A pizza-box-like package arrived from lulu the other day, containing a copy of Walking the M62 by John Davies. It has taken me a few days to completely open, with two hunts for suitable tools - compared with cack-handed Amazon, the lulu people are masters of book packaging who in my view could be entrusted with safe transit of all sorts of fragile and precious items (Ming vases, newborn babies…)
On reflection I might have other reasons for delaying cutting through the plastic straps and polythene cauls to actually read the book. Stumbling across a blog reference to John’s journey (during the darkest moments of a bestial Christmastide) gave me the idea of undertaking and documenting a long walk home. The concept landed in me like a compressed file, which is unzipping joyously into actual miles walked, mud spattered, words assembled, pixels ordered into images. A very good thing.
So why not pile into the book?
Basically I think I fear traversing the same ground. Not that I’ll accidentally be lured to Hull instead of Brighton, but that my journey will become a sort of cover version, tribute-band act, or Work in the School Of…
I know John only obliquely, but enough to be aware that we share some cultural touchpoints (Ballard, the Fall) and enthusiasm for technological communication. I worry about seeing and expressing things similarly – a not unfounded fear, as I’ve already quoted a line of Eliot which, I notice, flicking through the book, is one of John’s chapter headings. So there’s a danger that my own journey (‘real’ and ‘personal’ though it might be) becomes a sort of plagiarism, or at least a partially redundant exercise.
And there’s stuff I wish I’d thought of, like the double-colon device in his headings (‘Trafford to Warrington :: 18 October 2007’), or using Twitter…
Still it’s too late now – I have opened the book and eaten the fruit of knowledge. Walking the M62 will become another component of the cultural wampum bag I carry with me. Any similarities should be read as fascinating synchronicity and/or clever intertextuality…
All territory has already been traversed, we’re all gathered at the same storytellers’ fire – and yet, paradoxically, each journey is as fresh as a new cloud formation and there’s always something new to say, albeit in motley borrowed language.
Showing posts with label walkinghometo50. Show all posts
Showing posts with label walkinghometo50. Show all posts
Friday, January 18, 2008
Sunday, January 13, 2008
A different kind of rambling
I've started my walk from Southport to Brighton (planned to stretch over the remaining years into my 50th). It has a blog all its own, so I'll stop going on about it here - should you want to follow in my footsteps, bookmarking or the joys of RSS will fix you right up. Plus I'm tagging all the bits and pieces with ,walkinghometo50, so you should be able to track me down...
There's also a bunch of photos and a map...
Monday, January 7, 2008
'psychogeography socks'
Various synchronicity roads are leading me towards the work of Iain Sinclair. Yesterday, fancying finding out a bit more about comics writer Alan Moore's magickal practices, I found this
"I tell you what man, one the greatest, most mentally enriching, physically debilitating experiences of my life was going on a walk with Iain Sinclair, when he was doing this art exhibition at a gallery on Shoreditch High Street. He was going [sic] together four male artists and four female artists. And the idea was he was picking sites from his AA road atlas of London, and he got them all to pick a site, and he would either meet them there, or he would do a walk there. One of them was Michael Moorcock, who had come up from California. I was the only one who was actually doing the walk with Iain, the site I had chosen was Moorgate Churchyard, John Dee's place. I went to Iain's place at half eight in the morning and we walked the twenty miles through London, up the river to Moorgate. He had his special psychogeography socks, he was skipping. I was crawling along, sobbing. It was incredible. It's not just the walk - it was doing the walk with Iain....He would say "oh see that grating over there, that's the grating that TS Eliot used to peer up women's skirts from under." "Oh this is where they used to push Ezra Pound along the pavement while he was cursing about the Jews." You suddenly get this sort of...everything becomes light. New age woolly-hat Glastonbury mystics weary me, sometimes, but they talk about energy, the energy of a place, of a person. We all know what they mean, but at the same time it has to be said that this is not energy that is going to show up on an autometer. We're not talking about energy in the conventional sense that physics talks about energy. To me, energy is information - I think you can make that bold a statement. The only lines of energy that link up disparate sites in London are lines of information, that have been drawn by an informed mind. The energy that we put forth is information we have taken in. We will see a work of art and it will give us inspiration, it will give us energy. It's given us information that we can turn to our own use and put out as something else. That's the kind of energy that we - and psychogeography - are talking about. So Iain Sinclair's London is a much richer, more extraordinary place than almost anyone else's" here.
And today my Google Reader (or the daemon within it) served up this from quote from Sinclair in John Davies blog:
"Walking is the best way to explore and exploit the city; the changes, shifts, breaks in the cloud helmet, movement of light on water. Drifting purposefully is the recommended mode, tramping asphalted earth in alert reverie, allowing the fiction of an underlying pattern to reveal itself. To the no-bullshit materialist this sounds suspiciously like fin-de-siecle decadence, a poetic of entropy - but the born-again flaneur is a stubborn creature, less interested in texture and fabric, eavesdropping on philosophical conversation pieces, than in noticing everything. Allignments of telephone kiosks, maps made from moss on the slopes of Victorian sepulchres, collections of prostitutes' cards, torn and defaced, promotional bills for cancelled events at York Hall, visits to the homes of dead writers, bronze casts on war memorials, plaster dogs, beer mats, concentrations of used condoms, the crystalline patterns of glass shards surrounding an imploded BMW quarter-light window, meditations on the relationship between the brain damage suffered by the super-middleweight boxer Gerald McClellan (lights out in the Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel) and the simultaneous collapse of Barings, bankers to the Queen. Walking, moving across a retreating townscape, stitches it all together: the illicit cocktail of bodily exhaustion and a raging carbon monoxide high."
- which has some resonance with how I intend to approach my journey. Psychogeography has been my practice for decades, albeit not under that banner - the videos and performances I made about Portslade; slideshows of found items on the East/West Sussex border; personal mythologies like the padlock that holds the world together.
So - Iain Sinclair - recommended by magicians and vicars! I can't resist finding out more. I've avoided his work for ages for the perverse reason that it looks too much like the kind of thing I might like - but now I've relented and put in some library requests.
"I tell you what man, one the greatest, most mentally enriching, physically debilitating experiences of my life was going on a walk with Iain Sinclair, when he was doing this art exhibition at a gallery on Shoreditch High Street. He was going [sic] together four male artists and four female artists. And the idea was he was picking sites from his AA road atlas of London, and he got them all to pick a site, and he would either meet them there, or he would do a walk there. One of them was Michael Moorcock, who had come up from California. I was the only one who was actually doing the walk with Iain, the site I had chosen was Moorgate Churchyard, John Dee's place. I went to Iain's place at half eight in the morning and we walked the twenty miles through London, up the river to Moorgate. He had his special psychogeography socks, he was skipping. I was crawling along, sobbing. It was incredible. It's not just the walk - it was doing the walk with Iain....He would say "oh see that grating over there, that's the grating that TS Eliot used to peer up women's skirts from under." "Oh this is where they used to push Ezra Pound along the pavement while he was cursing about the Jews." You suddenly get this sort of...everything becomes light. New age woolly-hat Glastonbury mystics weary me, sometimes, but they talk about energy, the energy of a place, of a person. We all know what they mean, but at the same time it has to be said that this is not energy that is going to show up on an autometer. We're not talking about energy in the conventional sense that physics talks about energy. To me, energy is information - I think you can make that bold a statement. The only lines of energy that link up disparate sites in London are lines of information, that have been drawn by an informed mind. The energy that we put forth is information we have taken in. We will see a work of art and it will give us inspiration, it will give us energy. It's given us information that we can turn to our own use and put out as something else. That's the kind of energy that we - and psychogeography - are talking about. So Iain Sinclair's London is a much richer, more extraordinary place than almost anyone else's" here.
And today my Google Reader (or the daemon within it) served up this from quote from Sinclair in John Davies blog:
"Walking is the best way to explore and exploit the city; the changes, shifts, breaks in the cloud helmet, movement of light on water. Drifting purposefully is the recommended mode, tramping asphalted earth in alert reverie, allowing the fiction of an underlying pattern to reveal itself. To the no-bullshit materialist this sounds suspiciously like fin-de-siecle decadence, a poetic of entropy - but the born-again flaneur is a stubborn creature, less interested in texture and fabric, eavesdropping on philosophical conversation pieces, than in noticing everything. Allignments of telephone kiosks, maps made from moss on the slopes of Victorian sepulchres, collections of prostitutes' cards, torn and defaced, promotional bills for cancelled events at York Hall, visits to the homes of dead writers, bronze casts on war memorials, plaster dogs, beer mats, concentrations of used condoms, the crystalline patterns of glass shards surrounding an imploded BMW quarter-light window, meditations on the relationship between the brain damage suffered by the super-middleweight boxer Gerald McClellan (lights out in the Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel) and the simultaneous collapse of Barings, bankers to the Queen. Walking, moving across a retreating townscape, stitches it all together: the illicit cocktail of bodily exhaustion and a raging carbon monoxide high."
- which has some resonance with how I intend to approach my journey. Psychogeography has been my practice for decades, albeit not under that banner - the videos and performances I made about Portslade; slideshows of found items on the East/West Sussex border; personal mythologies like the padlock that holds the world together.
So - Iain Sinclair - recommended by magicians and vicars! I can't resist finding out more. I've avoided his work for ages for the perverse reason that it looks too much like the kind of thing I might like - but now I've relented and put in some library requests.
Friday, January 4, 2008
Stepping Out
As a lover of purposeful activity (preferably involving lots of planning, special equipment and some pub stops), I'm commencing a special journey. The plan is to walk home for my 50th birthday - a trip that will take me at least 280 miles and getting on for four years.
And what better way to start than to launch another blog. Walking Home to 50 will be the maundering plan, photos, journals and whatnot. You're welcome to join me on the way.
And what better way to start than to launch another blog. Walking Home to 50 will be the maundering plan, photos, journals and whatnot. You're welcome to join me on the way.
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