Psychogeography?

[Extollager]

One thing that I like about this genre of creative nonfiction -- to the small extent that I have encountered it and am prepared to generalize about it -- is the emphasis on walking. I could be clever and say that walking is my favorite way of seeing.

As such it belongs to the category of travel writing. Elsewhere at Chrons you will find the thread on the Penguin Travel Library and similar books.

Also, some of the people who write in this vein seem to be fascinated by the idea of walking from outside a city into and through and out of the city. That has interested me for a long time. I relished the way Nell and her grandfather just get up and walk out of London, in Dickens's Old Curiosity Shop, which I think is a notable London book and something I will read for a third time someday.

Some of the psychogeographers like Arthur Machen. Machen's book The London Adventure is something I don't own, but I get it on interlibrary loan every few years and read it again. It seems I copy some pages on a photocopy machine each time -- ? Perhaps in this way I will eventually copy it all? Anyway when Machen writes about roaming around London, I like it. He does that in some of his stories, too. Machen's one of my favorite authors and has been for most of my life, although I worry about him.

In the psychogeography I have read I often don't care fore the abundance of coarse language, such as I read last night in "Racist Sparrows," Jim Drummond's account of walking through London in 2005, in editor Iain Sinclair's London: City of Disappearances. This seems to go hand-in-hand with affectation of being an ally of Asian and Caribbean immigrants, homosexuals, users of illegal drugs, etc. The writers are more interesting than their die-stamped counterparts on American university campuses, at least, though that's saying precious little. Some of the writers affect contempt for (white, Christian, male) history while others are interested in history at least if it has to do with true crime or with well-heeled members of private clubs devoted to occult practices etc. The writers tend to affect an allusive style, but not so much alluding to tony consumer goods as to punk-type bands. The writing does seem affected at times.

However there has been enough that I liked in some of the writing I've at least glanced at that I expect to continue to look into it. I like their interest in neighborhoods that haven't been gentrified yet and their evident liking of things such as used book stores. I would probably be bored by some of the art movies they like.

They often want to amuse and sometimes they can be funny. They do want to Notice Things, and I like that.

I think they tend to like animals that are making a life for themselves in urban environments, like, say, feral cats or even foxes. Drummond looks for sparrows, thinks they might be disappearing. Talks to them, he says, when nobody's going to notice.

Wordsworth said: My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky.

Well it might; but I feel also a little lift of the heart if I see an alley cat going about its business. (That reminds me of a story. It was a chilly raw Thanksgiving here in North Dakota. The turkey was put in the over but we weren't going to eat the neck and liver, etc. I remembered a little colony of cats down by the lumber yard near the railroad tracks, thought I'd share with them. I tried to be discreet, but then, somebody in a vehicle appeared out of nowhere and was making cautiously for me along the tracks. I though maybe I was going to be asked what I was doing leaving those guts there, so I slipped past a fence, made my way into a residential neighborhood, but then I could hear the vehicle pulling up behind me as I walked past a church. But it turned out the driver was my son, come up for dinner with his parents, so, as the North Dakota guy said after he survived (or after his friend survived, can't remember for sure) being trapped in a big grain bin: "Fortunately, it turned out good.")

So far, of the psychogeographical-type books I have looked over from the library, I haven't been taken with any so much as to feel I needed to read it through or to buy my own copy.

Again, for me it's a subset of travel writing, but this time it's likely to by walking in one's own city or one nearby. To me there seems to be a little of the spirit of Thoreau writing about Concord as a town he had lived in or near for some years and was still exploring.

I'm also reminded of some of the pieces by Joseph Mitchell, such as the wonderful "Up in the Old Hotel."

Does anyone here read this kind of thing or even know what I'm talking about? Will a discussion happen?

 

[J Riff]

Duuno, but the Poe story, about the guy who always walks around, has no home, just follows street activity, and out MC follows him around, is a good one. Cannot think of the title offhand. But there's people like that here, until the snow comes, then the mystique vanishes and MacDonalds becomes the setting.

 

[Extollager]

There's the Poe:

The Man of the Crowd

 

[Extollager]

It might be that some psychogeographically-minded people would say that a key component is "aimless" wandering. Drummond's idea was to walk through London oriented by the Queen Eleanor's crosses, as I recall. They would like more Machen's "idle roaming." You're supposed to "drift," letting yourself be attracted, or repelled, according as you become aware of varying atmospheres in the urban "terrain." Likely you'll want to walk with one or two other people and compare notes. Machen always walked by himself, though, it seems to me...

Here's something related to Machen:

From the archive, 29 June 1945: A London adventure in St John's Wood

Blake, Dickens, and de Quincey would be revered figures too. See de Quincey's London walks in the Opium Eater and various pieces in Dickens's Uncommercial Traveller, which I think deserves to be better known. I use the Penguin Classic Selected Journalism 1850-1870. If I saw an inexpensive copy of the Everyman's Library edition of the Traveller, I'd probably buy it...

Maybe that's a lot of what the best psychogeography is about -- to wander like Dickens, and Notice Things, and find one's spirits lifted for a little while.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/914/914-0.txt

 

[Dave]

I've never heard of the term psychogeography before, but you aren't just talking about people walking a trail and writing about the experience, like Round Ireland with a Fridge by Tony Hawkes, or Walking Home by Simon Armitage, or A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson.

I think what you want is social commentary and documented personal inquiry, so more like the George Orwell books, Down and Out in Paris and London or The Road to Wigan Pier. I would also recommend that you read London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew. Charles Dickens was heavily influenced by Mayhew's work and Mayhew was doing this kind of investigative journalism and social observation long before anyone else. Victorian's were fascinated by life below the margins his work was very popular at the time.
It is way beyond copyright and available here: London labour and the London poor : Henry Mayhew : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive

 

[hitmouse]

@Extollager
See if you can get a copy of Swansea by Nigel Jenkins, on interlibrary loan (you surely wont obtain it any other way.)
When I moved to this gritty city a decade ago, this book helped me understand and start to like this place. Psychogeography which is unsentimental but funny and affectionate.

Or you could look at Leadville by Edward Platt, who is an old friend of mine. May still be available on Amazon.

 

[Extollager]

There seem to be two Swandsea books. I requested the first one, also Leadville. I don't know if they are in the "psychogeographical" tradition, but they sound interesting in their own right.

Here's an account of an easy ramble that the author, at least, regards as relevant to psychogeography.

A New Way of Walking

Re: Arthur Machen -- I did get this book The Thin Veil of London, but it seemed quite disappointing.

The Thin Veil of London

But at least we are talking about walking.

Machen

 

[Phyrebrat]

I'm going to come back to this thread tomorrow when I can focus on it properly. I've not heard the term before but reading your OP is something I can empathise with esp the comparison/contrast between Wordsworth's rainbow, and your alley cat.

Great thread!

pH

 

[Extollager]

Here's something I wrote last year that might be relevant to this thread. It refers to a story I love dearly:

N



ARTHUR MACHEN AND OTHER WALKERS

“The volume and depth and intensity of the world is something that only those on foot will ever experience” – Werner Herzog, in Herzog on Herzog, ed. by Paul Cronin

I recently read again my favorite story by Arthur Machen, "N." It was written some time after the Great War, so several decades after the composition of his well-known horror stories. It exhibits Machen the Londoner and writer of familiar essays.

It begins with leisurely and delectable pages evoking a few old friends sitting snug around a fireplace with drinks at hand, while beyond the drawn curtains a cold, dry wind is at work in the dusty streets. The men are at their ease as they reminisce about old eating-places, shops, and once-common prints of pictures – not of masterpieces but things such as a cheerful scene of medieval life, Landseer’s Bolton Abbey in Olden Times, or a portrait of a good-looking housemaid offering Sherry, Sir?

Machen’s gentlemen are sedentary as the story begins, but their conversation is largely about things they saw when they went walking (a situation to be found in other Machen stories too). Now one may cite Herzog again, who in his travels on foot found that “when people take note of how far you have walked, they start telling you stories they have bottled up for forty years.” Thus one of Machen’s gentlemen confides the story of a country cousin’s strange experience while walking in the city. One of the clues that Machen’s tale of perichoresis or visionary “interpenetration” provides is an imaginary book by a Victorian clergyman, the Rev. Mr. Thomas Hampole, A London Walk. That book must have had, as it were, innumerable unwritten prequels and sequels thanks to countless other walkers.

I found myself wondering if Machen ever learned to drive. My sense is that he did not. I thought about the Inklings. Tolkien was -- I gather, only for a short time -- a driver, and an erratic one. C. S. Lewis, as I understand, tried to get a driver's license but didn't succeed. So far as I know, Charles Williams didn't drive. Conversely, all four were confirmed walkers, in town, country, or city, though they didn't shun rail travel at least. I won't attempt to run down a list of all the major fantasy writers, though Lovecraft would be another walker who, so far as I recall, didn't drive.

Many stories of the fantastic let us pass an agreeable half-hour or so, but some of them offer more than a small measure of amusement, and get under our skins and become lifelong favorites. I suspect that such stories were typically written by walkers, and that Herzog’s comment at the beginning of this piece has something to do with the matter.


© 2016 Dale Nelson

 

[hitmouse]

Jenkins wrote a second book on Swansea, imaginatively titled Real Swansea 2.
I will be interested to see what you think of the book on its own merits, whether it fits in the definition of a psychogeography. The Real books, published by Seren, are supposed to be "psychogeographic guidebooks" and introduced me to the term.

Jenkins was the director of the creative writing programme at Swansea University. Died of pancreatic cancer a few years ago.

 

[Dave]

I'm still unclear on what is meant by psychogeography. Can anyone explain it in simple terms for a simple person?

I tried Wikipedia: "Aleksandar Janicijevic... came up with the working definition... as: 'The subjective analysis–mental reaction, to neighbourhood behaviours related to geographic location. A chronological process based on the order of appearance of observed topics, with the time delayed inclusion of other relevant instances." Which makes no reference to the written accounting of ones observations.

What I see is an avant-garde idea that there is no separation between the urban environment, its architecture, and the art that it produces, or the politics and world-view of the people who live there, and also that by walking through an urban environment one can get a feel for the art and politics from the environment by a kind of osmosis.

Wikipedia also says: "another definition is 'a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities... just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape.'" All I know is when I used to do that as a student, admiring the unusual Gothic architecture of the London buildings in Kensington, I was quickly stopped by undercover police who thought I was casing open windows of flats to break in and rob them, and that was simply walking the public highway, not going into any private areas or down "unpredictable" paths.

 

[Steve S]

Psychogeography is something I've got interested in over the last few months, and has fed into my writing. Will Self has written about the subject (there are several interesting interviews with him online). A key novel for me was Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd, which has contains many elements of psychogeography.

 

[Allegra]

Interesting thread. Some of the books mentioned I must look them up. The only one I've read is A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson, not the urban walk but fun. In practice, there could be worse scenario than encountering undercover police. A friend of mine lately ventured into the unknown of the seemingly peaceful Spanish city Valencia and got her bag snatched and knee injured in the fall. In London I once joined a Jack-the-Ripper evening tour - touristic and commercial but you can call it a psychogeography walk.

 

[Dave]

According to Wikipedia, Will Self had a long running column called Psychogeography, first printed in a airline flight magazine, and then in the Independent newspaper. Peter Ackroyd is a best-selling author of historical books on London and the river Thames.

However, and tell me if I'm on the wrong track here, but I'm getting the idea that psychogeography is not just a history, or a travel diary, or a political commentary, but it is about getting a generalised feeling for, and an understanding of, a place and its inhabitants, from much less obvious means. It also seems to be primarily urban. So, how the architecture of a suburb informs those who dwell in the buildings in relation to their politics and their art produced. In the same way, I could also tell you about the person who lives in a house just by looking at the make, model and age of their car; the content of their supermarket shopping delivered; how much and what they recycle, and what they send to landfill; or the plants, the design and the ornaments of their garden. I'd be using broad brush strokes and stereotyping, but it would likely be very accurate.

 

[hitmouse]

The Wikipedia article is interesting. I think one needs to distinguish between the mid C20th avant guarde artistic movement and the more popular and contemporary idea which is more like a synthesis of human and physical geography with personal reflections, history and culture. There is a blurry line between this sort of thing and travel writing (Bill Bryson) and the more lyrical nature writing (Richard Mabey, Roger Deakin et al.)

 

[Hugh]

Today's Tom Gauld Guardian cartoon:




And here's the link:

Tom Gauld on psychogeographers – cartoon

 

[Extollager]

Hugh,

That cartoon is spot on about a key element in some psychogeographizing. Brilliant!

 

[Hugh]

I'm glad you enjoyed it. I only have some basic knowledge re psychogeography, but I thought this hit some kind of very pleasant spot.

 

[Extollager]

Earlier this week I found myself wondering if a key factor, for some people who like the idea of "psychogeography," is a perhaps unconscious wish to connect with memories of reading the Sherlock Holmes stories and other literary works that evoke the city as the scene of mystery, crime, hidden connections, assumed identities, lost documents, obscure traces, antiquarian vestiges. In other words, we first encounter these things in fiction, where they leave deep impressions in our imaginations. In later years, we respond to things -- it might be an old brick wall, it might be a root pushing up through pavement -- that somehow connect with those impressions, and we pay attention to, and like, that thing that lies before us, partly for its own sake, and as something that is resisting homogenization, Planning, etc., if only because it shows the marks of time, and has become assimilated to the past; and though They can try to cover up the past, or lie about it, or look away from it, it is forever beyond their ability actually to change and fit into their plans.

 

[HareBrain]

The term makes me think of a biographer's comment on the neo-romantic artist Paul Nash, that (to paraphrase) he wasn't interested in the past as past, but in the accumulated intensity of the past as present. That's very much the feeling I get from some Peter Ackroyd novels (especially Hawksmoor), of all the past layers of London existing at one time. Parts of Alan Moore's From Hell evoke the same feeling, especially the chapter where William Gull drives round various parts of London, talking about their history and their connection with an occult idea (oddly enough, one connected with Nicholas Hawksmoor, the subject of Ackroyd's book).