Geoff Nicholson's Blog, page 66
September 29, 2010
SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION
The UK edition of THE LOST ART OF WALKING has now been published by Harbour Books, available wherever it is people buy their books these days.
It looks like this:
It's different in small but significant ways from the American edition: some cuts, some reworking, a couple of new chapters, and a slightly different subtitle.
Partly as publicity for the book there's an online audio interview with me, at talkingwalking.net, which is run by the estimable andrew Stuck, and is a good thing. It looks like this:
And I believe that if you click RIGHT HERE you'll get to the site.
It looks like this:
It's different in small but significant ways from the American edition: some cuts, some reworking, a couple of new chapters, and a slightly different subtitle.
Partly as publicity for the book there's an online audio interview with me, at talkingwalking.net, which is run by the estimable andrew Stuck, and is a good thing. It looks like this:
And I believe that if you click RIGHT HERE you'll get to the site.
September 27, 2010
THE REVENGE OF THE ROOT
A couple more things about walking and San Francisco. First, this place:
It's a section of Lombard Street, in Russian Hill, known as the crookedest street in the world, eight hairpin bends, necessitated by the 27 degree gradient. It's a great tourist attraction (and it must be absolute hell to live there).
Quite a few people simply drive their car down it – it's one way - very slowly and with great care, which is understandable but surely it takes all the fun out of it. Doing it carelessly, at high speed, after a couple of drinks, would surely be the way to get the best out of it. But most people approach it on foot, having arrived by tour bus or cable car.
Some honest souls do walk up from the bottom and then walk down again. A few, I'm sure, do it the other way round. But far more people design a route so they can approach from the top, walk down and then go on their way, which seems a bit like cheating to me. And a considerable number just stand around at the bottom taking photographs of other people walking up or down, which is just sad.
Of course, having some claims to be a walker, I felt I had to walk up. I'd actually walked there from Union Square, but I'm not trying to show off. I intended to count the steps, as I made the ascent, but frankly I got distracted. Actually they're beautifully easy steps, many of them just half steps so the ascent is made as gentle as possible. But it was a warm day and what with having to avoid all the other people coming down, by the time I got to the top, I'd lost count, didn't in fact care much about counting at all.
Sources tell me there are 250 steps, which I can believe, though as I say most aren't very big steps. And of course, being an LA resident, I was reminded of the line in Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely after Marlowe's climbed two hundred and eighty steps up to Cabrillo Street in Montemar Vista, "It was a nice walk if you like grunting," Marlowe says. I didn't do much grunting but I did a fair bit of sweating. It was nice to have the descent to look forward to.
Another, recent discovery about walking, with some relevance to San Francisco, although the event itself took place in Bolinas, concerns Richard Brautigan. That's him and his daughter Ianthe below, in North Beach, San Francisco, photographed by Vernon Merritt III.
Brautigan, incidentally was a non-driver, a very good thing given how much he drank, but it obviously became quite a problem when he moved to Montana, though that isn't the story.
Ianthe Brautigan wrote a strange and moving book about her father, titled "You Can't Catch Death." In it she tells the story of when he moved to a big, scary, Arts and Crafts house set back in a steep hillside in Bolinas. Huge trees grew around the house and although Brautigan paid to have the dead branches cut off, he wouldn't let them touch any of the live foliage. Consequently the house became shrouded in gloom and at night it was so dark it was hard to find even the doors of the place.
Then one day, "in broad daylight" Ianthe says, Brautigan was walking from the back door to the front of the house and fell and broke his leg. Ianthe says she expected a dramatic story of how it happened, but Brautigan simply said, "I just tripped on a tree root." Good for him. As I know all too well, the stories of authors who break their limbs while walking are best kept simple.
It's a section of Lombard Street, in Russian Hill, known as the crookedest street in the world, eight hairpin bends, necessitated by the 27 degree gradient. It's a great tourist attraction (and it must be absolute hell to live there).
Quite a few people simply drive their car down it – it's one way - very slowly and with great care, which is understandable but surely it takes all the fun out of it. Doing it carelessly, at high speed, after a couple of drinks, would surely be the way to get the best out of it. But most people approach it on foot, having arrived by tour bus or cable car.
Some honest souls do walk up from the bottom and then walk down again. A few, I'm sure, do it the other way round. But far more people design a route so they can approach from the top, walk down and then go on their way, which seems a bit like cheating to me. And a considerable number just stand around at the bottom taking photographs of other people walking up or down, which is just sad.
Of course, having some claims to be a walker, I felt I had to walk up. I'd actually walked there from Union Square, but I'm not trying to show off. I intended to count the steps, as I made the ascent, but frankly I got distracted. Actually they're beautifully easy steps, many of them just half steps so the ascent is made as gentle as possible. But it was a warm day and what with having to avoid all the other people coming down, by the time I got to the top, I'd lost count, didn't in fact care much about counting at all.
Sources tell me there are 250 steps, which I can believe, though as I say most aren't very big steps. And of course, being an LA resident, I was reminded of the line in Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely after Marlowe's climbed two hundred and eighty steps up to Cabrillo Street in Montemar Vista, "It was a nice walk if you like grunting," Marlowe says. I didn't do much grunting but I did a fair bit of sweating. It was nice to have the descent to look forward to.
Another, recent discovery about walking, with some relevance to San Francisco, although the event itself took place in Bolinas, concerns Richard Brautigan. That's him and his daughter Ianthe below, in North Beach, San Francisco, photographed by Vernon Merritt III.
Brautigan, incidentally was a non-driver, a very good thing given how much he drank, but it obviously became quite a problem when he moved to Montana, though that isn't the story.
Ianthe Brautigan wrote a strange and moving book about her father, titled "You Can't Catch Death." In it she tells the story of when he moved to a big, scary, Arts and Crafts house set back in a steep hillside in Bolinas. Huge trees grew around the house and although Brautigan paid to have the dead branches cut off, he wouldn't let them touch any of the live foliage. Consequently the house became shrouded in gloom and at night it was so dark it was hard to find even the doors of the place.
Then one day, "in broad daylight" Ianthe says, Brautigan was walking from the back door to the front of the house and fell and broke his leg. Ianthe says she expected a dramatic story of how it happened, but Brautigan simply said, "I just tripped on a tree root." Good for him. As I know all too well, the stories of authors who break their limbs while walking are best kept simple.
THE REVENGE OF THE ROOT
A couple more things about walking and San Francisco. First, this place:
It's a section of Lombard Street, in Russian Hill, known as the crookedest street in the world, eight hairpin bends, necessitated by the 27 degree gradient. It's a great tourist attraction (and it must be absolute hell to live there).
Quite a few people simply drive their car down it – it's one way - very slowly and with great care, which is understandable but surely it takes all the fun out of it. Doing it carelessly, a...
It's a section of Lombard Street, in Russian Hill, known as the crookedest street in the world, eight hairpin bends, necessitated by the 27 degree gradient. It's a great tourist attraction (and it must be absolute hell to live there).
Quite a few people simply drive their car down it – it's one way - very slowly and with great care, which is understandable but surely it takes all the fun out of it. Doing it carelessly, a...
July 22, 2010
BUSTERED
I was recently in San Francisco, a walker's town, though only for those who like a bit of intense aerobic exercise as they plough up the killingly steep inclines. I'm not sure I enjoy it exactly but I tell myself it must be doing me good. And of course once you get the lay of the land you do become able to find routes that leave out the worst of the ascents. I'm better than I used to be, but I still find I'm the only person pounding up streets that everybody else is walking down.
One way y...
July 19, 2010
IN THE MIDDAY SUN: A FREEWAY WALK
I swear this really happened. I was walking in Hollywood, heading north on Wilton Place, where it crosses the 101, right before Sunset Boulevard. in sight of The Home Depot. The day was hot, and I wasn't moving very fast, and I'd slowed even more to look down at the traffic on the freeway below, when a car pulled up beside me and the driver got out and ran round the car to face me.
Now I've been in situations similar to this before and generally it hasn't been the prelude to anything good, but...
In the Midday Sun: A Freeway Walk
I swear this really happened. I was walking in Hollywood, heading north on Wilton Place, where it crosses the 101, right before Sunset Boulevard. in sight of The Home Depot. The day was hot, and I wasn't moving very fast, and I'd slowed even more to look down at the traffic on the freeway below, when a car pulled up beside me and the driver got out and ran round the car to face me.
Now I've been in situations similar to this before and generally it hasn't been the prelude to anything good, but...
June 15, 2010
MAN RAY- RHYMES WITH RUSCHA (KIND OF)
Right before we finally signed the deal to buy the house we now live in, my wife and I did a walk through which the vendor, and he pointed at various things, saying, "I'm taking that, but I'm leaving that" etc. Generally, of course, he was leaving the things we didn't want, taking the things we did.
And at some point we came to the wall above the couch, on which was a signed poster of Man Ray's "Observatory Time: The Lovers," signed by the artist.
"I don't suppose you're leaving that behind,...
June 3, 2010
IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD
In general I like to have a destination when I walk, even if it's only the local book store or supermarket. But since I lead a sedentary life, working at home, once in a while I step outside my front door and simply walk around the neighborhood for half an hour or forty five minutes, for the sake of a break, and in the belief that walking is in itself an inherently good thing.
As I was growing up, whenever my dad or granddad or one of my uncles went out for no apparent reason, my mother or o...
May 21, 2010
I'LL WALK ON
A recently published book, Beckett: Photographs by François-Marie Banier, had its origins in 1978 when the photographer happened to be on vacation in Tangier and saw Samuel Beckett, the great dramatic poet of angst and stasis, walking along in shorts and sandals, carrying a shoulder bag and heading for the beach.
At first it seems that Banier more or less stalked Beckett, like a paparazzo, but somewhere along the line they became friends, and the book also contains photographs from the late...
May 20, 2010
Geoff Nicholson's Blog
- Geoff Nicholson's profile
- 55 followers
Geoff Nicholson isn't a Goodreads Author
(yet),
but they
do have a blog,
so here are some recent posts imported from
their feed.
