Um,

hmmm,

uh,

cough cough cough.

I'm a 56-year-old white guy who goes walking every day, in a landscape that needs to be walked. Whether it's by a white guy, a white woman, or someone black or brown, the walk is vitally important, more important than blackness, whiteness, brownness or gender. Not that gender and other matters are irrelevant, but so's the walk. I know people walk for different reasons, but i walk to get out of my human social head . Imagine, being continually judged by something one is not. A white guy with white hair walking through white grass? Bah. More like white grass walking through white hair. Or something. In my world, the earth comes first. If a writer betrays that, it doesn't matter to me who he or she is. I can't read it.

Fortunately, I'm not an academic, so I have that choice. I'm just finishing up a manuscript. It contains walking. Here's the thing: no one else has done this walking, or at least written about it. The walk is important. The fate of a landscape (in Canada) is at stake. The fate of cultures is at stake.

I think some respect for the walking would go a long way. And for aging white guys who spent the years of their possible academic careers raising their children so their wives could have their management careers. Are rants against white guys actually "rants against white guys"? Do people hate white guys for being white and being guys, or for certain issues of class, privilege and plaster-headedness? The latter, I think. "White" and "guy" are rather trivial in and of themselves.

So, I make a suggestion. Rather than ranting about white guys, or any one else, for that matter, could we concentrate on ranting about issues and attitudes, of a specific nature? I'm just reading Fermor's "A Broken Voyage" and, no, it's not by a woman, but, sheesh, what a journey he made, and what a gift he gave us all. It would be better to have a woman's walking book to go alongside it, but I'll take Fermor's over nothing. 

Um, can I make an observation, too? Sure I can. Here it is: if walking is reduced to an interhuman gender war, then it is an interhuman gender war and not walking. For this, however, there is an antidote: walking. 

:-)

Which is not talking (and not writing). Books about walking are perhaps a weird kind of dinosaur, and one day we will find that their heads and their tails don't come from the same beast at all and we will take them apart into a) a cardboard suitcase and b) a pink Trabbant. And go out and have a pint of bitter and laugh our heads off at the quaintness of our youths misspent in literature and the Cold War.

That being said, until then I don't like stuffy books about walking, in whatever shape they come, but I love this book:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jun/17/river-woolf-olivia-laing-review

The review is dumb. I don't think I'd want to go walking with Mr. Bate.  I don't think he understood the book at all, and I think part of that has to do with gender and a lot of it has to do with poetry. I don't think he'd fare well with an intuitive book of poems, either. I think he just plain likes to judge things, based on criteria that have nothing to do with them. 

No doubt, he's the kindest, most generous man, and it's only the review that appears to suggest otherwise. I hope so.

 Ms. Laing, however, would be an honoured and wise companion, and although she's a lot younger than I am, I would look to her for wisdom and good guidance and know I had found it. She has earned my full respect. Not on the first pages. Those are poorly edited, but she won through easily enough.

Oh, here's a thought: gender is not a genre.  It's just a thing that's split in two and makes us wiser when we fit it back together for a few minutes and go wow. Isn't walking like that?

As for the New Yorker, golly, but it's The New Yorker! The article is superficial and about a century out-of-date. Is that a surprise? Really? Really? That is the story, not the content of the article.

Here's a clue as to how to tell if a text is from Wonderland: it uses the word 'we' (as does the New Yorker's carpet bomb) for the marvellous, frustrating, exciting, bizarre multiplicity of human-ness. This is not an expansive we. It's a dismissive one. Once it has been spotted, the text can safely be given over to the bomb removal squad, leaving one free to hustle the children away and have a worm race with them or something.

Now, if you want my pet peeve, which you probably don't, but, hey, maybe it'll illuminate something or other, the books that irritate me are the ones that are spoken by a character called "I". 

What's that all about? Well, yeah, I know, Fichte, the University of Jena,1793,  et cet er a, but, sheesh. Shouldn't a book have the guts to speak out for itself? Hasn't this I character written enough books by now?

;-)

Harold Rhenisch
www.okanaganokanogan.com
www.afarminiceland.com

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