Customer Reviews

Psychogeography: Disentangling the Modern Conundrum of Psyche and Place

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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 not his greatest journalistic performances. Sometimes he draws up a keen sense of psyche and place, at other times clearly nothing much is happening and Self draws on his vast memory reserves to regale us with a tale from his myriad past. The writing is always fresh and pungent and the illustrations by Ralph Steadman - engorged, satirical grotesques in the spirit of Dali - are ideal accompaniments.

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.

Don't read this if you are interested in psychogeography - it's more autobiographical. So if you are a fan of Self's, go for it.

I found it pompous and couldn't get through the first 10 pages.

I enjoy a good read that introduces me to words I do not know- it's a great opportunity for me to attempt to build my vocabulary. However, a work in which the author strives to pull the most archaic, out-of-use, and unknown words into every sentence is not a good time. Will Self seems more interested in trying to prove that he is a poetic writer with a encyclopedic thesaurus at his fingertips than actually conveying a well written story. Granted, some of the jargon is simply british-english slang that doesn't ring a bell in american-english, but for the most part the author purposefully chooses words that are completely outside of the common lexicon and unknown to the masses.

To further complicate matters the majority of his antiquated verbiage isn't even in an average dictionary. The words are simply ones he stumbled across and fit to suit his purpose. (Within 6 paragraphs I came across 11 words I was unfamiliar with- 6 of which were not in my run-of-the-mill dictionary)! If you want to try and read this work of mangled words I suggest you have a hefty encyclopedic dictionary by your side.