the refugees had of escape was to swim; the distance, however, was 50 miles. I advised people to take plastic footballs with them as additional swimming aids. For those who drowned, the undertaking became legendary before it even began. After several days we reached a town in Australia; I was the first one to come ashore, and those who followed were preceded by their wristwatches, which drifted half underwater. I grabbed the watches and pulled the swimmers ashore. Great, pathetic scenes of brotherliness ensued on shore. Sylvie le Clezio was the only one among them whom I knew. When it started to rain very hard again, I wanted to seek shelter in a roofed bus stop, but there were already several people there. I hesitated before creeping over to a school for cover.

Speaking of Herzog, so impressed was I with his documentary Encounters at the End of the World (which you'll remember I saw at the International Film Festival) that a week or so later I went out and hired two Herzog movies on DVD: Grizzly Man and Rescue Dawn. The former was quite amazing. Full of stunning landscapes, touching encounters with wild animals, one very strange protagonist, and the same heavily-accented, dry narration by the director that I so enjoyed in Encounters. I love it that a conspiracy theory has emerged that this documentary is in fact a fake. You can read a bit about it at IMDB.

Rescue Dawn I didn’t really enjoy. I've been a fan of Christian Bale ever since I saw him in American Psycho, but he seemed miscast in the role of Dieter Dengler, and the acting in general (or maybe it was the script) I found less than convincing. There was a so-so "making of" documentary on the DVD, which showed that Herzog (now in his mid-60s) is still a very "hands on" director who doesn't like making his actors do things he himself isn’t prepared to do, whether it be eating live insects or swimming in rapids.

Along with these Herzog movies I also rented Ed Sullivan Presents The Beatles, a two-DVD set featuring the four episodes of the Ed Sullivan Show on which The Beatles appeared in 1964 and 1965. You may recall that one of the other Amazon books I ordered was Revolution in the Head, a song-by-song analysis of all The Beatles' songs, so with this by my side I was able to read about each song as it was played on the show. Although I don’t remember ever seeing The Beatles "live" on TV as a youngster, some of the other acts they performed with on these shows definitely brought back childhood memories. There was Soupy Sales, familiar to me as a panelist on What's My Line, singing a corny song called "The Mouse". And there was Cilla Black. When I was a young boy, our whole family (perhaps with the exception of my rebellious eldest brother) would gather around the TV to watch her show, Cilla.

One thing I never knew (until reading about it in Revolution in the Head) was that that show's theme song, "Step Inside Love", was a Paul McCartney composition. In fact Cilla's connection with The Beatles was quite deep. According to Wikipedia, she started out as a cloakroom attendant at the Cavern Club in Liverpool where she used to give impromptu performances. John Lennon eventually introduced her to their manager, Brian Epstein, and persuaded him to give her an audition, where she was accompanied by The Beatles!

I still haven’t finished Revolution in the Head. When I took back the Ed Sullivan DVDs to Alice in Videoland I noticed they had The Beatles Anthology on DVD, so what I think I might do when I have some spare time (it's a five-DVD set) is hire that and read the entries for the songs as they're introduced in the documentary. This probably won’t be for a while. I started rewatching The Wire a few weeks ago, and I'm only halfway through season 3.

More Wanderlust

Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to nothing is walking. Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilling rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals.

Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit

Mid-winter treats

Christchurch winters can be pretty miserable. Among the few things to look forward to at this time of year are the Christchurch Arts Festival and the International Film Festival. I eagerly await the publication of the programs for these festivals each year (or every two years in the case of the former, which is biennial) and love going through and circling the various events I want to attend. I then add up how much it's all going to cost, and go through the programs again, re-circling the events I really don't want to miss.

This year I ended up going to two arts festival events and three movies. First up was the Sydney Dance Company's presentation of Rafael Bonachela's 360° at the Theatre Royal. Dance is something I haven’t seen a lot of in the past, so the novelty of the experience made the evening all the more enjoyable. The music was great, and I particularly liked the way video was incorporated into the various routines.

Next up was the Iiro Rantala New Trio, a jazz outfit from Finland, who performed in a tent-like structure in the middle of Cathedral Square. I was intrigued by the line-up for this show, which featured a pianist, a guitarist, and a beatboxer, but I was also a bit apprehensive, given that it's not the sort of jazz I normally listen to. It turned out to be a thoroughly entertaining evening. Rantala talked quite a bit between numbers, but thankfully he's a pretty funny guy (his dry humour reminded me of another Finnish jazz artist we saw at the same festival several years ago, Jukka Perko, so it may be a Nordic thing) so mostly these musings were a bonus. The notable exception was a joke about Susan Boyle and the moon landing, which quite rightly went down like the proverbial lead balloon.

The three movies I saw at the International Film Festival were Departures, North Face, and Encounters at the End of the World. I enjoyed them all, but Encounters made by far the greatest impression on me. Ostensibly a documentary about Antarctica and the people who work there, this movie is actually an exploration of our relationship with the planet and the universe. It's hard to avoid concluding that the famous scene with the disoriented penguin who wanders off alone in the direction of a distant mountain range (and certain death) is a metaphor for the human species.

Despite Herzog's at times hilarious narration, there's no escaping the fact that this is a dark movie (what movie that deals with the reality of global warming, among other things, wouldn't be). Having said that, its message isn’t entirely negative. There's something noble about the efforts of the scientists Herzog interviews to find answers to all manner of questions about the natural world around us, efforts the director contrasts with those of the early explorers who set out to "conquer" Antarctica and of people like the idiot who plans to pogo-stick to the South Pole.

The movie ends with one of the interviewees (not a scientist, but in fact a forklift operator at McMurdo Station) paraphrasing a quote by Alan Watts: "We are the witness through which the universe becomes conscious of its own glory." Watts is religious, but similar sentiments have also been expressed by non-religious figures, including Carl Sagan ("We are a way for the universe to know itself") and Murray Bookchin, who in The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy, my copy of which remains missing, describes humankind as "nature rendered self-conscious".

Although I've seen two documentaries about Werner Herzog (Burden of Dreams and Werner Herzog Eats his Shoe), this was the first documentary by him that I've seen. I'm now eager to see more. I'll probably start with Grizzly Man.

Some things don't pass

How big a fan of The Beatles was I? Well, the first album I ever bought (on vinyl, of course) was a compilation of Beatles songs called Love Songs. That wasn't the first album I ever owned, though. That honour goes to ABBA's Arrival, which my parents gave me as a Christmas present in 1976. OK, I admit I did ask them to buy it for me. If my memory serves me correctly, Arrival came with a very fetching poster of the band (I preferred the blonde).

My best friend in high school was also a big fan of The Beatles. In fact it was one of the few things we had in common. That and an interest in cycling. And a lack of girlfriends (perhaps the three were related). But while Peter was more a Paul fan (he even named his firstborn Prudence - luckily it was a girl), I was definitely a John fan.

Having said that, I also had a bit of a soft spot for George. One of my most prized possessions as a teenager was a copy of All Things Must Pass on vinyl, which Wikipedia informs me was the first triple album ever released by a solo artist. And when my parents went to London and asked us kids if there was anything we wanted over there, I requested a copy of The Concert for Bangladesh, also a triple album. A couple of years ago I bought the film on DVD, and still enjoy watching it from time to time. And while I've sold off a lot of my old records over the years, I still have The Concert for Bangladesh safely stashed away in a cupboard. It must be worth quite a bit of money now.

Anyway, today while browsing through the cheap DVDs at the Warehouse I came across an episode of the Classic Albums TV series on John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band. I've never seen this episode, but I'm a great fan of the series and love the album concerned. I'm looking forward to watching it.

Off topic

One of the dilemmas I created for myself when I started this blog and gave it the title The Walking Fool was what to do during those extended periods when I was not only not walking, but also not thinking much about walking. Back when I'd completed the Nakasendo walk and was really into running, I even considered starting up a completely new blog called…The Running Fool.

As you can see from the list of labels at left, I have written on quite a few different topics over the years. However, many of these topics are either directly or indirectly related to walking, and as I've mentioned previously, a lot of my posts (including this one) are composed at least partly in my head while I'm out walking (in this case to the supermarket and back). In the end, it just doesn’t feel right to write in this blog about things not related to walking in some form or another.

Which is all a roundabout way of saying that since I got back from walking the Tokaido nearly two months ago, I've hardly done any walking at all. So what have I been up to?

One thing I've been doing is refining my cooking skills. I'm working on perfecting recipes for a couple of things I've always wanted to have in my culinary repertoire: one a good vegetarian curry, and the other a good dahl. Judging by Mrs Fool's reaction, I'm definitely making progress on both.

I've also been reading quite a lot. I finally got around to reading Edmund White's The Flâneur, which is one of the books I bought in Wellington when I was up there for the Wellington Jazz Festival. It's a quirky and well-written volume, more a personal guide to and history of Paris than a book about walking per se. The Paris Commune was mentioned a couple of times, but there was no mention of the Situationists, surprising given the similarities (superficial though they may be) between the "drifting" of the Situationists and the favourite activity of the flaneur, described on the back cover as "someone who ambles without apparent purpose but is secretly attuned to the history of the street he walks - and is in covert search of adventure, aesthetic or erotic."

I've also read a couple more John Rain thrillers (including one I bought in Tokyo at the end of the Tokaido walk), which means I've now read all but one in the series. Incidentally, on my last day in Tokyo I'd intended to have lunch at one of the real-life restaurants frequented by John Rain, Las Chicas. I spent ages roaming the backstreets of Aoyama searching for it (I'd checked its location on the restaurant's website before leaving New Zealand and was pretty sure I knew where it was) but to no avail. Next time I'll take a map.

With my pile of unread books severely depleted and the New Zealand dollar the strongest it's been for many months, yesterday I logged onto Amazon and ordered three items from my Wish List. The first is Werner Herzog's Of Walking in Ice, the account of the film director's journey on foot from Munich to Paris to which I've previously referred. The second is Rain Storm by Barry Eisler (yes, it's the one John Rain novel I haven't read). And the third is Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties by Ian MacDonald.

That third item probably demands some explanation. Well, I was a serious Beatles fan in my teens, and I've recently started listening to their music again and watching some of their live performances on YouTube, a medium that wasn't around when I was at high school (this was back in the days of vinyl). I read about this book, which is a song-by-song analysis of every song ever released by the group, in a discussion in the comments section of Russell Brown's blog, Hard News, and thought it sounded really interesting. Coincidentally, another post on the same blog made just a few days earlier led to an equally fascinating discussion about food, with dahl featuring prominently.

Bear-viewing hikes in the Japan Alps

For most hikers, running into a bear while out in the woods is a bad thing—that’s why so many locals walk the trails with jingle bells attached to their gear. But for the participants on a special hiking tour in Nagano, finding a bear is the whole point.

Read the full story here.

The "best walk in the world"

According to Walkopedia, the kora (pilgrimage) around Mount Kailash in Tibet is the best walk in the world.

I've wanted to go to Tibet since I was a teenager. Getting to Mount Kailash would be half the fun. This tour takes you in on foot from Nepal. The gradual climb up the Humla Valley is designed so that your body can acclimatize to the extremely high altitude (over 5000m) at the actual mountain. The only drawback I can see is that there don't appear to be many cafes in the area.

The Tokaido walk in numbers

Total distance walked: 496.1km
Number of days: 25 (including two rest days)
Average distance walked per day (excluding rest days): 21.5km
Longest day: 27.8km
Shortest day: 12.1km
Maximum altitude reached: 846m
Total money spent during walk (including two rest days, not including time in Kyoto and Tokyo): 252,564 yen
Daily budget: 10,000 yen
Actual average amount spent per day: 10,102 yen
Number of blisters: 1
Number of mosquito bites: 9
Number of confirmed mosquito kills: 2
Number of snakes seen: 3 (including 1 deceased)
Number of bears, monkeys, wild boar seen: 0

Day 24: Kawasaki - Nihonbashi (19.7km)

I got up at 5.30am, showered, shaved and dressed, and then breakfasted on the bread, yoghurt, and iced coffee I'd bought at a convenience store the night before. My toe hadn’t given me any trouble for several days, so I left the bandage off and put a simple plaster on it.

I left at 8.30am. A couple of kilometres down the road I crossed the Tama River, which marks the boundary between Kanagawa prefecture and metropolitan Tokyo. On the other side of the bridge I paused for a few minutes to watch people at a golf practice range below. There were three tractor-like vehicles going around sweeping up the balls. Imagine driving one of those for a living!


I followed Route 15 for a while, eventually turning off at a memorial marking the location of the old Suzugamori execution ground, described on a nearby plaque as one of the "hundred scenic spots in Shinagawa". For the next couple of kilometres I followed a quiet shopping street. This is probably the only place within metropolitan Tokyo where people can experience something of the atmosphere of the old Tokaido, and I noticed quite a few people with maps and small backpacks exploring the area.

At noon I passed Shinagawa station. I'd been walking for three and a half hours without a proper break. It was time for lunch but I couldn’t find a place I liked the look of. I eventually stopped at a Segafredo coffee shop near the Sengakuji subway station and had a panini, a salad, and a cup of coffee. Soon after getting underway again I spotted Tokyo Tower and climbed a pedestrian overbridge to get a better view.


My surroundings were starting to look very familiar. At 1pm I found myself in front of Tamachi station, very close to my old university. At 1.20pm I passed Hamamatsu-cho station, just along from the hotel where I once worked. Then at 1.40 I reached Ginza. I was delighted to find that, being a Saturday, the street was blocked to traffic. I was able to walk down the middle of the street, although I noticed that a lot of the Japanese people around me still stuck to the footpaths.

My attention was drawn to a sumo wrestler in a yukata and I took his photo just in case he was famous. (It turns out he was an up-and-coming young wrestler by the name of Toyohibiki.)


I continued my parade through Ginza. I passed the famous Matsuya department store on my right and the Apple store on my left.


At 2.05pm I turned the final bend before Nihonbashi, which I could now see ahead of me in the distance. The brilliant weather, the lack of traffic, the knowledge that I was near my goal all combined to make me feel pretty elated. A few hours earlier I was eager to get to Nihonbashi, but now I wanted to make these final moments last. I saw an Excelsior coffee shop and decided to stop for one last iced coffee and a slice of cheesecake.

I got underway again at 2.30pm and slowly walked the final few hundred metres to the bridge that marks the eastern terminus of the Tokaido. It felt strange coming to the end of such a marathon journey alone. In 2007 I'd approached the same spot from the opposite direction after walking the Nakasendo with my friend Erik. Back then we'd hugged and congratulated ourselves when we got to the bridge before getting a passerby to take a couple of photos of us together. This time there would be no such celebrations.

I decided that I'd mark the occasion by taking some photos of myself with Nihonbashi in the background. Then I realized that I'd never photographed myself before with my still camera, so I took a few test shots as I neared my goal. When I reached the bridge it took me several tries before I managed to take a photo with both my face and the nameplate clearly visible. I hung around for a few minutes taking some more photos and then headed to my hotel down the road.


That evening I dined in my hotel room on a packet of potato crisps and a can of beer, followed by some fresh bread I'd bought at a bakery, an assortment of cheeses, a salad, some strawberry panna cotta, and a small bottle of white wine. I fell asleep in front of the TV at 8.30pm.

The End