Psychogeography: Disentangling the Modern Conundrum of Psyche and Place

Sorted into column sized vignettes, Will Self paints an amazing picture of a scrambled world. With an even steady hand, he's able to make English suburbs seem as exotic, absurd, and strange as Singapore or Kashmir. For anyone's who's flown and felt the disorientation of modern air travel, Will speaks to the 21st Century traveling man. In addition to Will's stupefying master of his native language, the book is wonderful illustrated by Ralph Steadman.

Psychogeography in its contemporary manifestation owes much to the 1950s situationists from the Left Bank of Paris believing (this was after several carafes of vin de table) that by traversing the city on foot they could bring down the micro climate structures of capitalism - the pod like enclaves of home, train and office and instigate the revolution. They failed. But Guy Debord, a founder member of this group, with his seminal text 'The Society of the Spectacle' laid the foundations for a Marxist interpretation of modern life as a chimera, mediated through the lens of the media and technology, so nothing is real any more. Will Self, himself a long time lancer of contemporary societal virtues and mores, tries to reorient himself eotechnically amongst the modern climate of car and aeroplane. (For an interesting exposition of this concept, check out his google lecture on the subject, available easily via, er, google). He walks, not in the standard fashion - rugged Appalachian trail, romantic sunset beach - but amongst the Ballardian structures of urban life - the motorways, industrial estates, retail boulevards and urban hinterlands, traditionally neglected by the visually snobbish flaneur. Starting out, he details a walk he took aiming to fuse the twin parts of his psyche - his base in Vauxhall, South London, and his mother's homeland, New York. He walks from South London to Heathrow, flies business class to New York - giving opportunity for a delicious metaphor of forming a cupola with fellow traveller 'anonymous lovers spent by mercantile soixante-neuf' - and walks from JFK to the centre of Manhattan accompanied by several members of the great and good of New York literary society who become puzzlingly engaged in the walk (and cop quite a few blisters on the way). The rest of the book consists of bite sized articles from Well Self's Independent newspaper 'Psychogeography' column. A vast array of points on the globe are covered: Morocco, Ohio, Barcelona, Dublin, Rio (though not so much east of Suez). Reading these pieces as a collection you pick up a sense of how the flow of the column works: Self visits a place, often in the context of a book tour, or a family trip, or sometimes - as in the case of a visit to the Buncefield oil depot leak - purely his own curiousity. Once there he puts out his imaginative and surrealist feelers to get a sense of how the architecture, landscape and people of a place rub him up and affect his sense of psyche. Hence the pieces in urban areas are written in a more boiler plated, grittier style, with appropriate metaphors than those in cleaner, sparsely populated areas. The resulting text is often far more surreal, and studded with more references to contemporary culture, architecture, politics (anything that fills Self's voluminous memory) than you could probably imagine. Generally, the book is an entertaining coffee table work, full of well written, 'glib satires' as Self terms them. They are generally n