Ordinary Walking, Ordinary Writing
Some Thoughts in Preparation for an Essay as Yet Unwritten
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7480/writingplace.3.4356Abstract
Naomi Stead pursues a theoretical inquiry into the relationship between writing and walking based on author’s previous ficto-critical texts based in Stockholm, Sydney and Brisbane. The text was inspired by a small article that appeared in the daily newspaper in Melbourne, Australia in March 2018, which described the effect of different linguistic formulations used by phone dispatchers at ambulance stations, when someone telephoned in need of urgent medical attention. The story was about the difference between the dispatcher asking ‘what happened’ – which tended to send the caller off into a longwinded narrative account with much extraneous detail – and when the dispatcher asked ‘what’s happened’ – which caused the caller to report, quickly and directly, the sequence of events that had led to the medical emergency. The difference between these two modes of communication – the division of ‘what’ and ‘what’s,’ the single letter – was measured in long seconds, even minutes, and could easily be the difference between life and death.
This text is introduced by a reading compiled by Robin Wilson
References
References Main Text:
James Joyce, Ulysses, edited with an introduction by Jeri Johnson (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993 [1922]).
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (London: Penguin, 1996 [1925]).
Iain Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory: 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London (London: Granta Books, 1997).
W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, translated by Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1998).
Alison Stenton, ‘Spatial Stories: Movement in the City and Cultural Geography’, in: Clare Bryant and Susan E. Whyman (eds.), Walking the Streets of Eighteenth-Century London: John Gay’s Trivia (1716) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 62-73.
Ross Chambers, Loiterature (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999). 7 Francesco Careri, Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice (Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili, 2005).
Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (London: Verso, 2001), 173-174.
Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts, (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2015), 22 138
Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: A Place Between (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 188. 11 Ibid.
Naomi Stead, ‘If on a Winter’s Day a Tourist: Writing the Phenomenological Experience of Stockholm’, Architectural Theory Review, vol. 14 (2009) no. 2, 108-118.
Soile Veijola and Eeva Jokinen, ‘The Body in Tourism’, Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 11 (1994), 125-151.
Naomi Stead, ‘Writing the City, or, The Story of a Sydney Walk’, NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, vol. 18 (2010) no. 4, 226-245.
References Reading:
Kim Gurney, The Art of Public Space: Curating and Re-imagining the Ephemeral City (London, Palgrave, 2015), 58.
Eric de Bruyn, ‘Alfaville, or the Utopics of Mel Bochner’, The Grey Room, no. 10 (2003), 76-111: 87.
Louis Marin, ‘Critical Remarks on Enunciation: The Question of the Present in Discourse’, in: Werner Hamacher and David E. Welbery (eds.), On Representation: Louis Marin (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 373-387.
