Armchair treading

As many of us already know, there is a long tradition of writers who walk, or of walkers who write. (Which leads me to the question, which came first, the writer or the walk?) It’s been a favorite pastime of wordsmiths since, well, I don’t know exactly when, but we can easily trace treading as an art form to Wordsworth, Coleridge and the Romantic's penchant for opium induced strolls through the moors or, in the States, Emerson and Thoreau’s woodland wanderings. As we head into urban territory, there's Benjamin's and Baudelaire’s descriptions of the Parisian flaneur. There’s Virginia Woolf and Dickens in London; Whitman,  White and O’Hara in New York. I couldn’t attempt anything close to a comprehensive list, even for NYC alone, considering all of the lesser known walker/writer/poets/ bloggers that tread, or have treaded, or will tread these streets.    

Whitman, grandfather of NYC strolling and listing. 

For almost a year now, I have been dragging my feet (pardon the pun) on a half-started, slightly aimless “thesis”  that is based on NYC walking. I have the luxury of a professor who allows creative license for this project (an anomaly for a Literature MA at NYU) and am trying to develop my own narratives of the walking experience, presenting it interactively. (If you recall, I had posted a link to the start-up project or this, http://web.me.com/treadsoftlyny/ www.treadsoftlyny.com. ) Over the past few months I have been reading up on the subject, trying to get a sense of other writer’s walking experiences and their reactions and interpretations to city space, whether they have written on the art of walking itself, or have creatively processed their environments via walking. 

Since with this arctic influx many of you may be reluctant to take aimless treks about your respective neighborhoods, I thought I would start sharing some of this literature. You may therefore stay in the warmth of your home and still take a transformative arm-chair stroll through the city...and a bit beyond. While literature on walking may sound mind-numbingly boring, do not underestimate the capacity of the banal to shock and inspire! You may find yourself mesmerized by the odd feats of frantic, competitive walkers, trekking months at a time under the most bizarre of constraints. (You may also simutaneously find yourself feeling just a bit better about yourself and your own mental stability.) You may reassess the conceptual versus the physical through the toils of pilgrimage, or open the floodgates of memory as you traverse your childhood landscape. You may deeply appreciate your right to walk in public, a concept possibly taken for granted in this culture, or get caught in a noir-type plot, stalking mysterious subjects through the streets of Manhattan for reasons unbeknownst to you.  

Or, you may just be bored. 

The Lost Art of Walking , Geoff Nicholson  

After a martini or two I would walk the dark streets of Manhattan feeling a little "bagged," a bit "lit up," with a new strange sense of power and possibility, and as I found out later, risk of being run down. I wouldn't have cared. 

A recent release, this is my first time reading Nicholson (he’s written fiction as well as non-fiction), and since I enjoyed breezing through his blunt sarcasm, it won’t be my last. Full of quirky information about the history of walking, freakish walkers, musical walks, as well as following in the footsteps of Raymond Chandler, all subjects surround Nicholson's own relationship with trekking. A plus: his lack of, or at least minimal focus on, theoretical BS; simply put, he writes a book about walking, and he walks around a lot. While his writing is not specific to New York, he does dedicate a chapter to it, “A Man Walks Into a Bar: New York, the Shape of the City, Down Among the Psychogeographers and Mixologists." (Though, here, he somewhat points out the absurdity of psychogeography.) My purpose is not to review his book, so you can click here to see what the NY Times had to say. 

A Walker in the City , Alfred Kazin 

No other Brownsville street brings home to me so many of the external things I once lived with. Pitkin Avenue is what Brownsville is most proud of, for walking down it on a Saturday night, when all the lights are ablaze... 

This is a fairly short one that takes the reader on Kazin’s nostalgic walks through his childhood neighborhood of Brownsville, Brooklyn, where every block evokes a different character and memory. It also illustrates how walking was such a key part of Kazin’s growth, particularly as a thinker and writer. 

The Colossus of New York , Colson Whitehead 

You start building your own private New York the first time you lay eyes on it. 

Another short, poetic gem. Whitehead explores various settings and sentiments in the city—Central Park, Rain, Brooklyn Bridge, Rush Hour, to name a few—with a narrative for each section. 

Wanderlust , Rebecca Solnit 

We are eternally perplexed by how to move toward forgiveness or healing or truth, but we know how to walk from here to there, however arduous the journey. 

This is part journalism, part memoir, part cultural studies—a brilliant combo in my book. Again, though not specific to NYC as Solnit resides in San Francisco, she does include a section on "The Solitary Stroller in the City," which any city walker can relate to, and has some great introductory chapters about how our identity is literally linked bipedalism, stretching way back to the footprints at Laetoli . Her chapters on pilgrimage and labyrinths are also personal and insightful. A much more intellectual and serious tone than Nicholson (who does not seem to be a Solnit fan), so if you are not into somewhat heavy, in depth analysis (ie, "Aerobic Sisyphus and the Suburbanized Psyche"), this is possibly not for you...at least not in its entirety. 

The New York Trilogy , Paul Auster 

New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he came to know his neighborhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost. 

Three noir-type detective stories which involve a private investigator stalking his subjects through the streets of NYC. Auster is ridiculously absurd and refreshingly inventive, often playing around with identity. Concepts are just as much "stalked" in these stories as the characters.  

Photo of Walt Whitman was taken from: http://www.obitmag.com/media/image/Walt_Whitman_edit_2.jpg.