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Publication: June 2017
List Price: £10.00 Format: ~ Paperback - 104 pages Size: 12.7 x 20.3 cm ISBN: 978-1-911193-06-7 Tags: walking, walking arts, poetry, ambulonormativity, drift, dérive, mythogeography, falling, imbalance, psychogeography, improvisation, alyson hallett, phil smith Buy the paperback (£15)Buy the pdf (£13)Click the 'Buy' button below. At checkout, click No postage on ebooks from the dropdown.
After paying, we will send an immediate confirmation and email your ebook file within 24 hours. pdf ISBN: 978-1-911193-22-7
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About the authorsSee our other books on Walking
ReadershipWalking Stumbling Limping Falling is for anyone interested in: the idea of what is 'normal' in walking ~ mythogeography & psychogeography ~ radical walking ~ walking as poetry ~ the aesthetics of falling, tripping and stumbling ~ walking art or walk-performances
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In a 1934 lecture, Marcel Mauss said: "A kind of revelation came to me in hospital. I was ill in New York. I wondered where previously I had seen girls walking as my nurses walked. I had the time to think about it. At last I realised that it was at the cinema. Returning to France, I noticed how common this gait was, especially in Paris; the girls were French and they too were walking in this way. In fact, American walking fashions had begun to arrive over here, thanks to the cinema."
Here are the roots of contemporary views of daily-life movement (including walking). We notice people who don’t walk normally. We notice ourselves when we don’t walk normally. There is, it seems, an intense, invisible pressure to walk normally. Straight is the gait. Call it ambulonormativity. For about 9 months, two walking-authors/artists – Alyson Hallett and Phil Smith – found themselves wrestling with not being able to walk normally. They wrote to one another about it and, amongst other things, reflected on: prostheses ~ waddling ~ Butoh ~ built-up shoes ~ walking in pain ~ bad legs ~ vertigo ~ falling (and fallen) places ~ hubris ~ bad walks ~ scores for falling down ~ walking carefully ~ disappointment. This is their conversation. From it, there emerges an 'Alphabet of Falling', a sustained reflection on the loss of normal capabilities, anecdotes and autobiographical stories, and the beginnings of a larger discussion about stumbling and falling: the pedestrian equivalent of blowing an uncertain trumpet. As the book concludes: "When you next fall, stay down for a while, see what comes. Then, when you get to your feet again, rather than relying on your body’s natural approximations of space, choose your steps, not anxiously but in an excited kind of wariness; and, with each pace, a little more undo the ‘grounds’ that tripped you up." ReviewsWalking Stumbling Limping Falling by Alyson Hallett & Phil Smith
"I just wrote this whole post then tripped up. My finger slipped on the iPad and I wiped the whole text away with one action. Such is life. Things change with the blink of an eye, an accidental swipe, a fall from grace. When our bodies are irrevocably altered by illness or surgery, our minds are too. And maybe what evolves is richer than what was there before. This book proves that. It is the outcome of a conversation between two keen walkers who, for different reasons, were temporarily grounded. And it is a grounding read for those of us of a certain age. It reassures us that we are not alone. At the beginning, I struggled to get into it, in the same way I find rising from a deep, low sofa, with soft cushions, difficult. I don’t recall finding that hard when I was younger. I wasn’t quite sure of the territory, there are quite a few unknowns until the narrative revealed itself. Like an anatomy of walking. As it progresses we get closer to the bone, deeper into the cells, delving through the surface tension and tentatively navigating the cracks in the pavements and mortality. I enjoyed the comments about the association of falling with humiliation. How as children we fall constantly and it is part of learning, but we don’t anticipate that, as adults, we will have to revisit that process for some reason. And it will always be so excruciatingly embarrassing that we will leap to our feet as fast as possible..." Read the full review (by Carolyn Black - Flow Contemporary Arts) here. |
Reviewed by Victoria Field in Writing in Education 74, April 2018
"Walking Stumbling Limping Falling is a slim volume of prose but like the best slim volumes of poetry, every page is opens a series of doors that invite us to enter a house of many mansions. It contains some intriguing pointers to the highways and byways of language and walking...
Some of the questions they pose for each other are useful prompts for personal writing of all kinds. What memories do you have of learning to walk? Have you ever fallen? We might have a good leg and a bad leg - is there such a thing as a ‘bad walk’? What is the most special walk you have taken with another person? Are there ‘fallen places’? If you could have a prosthetic anything, what would it be?
For me, the idea of falling was a potent catalyst for memories and musing. I’ve fallen from grace and fallen in and out of love but have yet to fall on hard times or flat on my face.
...Alyson and Phil throughout their book interrogate the notion of walking as ‘universal and normative’ and the pressure to appear smooth, confident and consistent. How would it be to ‘limp for art’, ‘stumble for health’? I was struck by the intimacy of body and psyche in these exchanges and how in writing about illness the body is both us and other. Alyson describes her pain as an ‘it’ with ‘tides and moods’, her bones ‘know about other’."
Read the full review here ~ See the current issue of Writing in Education here.
"Walking Stumbling Limping Falling is a slim volume of prose but like the best slim volumes of poetry, every page is opens a series of doors that invite us to enter a house of many mansions. It contains some intriguing pointers to the highways and byways of language and walking...
Some of the questions they pose for each other are useful prompts for personal writing of all kinds. What memories do you have of learning to walk? Have you ever fallen? We might have a good leg and a bad leg - is there such a thing as a ‘bad walk’? What is the most special walk you have taken with another person? Are there ‘fallen places’? If you could have a prosthetic anything, what would it be?
For me, the idea of falling was a potent catalyst for memories and musing. I’ve fallen from grace and fallen in and out of love but have yet to fall on hard times or flat on my face.
...Alyson and Phil throughout their book interrogate the notion of walking as ‘universal and normative’ and the pressure to appear smooth, confident and consistent. How would it be to ‘limp for art’, ‘stumble for health’? I was struck by the intimacy of body and psyche in these exchanges and how in writing about illness the body is both us and other. Alyson describes her pain as an ‘it’ with ‘tides and moods’, her bones ‘know about other’."
Read the full review here ~ See the current issue of Writing in Education here.
Reviewed by A. Norris on amazon
" I could never have anticipated that such an innocuous theme for a book could yield such an intimate exchange of mails between Alyson and her correspondent, Phil Smith, as they regaled us with their experiences of walking and the obstacles they encountered, largely due to the idiosyncrasies of the body. While reading it it became unavoidable not to bring to the text one's own experiences and at one moment I felt my heart wrenched back to a time when seeing my own father fall down in the streets of London and realizing then for the first time just how vulnerable he was and, by extension, all of us. Such is the universal nature of the theme that while reading it I could empathize with many of their deeply personal accounts of the times the writers walked, stumbled and fell. But this is just the starting point and provided the writers with an opportunity to meander off on tangents that encompass hip replacements, walking as protest, a musical score for falling down, walking as confirmation of our relationship with the earth, among others... A highly recommended read."
" I could never have anticipated that such an innocuous theme for a book could yield such an intimate exchange of mails between Alyson and her correspondent, Phil Smith, as they regaled us with their experiences of walking and the obstacles they encountered, largely due to the idiosyncrasies of the body. While reading it it became unavoidable not to bring to the text one's own experiences and at one moment I felt my heart wrenched back to a time when seeing my own father fall down in the streets of London and realizing then for the first time just how vulnerable he was and, by extension, all of us. Such is the universal nature of the theme that while reading it I could empathize with many of their deeply personal accounts of the times the writers walked, stumbled and fell. But this is just the starting point and provided the writers with an opportunity to meander off on tangents that encompass hip replacements, walking as protest, a musical score for falling down, walking as confirmation of our relationship with the earth, among others... A highly recommended read."
Loitering with Intent: the Histories and Futures of 'Psychogeography' ~ Witold van Ratingen
“A second valuable work on psychogeography and reduced mobility is Walking Stumbling Limping Falling, the recent bundle of e-mails between Alyson Hallett and Phil Smith about the poetics of slipping up and falling down; the development of a non-normative drift; about fragility, surgery and recovery; and the intimate, invisible bravery of learning to walk with a body that has suddenly become unfamiliar. Hallett and Smith’s exchanges resist what they call “the fascism of normality” (70), seeking instead to celebrate those uncoordinated and hesitant choreographies that deserve an equal place in the canon of walking.”
“A second valuable work on psychogeography and reduced mobility is Walking Stumbling Limping Falling, the recent bundle of e-mails between Alyson Hallett and Phil Smith about the poetics of slipping up and falling down; the development of a non-normative drift; about fragility, surgery and recovery; and the intimate, invisible bravery of learning to walk with a body that has suddenly become unfamiliar. Hallett and Smith’s exchanges resist what they call “the fascism of normality” (70), seeking instead to celebrate those uncoordinated and hesitant choreographies that deserve an equal place in the canon of walking.”
Appreciated on Facebook and by email
“Just read your email conversations with Alyson. Really fascinating, an insight into the disambulatory. I'm still struggling to negotiate basic paths but am more accepting of the paradox between having an orthodox leg length whilst being less mobile, a temporary hiatus. Your conversations remind me of the Einsteinian maxim that the ground is continually rushing up to meet us. That this constant upthrust is the true nature of gravity not the trite, what goes up must come down, and that our daily struggle is in remaining upright as the natural inclination is to succumb to gravity and continually fall. These are just some thoughts that have been bubbling, stimulated by your booklet.”
“I have just finished reading Walking Stumbling Limping Falling. I have thoroughly enjoyed the book, thank you - so many interesting comments to think about. I was reading it on the train back from A Pint of Science talk in Sheffield. I arrived back in Ilkley about 11.45 pm. It had been raining and the atmosphere was so still. I looked at the pavements as I walked home, intrigued by all the snails that had come out and were able to slide around freely, seeming to enjoy the space without fear of human feet crushing them. I picked my way among them very carefully. Your book makes me feel that my thoughts can spill out sideways and meander a bit - so different from the forward path that they usually pursue. I like the physicality of the book - slim, floppy, white pages, matt cover with that interesting painting. I have always loved holding a book, feeling its cover, opening it. Thank you both for a very interesting book.”
"Cue for saying how much I loved Walking Stumbling Limping Falling ... Quirky and imaginative and necessary. I gave it as a present to someone who also recently experienced a hip replacement, and because we'd been having several conversations about the okay-ness of vulnerability. Thank you. "
“A wonderful visceral, truthful talking walking as metaphor.”
"I’m not a walker. I’m a stumbler and a dreamer. I carry your ... book next to my spine. Tucked into the compartment of my backpack, which I use when going to the gym. I only read it on the U-bahn between stops. When I get off, I raise my knee to rest my backpack whilst I tuck the book away again after I have pressed the fold of a knee into the page - reminding of place."
“I read your book Walking Stumbling Limping and found it very interesting and really moving. It found strange resonances in me as I received it the week I was making exams and seeing specialists for my poor knees, worn out by years of practising ballet on an apparently birth weakness - On a more materialistic level, I also enjoyed a lot the touch of the cover and the format.”
"I read the limping book from cover to cover. I found it so unusual and very compelling and poignant and unflinching. Because of my postural problems with scoliosis and my various arthritic aches, I felt very in tune with all you both bear witness to about the emotional and psychological impact of pain and bodily difference from the norm. So thank you for such illumination, it has been very helpful and strengthening. I am often very conscious of postural difficulty and your book gives good heart to me." Penelope Shuttle
“I have just finished reading Walking Stumbling Limping Falling. I have thoroughly enjoyed the book, thank you - so many interesting comments to think about. I was reading it on the train back from A Pint of Science talk in Sheffield. I arrived back in Ilkley about 11.45 pm. It had been raining and the atmosphere was so still. I looked at the pavements as I walked home, intrigued by all the snails that had come out and were able to slide around freely, seeming to enjoy the space without fear of human feet crushing them. I picked my way among them very carefully. Your book makes me feel that my thoughts can spill out sideways and meander a bit - so different from the forward path that they usually pursue. I like the physicality of the book - slim, floppy, white pages, matt cover with that interesting painting. I have always loved holding a book, feeling its cover, opening it. Thank you both for a very interesting book.”
"Cue for saying how much I loved Walking Stumbling Limping Falling ... Quirky and imaginative and necessary. I gave it as a present to someone who also recently experienced a hip replacement, and because we'd been having several conversations about the okay-ness of vulnerability. Thank you. "
“A wonderful visceral, truthful talking walking as metaphor.”
"I’m not a walker. I’m a stumbler and a dreamer. I carry your ... book next to my spine. Tucked into the compartment of my backpack, which I use when going to the gym. I only read it on the U-bahn between stops. When I get off, I raise my knee to rest my backpack whilst I tuck the book away again after I have pressed the fold of a knee into the page - reminding of place."
“I read your book Walking Stumbling Limping and found it very interesting and really moving. It found strange resonances in me as I received it the week I was making exams and seeing specialists for my poor knees, worn out by years of practising ballet on an apparently birth weakness - On a more materialistic level, I also enjoyed a lot the touch of the cover and the format.”
"I read the limping book from cover to cover. I found it so unusual and very compelling and poignant and unflinching. Because of my postural problems with scoliosis and my various arthritic aches, I felt very in tune with all you both bear witness to about the emotional and psychological impact of pain and bodily difference from the norm. So thank you for such illumination, it has been very helpful and strengthening. I am often very conscious of postural difficulty and your book gives good heart to me." Penelope Shuttle