Search Results for: wayne curtis

He Told Me to Walk This Way

By in identity, the statusphere, walking No Comments

Mark Kingwell:

Even if one were inclined to agree with Gros’s vision of aimless walking—he is also against special shoes, clothing, and those pointed staffs that “are on sale to give walkers the appearance of improbable skiers”—he is awfully normative about the whole business. His demand for aimless, noncompetitive walking is just as judgmental and insistent as any other, and may sail closer to self-contradiction than most. You’re not doing aimlessness right! Walk this way!

There are two things I find interesting about this topic. One, the fact that there are apparently several books, all current, about the supposed “philosophy” of walking. This is a review of a new one from a French author. (Shanna, who enjoys tormenting me with emailed links to things I might have otherwise been mercifully ignorant of, had already alerted me to his existence.) Wayne Curtis, of course, has been an object of mockery here for a while now over his installment essays from his forthcoming book on the topic. Phil Oliver is working on one of his own. And a couple years ago, I read a book that grounded Thoreau’s philosophy in his habit of “sauntering”, which is a cooler, more exclusive way of walking. Honestly, how much unique is there to say about the “history” and “philosophy” of putting one foot in front of the other?

And two, the fact that the topic seems to lend itself quite naturally to ridiculous levels of signaling. The excerpt above could have been included in any of my own posts about the aforementioned Mr. Curtis, who seems unable to let his topic stand on its own two feet without leaning on the crutch of competitive status-seeking. Perhaps this is only to be expected. With very little to say for itself, walking as a purposeful philosophy has to rely on defining itself by contrast to what it is not, i.e., people who walk in the wrong places while thinking the wrong thoughts, people who only use it as an instrumental method of transport. The only way to make an utterly quotidian subject special is to invent a corpus of insights available only to the initiates.

Kingwell himself, though able to spot the speck in Gros’s eye, showed himself last year to be susceptible to the very same tendency to tell people they’re “doing X wrong”. Is there any escape from the circle of signaling?

Empty Free Unplugged

By in bring me the head of nicholas carr, identity, technology, the statusphere, walking No Comments

Casey N. Cep:

That is why, I think, the Day of Unplugging is such a strange thing. Those who unplug have every intention of plugging back in. This sort of stunt presents an experiment, with its results determined beforehand; one finds exactly what one expects to find: never more, often less. It’s one of the reasons that the unplugging movement has attracted such vocal criticism from the likes of Nathan Jurgenson, Alexis Madrigal, and Evgeny Morozov. If it takes unplugging to learn how better to live plugged in, so be it. But let’s not mistake such experiments in asceticism for a sustainable way of life. For most of us, the modern world is full of gadgets and electronics, and we’d do better to reflect on how we can live there than to pretend we can live elsewhere.

It seems like a fairly innocuous and sensible article to me. And yet, Freddie’s jimmies have gotten all a-rustled by it. He seems to think that Cep and people like her are overreacting out of feeling threatened by alternative behavior, in which case I can only say, blogger, critique thyself. Really, I don’t get any sense whatsoever that she’s acting to stamp out heresy. Not everything is an issue of insecure powerbrokers trying to maintain their sweaty grip upon the levers of control. People are just having a conversation, dude, relax.

It’s funny, because, looked at from a different angle, this would seem to be the kind of thing he usually criticizes: an impotent yet self-congratulatory little niche movement, another roundabout method of social sorting and status-seeking. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t have any problem with the Unpluggers myself, and I’m not accusing them of failing to live up to any revolutionary ideals. I’m just agreeing with Cep’s basic question: Why bring it up? Why make a “thing” out of it? Most of us cross the digital/meatspace border back and forth on a regular basis without feeling the need to Instagram the occasion. What does it mean to call attention to it?

In other words, rather than simply shut the laptop and go work in the garden for a while with no fanfare, the Unpluggers are consciously differentiating between the two experiences. As the poets might say, they’re naming the experiences in order to signify something about them. For example, walking. It’s something most of us have been doing since we were toddlers and continue to do when necessary, something we don’t often think about. But to someone like Wayne Curtis, walking is an ideological subject in itself. It is a very specific, purposeful action, perhaps even a way of life, with its attendant behaviors, attitudes and values. But by naming something, you’re also, if only by implication, calling attention to what it is not. And so, especially for a subject about which not much of interest can be said to begin with, one easy way to create an identity is to contrast the subject with its opposite. Thus walking, rather than being an unremarkable method of locomotion, also becomes a way of contrasting oneself favorably to those who don’t walk for pleasure.

What, then, are the Unpluggers signifying by the conspicuous way they go about their business? Why have they decided, like dilettante Amish, to draw the line at technology developed in the last two decades or so? These are perfectly valid questions for someone like Cep to ask. What, this is part of your identity? This is an important ritual behavior for you? Well, okay, that’s fine; I’m sure the marketing department is already preparing some targeted ads for your demographic to aid in your quest for an authentic, analog experience. I hope you didn’t have any higher aspirations than that, though.

Pretenderfoot

By in fresh hell, walking 7 Comments

I realize this is just his thing, his niche topic, but Lord, Wayne Curtis is such a ridiculous plonker:

The long and short of it: After five million years of perfecting the art of walking upright, we’ve lost the battle in maintaining the spaces that welcome us on foot. And this feeds the cycle of our walking less, and thus rendering it less important. “Landscape design” has the sound of something effete and precious, an art practiced by the overeducated for the overcompensated. But it’s not. In fact, creating the right landscape may be central to our survival.

If we want to get people walking and experiencing their environment and community and avoiding the chronic diseases that are the burgeoning byproducts of sedentariness, it’s not enough to hector and cajole people. Landscaper designers must be teamed up with urban planners to create inviting habitat to lure people from their cocoons of steel.

In short, in working the land, we need to also pay attention to genetics, lest we evolve into limbless rubber balls. Or perhaps we’ll regress to a quadrupedal species, unable to move about without four limbs: Two feet on pedals and two hands on a wheel.

Or perhaps we’ll become peripatetic cyborgs who walk in place on machines while watching TV or listening to music through headphones, being that actual evolution is not limited to the unimaginative value-judgments of your romantic fantasies. Speaking of which, my trusty treadmill passed away a few days ago, after more than eight years of loyal, regular service. Thousands, literally thousands of glorious miles spent in each other’s company. Not bad at all for the cheapest, most basic model being sold at the time. If I unreservedly recommend Proform for all your inauthentic walking needs, could I perhaps get a sponsorship from the company? For a free treadmill, hell, yes, I’ll gladly put the company logo in the sidebar and urge all of you to contribute to Curtis’s dyspepsia by getting one yourself. If not, this would be a good time for one of my fabulously wealthy lurking readers to step out of the shadows and become a benefactor. You want me to remain in good health to keep writing indefinitely, don’t you? Maybe I’ll even throw in a picture of my chiseled muscular legs as a bonus.

And Just Last Night I Walked With a Zombie

By in fresh hell, technology, the statusphere, walking No Comments

The biggest problem with the digital zombie is not the walking into signposts. It’s more insidious than that, and involves an incurable disharmony with the outside world. A walker strolling down the sidewalk mulling how many exclamation points to append to his or her Facebook status update about walking down the sidewalk is not really here. Studies suggest that he or she is even more disconnected from the actual world than is someone driving 80 miles an hour across west Texas at two in the morning while cranking Carlos Santana.

…Stopping, looking, lifting your head up, searching around you for something… it’s all part of what being human means, of what we evolved to do.

Yes, Wayne Curtis is back again to remind you that you’re doing this walking thing all wrong. Getting to your destination in one piece without causing mayhem isn’t good enough; you’ve got to be absorbing the proper sensory stimuli and thinking about it in the right way to earn his approval. That’s all predictable romantic tripe, of course; I just enjoy the facile way he invokes evolution, of all things, to support his rigid, retrograde definition of what counts as “the actual world,” when, as far as evolution gives a fuck, humans could end up as half-android beings on spaceships eating freeze-dried nutritional powders and getting all their exercise through use of machines.

Santutthi Paramam Dhanam

By in bring me the head of nicholas carr, foolosophy, santutthi, walking No Comments

Wayne Curtis:

What do we lose by walking less, and breaking up our walks into Halloween-candy sized missions? We lose that opportunity to tightly stitch together our world. A long walk — it takes about three hours to walk 10 miles, and without breaking a sweat — gives us time with our thoughts, and establishes the right speed to appreciate the complexity of the world around us. It gives us time to plait the warp of random observations and the woof of random thought. We create a narrative and a place. Americans drive an average of 13,400 miles each year, or about 36 miles a day. The one time people spend long periods alone with their thoughts tends to be in a car — on long drives or stuck in traffic. But it’s not the same. In a car, we’re cocooned, isolated from a complex environment that can engage us.

And as traffic historian Tom Vanderbilt has noted, our highway system today essentially mimics “a toddler’s view of the world, a landscape of outsized, brightly colored objects and flashing lights” as we speed along “smooth, wide roads marked by enormous signs.” Heading down an on-ramp to merge onto a highway, it’s as if we’re entering a day care center for adults. We push on pedals and turn a big wheel. We communicate with others by blaring a horn that plays a single note, or by employing a hand signal that involves a single finger.

“‘The pedestrian mind doesn’t get very far in a day, but it has the opportunity to see where it is going,” noted a writer in the Saturday Review of Books. That was written in 1928, and even then — when the gulf between walking and driving was scarcely a gully — he could see the outlines of two differing ways of thinking: The walking mind and the driving mind. (“Vehicular minds move under some other power than themselves and hence grow flabby and become crowd minds, standardized and imitative.”)

Like Robert Shaw’s death scene in Jaws, I felt myself helpless with horror as the entire point of this essay tumbled, slipped and slid down the logical incline, dragging the reader toward the mindlessly gnashing teeth of the inevitable Nicholas Carr reference. And sure enough, crunch crunch munch gulp, the modern world is makin’ us stoopid.

You see this a lot. I suppose “Hey, I enjoy casually strolling around and thinking ’bout stuff” doesn’t have enough of a hook to hang an essay upon. Too straightforward. Gotta have some kind of peripheral angle, something topical, something to flatter engage the reader. Sighing about how shallow and frivolous most people are (not the author, and certainly not the discerning readers); now, that’s a perennial theme. Wistful reflections on a lost age when things were otherwise, ditto. “Strolling around thinking about stuff makes you a better, deeper, more authentic person than all the stupid schlubs in their stupid cars,” ah, that’s the stuff we’re looking for.

There’s a receptive, contemplative state of mind that I feel is most conducive to genuine intelligence. Perhaps some people are more congenitally inclined to it, but you know what another necessary ingredient is? Time. Leisure. A principled refusal to Taylorize one’s entire life for the sake of accomplishment and efficiency. You don’t have to live in a walkable community. You don’t have to handwrite all your letters with a quill on a scroll. You don’t have to spend an hour every evening cooking your food with ingredients from the farmer’s market, or make your own soap from scratch, or sit on an official meditation cushion. None of those affectations will make a profound difference in your life if you don’t have that.

I Made a Pilgrimage to Save the Human Race

By in foolosophy, identity, ohferfucksake, the statusphere, walking 2 Comments

James Jeffrey:

“To walk the city and its environs is, in a very powerful sense, to use it,” Self says. “The contemporary [walker] is by nature and inclination a democratizing force who seeks quality of access, freedom of movement and the dissolution of corporate and state control.”

Self makes the point that there are two types of walking. The first, such as walking to work, has an obvious objective, and the second, walking simply for the sake of it, serves “as a resource that can refresh us physically, aesthetically and even spiritually.”

Self writes about the surrealist poet Louis Aragon, who, drawing on foot-bound ventures around Paris, described how the walker could, if sufficiently alive to nuances of place and atmosphere, experience the “moment.” This, Self says, is the “ambulatory equivalent of the sort of insights the surrealists believed they received from dreams, séances, automatic writing and other methods they used to short circuit the deadening influence of rationality.”

But increasingly we are boxing ourselves in with rationality, data, and sheer laziness. Self notes that with each passing year, the number of journeys taken on foot declines. At the current rate, walking may die out as a means of transport by the middle of this century.

I ask, as I have so many times before, what is it about the utterly ordinary act of walking that turns people into such insufferable wankers?

We spent last weekend walking around the university and its surrounding streets and footpaths. It’s one of our favorite things to do. Whenever our business travels take us to a university town, we like to spend a couple hours in the early morning strolling around campus and downtown with only the birds, squirrels and chipmunks for company. That’s in addition to the mountain hikes we also enjoy. I say all this in the hope of establishing my ambulatory bona fides so that you won’t be too dismissive when I tell you that all this romantic rhetoric about the mystical salvation to be found on foot is no different from any other marketing manure. Walking is an enjoyable activity in and of itself, but it’s not a cure for the tragedy of the human condition. Before the first step, or after a thousand miles, it makes no difference. You’re still going to be largely the same person with the same weaknesses and problems.

When luxuries and comforts become too widespread and easily obtained, the only way for snobs to distinguish themselves is to pretend that they’re privy to a secret truth hidden in plain sight, unavailable to the uninitiated. When possessions are too common, you start selling experiences. People, being a social species, naturally feel insecure and uncomfortable when others snub them. Oh, no! Is it because my armpits stink, or because I haven’t appreciated the right art in the right way while partaking of the right travel experience? Either way, there’s someone waiting to sell you the temporary answer. No one is ever content where they are; we’re always easily convinced that lasting satisfaction lies elsewhere, and thus spend our time pursuing carrots dangling from sticks attached to our bridles. An article like this doesn’t exist to share the subtle pleasure that a long walk can bring; it exists to make you feel anxious about the degraded state of the world, afraid that cool artists like J.G. Ballard and Will Self might see you as one of those simple-minded, suntanned wage slaves, and desperate for reassurance that an ecstatic alternative exists to the ordinary chore of getting on with life as best as you can. Walk on, dear reader, walk on.

Mesmerize the Simple Minded, Propaganda Leaves Us Blinded

By in identity, ohferfucksake, the statusphere No Comments

Mark Edmundson:

But, some might counter, there is absorption in our culture. And plenty of it. Look at the face of the young man watching TV (during this, the purported golden age of television), the young woman at the movies, the kid in his basement playing his first-person shooter video game. Is this not absorption?

I think not. It pays, I believe, to distinguish between being absorbed and being mesmerized. Modern life avails one of plentiful opportunities to be mesmerized, enchanted, visually inebriated now: The condition is not hard to bring on. In a culture that asks us too often to “pay attention,” we need rest and release, and we can find both through the mesmerizing powers of current electronic culture. Ideally, paying attention should be rewarded by absorption, but when absorption isn’t found, or no one teaches us how to achieve it, then being mesmerized will have to do. Being mesmerized is all about wish fulfillment. It’s about becoming the soldier, becoming the knight, becoming the sports star, becoming the princess. It is a turning away from reality. To be absorbed is to intensify one’s connection with what is real with the hope of reshaping it for the better, if ever so slightly. The engaged and absorbed doctor wants health for his patient; the scientist wants to add to the stock of available knowledge; the true poet hopes to bring beauty and truth, pleasure and instruction, to her readers. These people are not cheering themselves on or inflating their sense of self. They are acting out of love for the world, and, in return, they receive one of life’s best gifts: simple absorption.

Assuming I’ve understood this taxonomy correctly, “paying attention” is like working a typical job, being “absorbed” is like having a beloved hobby, and being “mesmerized” is like being an unemployed pothead. Eh, whatever. Another pointless exercise in rhetorical bubble-blowing. The only interesting thing about it to me is, once again, seeing how an author’s paean to this or that virtue or activity always seems to involve a judgmental condemnation of those who aren’t doing it correctly, no matter how petty the distinction. You can’t even sing the praises of walking or loafing without simultaneously creating dubious status hierarchies to make sure your readers know you’re one of the elect.

I mean, really, I love the simpleton faith here that “reality” doesn’t involve significant amounts of illusion, imagination and daydreaming. Hell, his naïve vision of a world of selfless heroes creating endless incremental improvement is quite a mythical fantasy itself.