a triarchy press publication
'Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways' by
Phil Smith
Publication Date: 26th January 2010
No. of Pages: 256
Book type: Paperback (244 x 170mm). With well over one hundred
illustrations and printed in full colour throughout.
ISBN: 978-0-9562631-3-1
Lovely Edition Printed on 115gsm silk coated stock with a heavy card cover.
List Price: £28.00
Offer price: £25.00
Economical Edition – special printing, available only from Triarchy
Press. Printed on 90gsm paper with a paper cover.
List Price: £15.00
Offer price: £10.00
About Mythogeography
At its simplest, Mythogeography is a way of walking, thinking and organising on many levels at the same time. Anyone can do it. You can do it. Walking becomes a performance, walkers become performers and the route becomes their co-star.
In a city, for example, walkers become aware of their urban home as a site, a forum, a playground and a stage: all there to enjoy, understand and provoke on multiple levels:
- Shops, houses, streets
- Tourist sites, visitor centres, museums, heritage industry
- Visible archaeology and history
- Community/social/collective ambitions, hopes, disappointments, failures
- Personal memories and recollections
- Invisible and forgotten history
- Concealed history (crime, disease, squalor)
- Childhoods, loves, hates
- Myths, legends and rumours
- Private dreams, imaginings and fantasies
The levels of the city are reflected back in the many levels of the walker - the public and the private, fact and dream, admissible and inadmissible, forgotten and remembered, past and future.
Explore www.mythogeography.com for more on the subject of Mythogeography, drifting, drive, Phil Smith and Crab Walks.
Mythogeography - The Book - is:
2 parts story
This section is the gloriously funny and endlessly fascinating account
of the author's recent journey on foot across the north of England in the
footsteps of a man who made the same journey 100 years ago sowing acorns
in the company of a dog called Pontiflunk.
Read a snippet
1 part handbook
The "handbook of drifting" and the "orrery" later in the book have ideas on
walking like a stalker, like a swimmer, like a ghost, like an explorer, like
a pilgrim... and that's just the start. Learn about how to organise your own
procession, the philosophy of walking, crabs in society, UFOs in Devon, Uri
Geller, the political geography of cities, the madness of municipal history
and much, much more (as they say).
Read another snippet
As the author puts it:
From the transnational pilgrim to the person who 'drifts off' on the way to the shops, Mythogeography addresses the means, uses and consequences of 'walking sideways', of deploying the ordinary act of walking as a lever to prise the lid off everyday life.
This book is not entirely conventional. It consists of an assemblage of sometimes unreliable, sometimes fractious documents hung around a flawed, yet epic tale of a journey in search of oak trees. It floats numerous narratives around this travelogue, weaving a matrix of possible trajectories for the reader from passive contemplation to wild pilgrimage and activist pedestrianism. The book's second half contains advice, tasks, guidance, kits and mental maps: a toolbag of information and suggestions for the reader who wants to take the next step. Mixing entrepreneurial drive, rambling discourses and post-dramatic performance with soft architecture and post-politics-politics, Mythogeography is a guide to strolling in the cracks in the pavement and a means to walking out on the Spectacle.
Scroll up to buy the book. Drift off to visit the Mythogeography wonderland website.
About the Author
Phil Smith was one of the organisers of the first symposium on Mythogeography in October 2008 at the University of Plymouth, where he was, until recently, a Senior Research Associate and where he is now beginning three years' funded research making and studying 'interventions in touristic and heritage space'.
He says of himself:
'The Crab Man', Phil Smith, is a middle-aged, gadfly academic and artist currently based in and around Exeter. He admits to having struggled with the vagaries of making politics as a form of performance and to having experimented at length with performances in unusual sites. He also says that he intends to develop walking as a generator for extreme pleasure and a means of activism and resistance.
There's a short film of him here and more about him here. There's loads of information on Wrights and Sites (the group of site-specific artist-researchers to which he subscribes) here. That's enough isn't it? He's a proper Renaissance Crab, OK?
Follow us on Twitter
Join us on Facebook