Tag: Gertrude Stein

18. Ann de Forest, editor, Ways of Walking

I was on a Zoom call a couple of weeks ago, learning more about a walking workshop I’ll be part of in early May. I recognized the name of one of the other participants: Ann de Forest. Don’t I have a book by her? I asked myself. When the call ended, I went looking. Yes, there it was: Ways of Walking. It’s been a while since I read something about walking. Why not give Ways of Walking a try?

What’s a good metaphor to describe the collection of personal essays? A buffet, a smorgasbord, a feast? (It’s getting close to supper time–can you tell?) The 26 authors included show how moving through the world on foot is connected to so many other aspects of experience, individual and collective and both together: grief, curiosity, memory, connection, anger, caretaking, assault. Ever asked yourself what it might be like to walk through Philadelphia–many but not all of the essays here describe walking in that city, the home of its editor–if you’re African American? Wonder what it’s like to walk in places that have been colonized? Want to know about walking and disability, or walking and illness, or walking and injury? As a woman, if that’s not how you identify? Thinking about walking and pilgrimage? All of that, and more, is included here. The writers aren’t shy about giving credit to their literary forebears, either. Thoreau makes multiple appearances, as does Virginia Woolf; the Little Prince shows up, as does Hart Crane, Yi-Fu Tuan, Gertrude Stein, and Aphra Behn. Ways of Walking is a rich collection of perspectives and references.

Some of the thinking here caught me unawares. For instance, Justin Coffin, in the final essay suggests that there are “two kinds of great journeys: we are either Theseus escaping the labyrinth or Odysseus trying to get home.” I want to steal that idea. David Hallock Saunders remembers walking games his father played with him in Los Angeles when he was a boy, games that recall the playful way that the Situationists and, more recently, psychogeographers like Phil Smith navigate the city. Ann de Forest’s essay about walking in Los Angeles encourages me to rethink what I imagine that city to be like. Ruth Knafo Setton, remembering walking with her late father, suggests that “[w]alking is an act of gratitude for our ability to perceive, to move with our bodies, and to see and absorb with our senses.” Walking gives Lena Popkin “two conflicting, almost clashing, emotions”: as a woman and a survivor of sexual assault (more and more it seems those two groups of people are one and the same, a Venn Diagram that overlaps completely), she feels “both apprehensive and calm, often in the same walk and sometimes at the same time.” Once again, I was reminded of how limited the notion of a text being “relatable” is. We ought to read to understand difference, not similarity–to learn something new, even if that’s difficult.

My favourite essay in this collection, I think, is Sharon White’s “Walking (Variations on Thoreau).” It’s a beautifully written braided essay, and I’m a sucker for beautifully written braided essays. Half of the time I wasn’t sure what was going on in White’s essay, and it didn’t matter:

In the pine forests it’s not a handicap to be alone. A group of fishermen give me a map. A ranger says I should have had an ice ax, but I don’t. I take a day or so to reach the ridge and then it’s splendor wherever I look. The chime of the wind crashing against my ears. In the morning I can’t see, my eyes pinned shut by bees. My first-aid kit is useless. But I can make it down to the series of clear sandy streams emptying into pools where I strip off my clothes and soak my bites in the water.

Had I not been on that Zoom call, had I not recognized de Forest’s name, this book would’ve stayed on its shelf, and I would’ve missed reading that paragraph. You just can’t predict what wonderful surprises are waiting for you.

12. Tommy Orange, There There

Yesterday, I wrote that at this point in the semester I only have time to read books I’m teaching. That wasn’t entirely true. I managed to finish Tommy Orange’s There There last night. Jenna Hunnef, a colleague from the University of Saskatchewan, is coming down to Regina on Friday to give a talk on this novel, and since I’m the organizer, I thought I needed to reread There There so I could ask an intelligent question during the discussion–or at least a question informed by something beyond a reading from six years ago.

For some reason, I have a copy of the hardcover edition of There There. I don’t recall why I was so eager to read this book, but I think there may have been a positive review in The New Yorker. Before rereading it over the past week or so, all I could remember was that I liked this book. Now I remember why.

Jenna’s paper is about neomodernism in this novel, and there are signs of modernism everywhere in it: in the quotations that begin the book’s four sections (from Bertolt Brecht, Javier Marías, Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, and Jean Genet); in the title’s allusion to the famous remark of Stein’s about Oakland, California, having “no there there,” which one of the novel’s characters, Dene Oxendene, explains to us, which is also the title of a Radiohead song; and in the narrative structure. The book is a collage of voices, almost all of which belong to urban Indigenous people living in Oakland or with some connection to that city. For the first half of the novel, those characters speak to us in third person, tightly focalized on their thoughts, feelings, and experiences; in the second half of the novel, that narrative mode opens up a little to include chapters in first-person and also (the quite rare) second-person narration. To me, the term “collage” is essential to understanding how this novel works, partly because part of its collage includes two collage essays (one in the prologue, one in a chapter identified as an “interlude”). Sometimes, when characters appear, I wasn’t sure if I had met them before, and I would flip back through the book looking for them; sometimes I’d find them, sometimes not. My bad, really, for not tracking the characters on a sheet of paper as they appeared. This novel demands that kind of attention. Modernist texts tend to require effort. That’s okay. We all need more cognitive friction in our lives; it’ll help us deal with the other kinds of difficulty we experience.

There There is also the story of a heist, kind of like Stanley Kubrick’s film noir The Killing, which is (I think) an intertext here, although There There‘s structure is so much more complex than the one in that movie. I’m not going to say anything else, because I don’t want to spoil anything for anybody, but I think it’s fair to say that signs of doom are everywhere, from the first chapter, where Tony Loneman (a 21-year-old Cheyenne man with FASD) tells us that his favourite rapper is MF Doom. The robbery, though, is important in two other ways: as a version of the lateral violence that colonialism has left the Indigenous characters with, and also as a version of colonialism itself, which has led to multiple thefts from Indigenous Peoples: of land, of resources, and through boarding schools and residential schools, of languages, cultures, and ceremonies. Colonialism doesn’t define these characters, even as they struggle to survive and resist it, but it’s their world. If they were fish, it would be the water in which they swim, something omnipresent but also, perhaps, hard to identify. It’s easier to see their struggles as personal. They are personal, sure, unique to them, but they’re part of that broader reality.

If you’re in Regina, and you want to know more, come to La Cité 215 on Friday afternoon at 2:30 to hear what Jenna has to say. There will be cookies–the good kind. You don’t need to have read the book beforehand, although you might be inspired to get a copy afterwards.