Wednesday, September 7, 2016

SOME WALKING GOSSIP

First: John Hayward (who was wheelchair-bound because of muscular dystrophy, and who was known, not always affectionately, as Tarantula) talking about TS Eliot, quoted by John Malcolm Brennan:
“On the day Time magazine came out with his face on the cover he walked for hours looking for wherever he might find it, shamelessly taking peeks at himself.”
       This is the Time cover, with portrait by Boris Michael Artzybasheff, and yes, that is a martini rising behind Eliot's right ear:


It’s remarkably hard to find a picture of T.S. Eliot walking, but there’s this one from the University of St Andrews, captioned “T. S. Eliot and others in North Street, St Andrews, 1953; photograph by George Cowie.”


Secondly: here’s Mark E Smith writing (or being ghostwritten) in Renegade his amazingly (and perhaps unexpectedly) good, not-quite memoir. It seems he was a walker of the suburbs at the time of making the album Perverted by Language.



“Walking the same places, skint, you see a lot of hidden sores when you’re having an off day.  Your eyes have changed and the simple actions of other people take on a significance that may not be truly there.  These are extreme moments …
“I’d be walking around wondering how I could finance everything and there’s be a fellow in an ill-fitting pair of slacks adding dabs of white paint to the white paint that was already there.”
        
It’s not too hard to find a picture of Mark E. Smith walking, this one’s by Natasha Bright:


It’s not even hard to find one of him in a wheelchair either:



Much harder to find one of John Hayward, but here is with Rose Macaulay and others.


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