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