Reviews

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More coming...

1. Amazon - a reviewer called Hagstone

I'm not sure how a review can do this wondrous compendium justice. It animates the world with meaning; not the fake cliched meaning of the heritage industry, but the realities, often uncomfortable, that create and conjoin the structures around us. It ranges from the radical geography of Doreen Massey, to the superb storytelling of Crab Man; it can refer to the urban paranoia of anonymous 1980s writers, and the oak tree wanderings of an acorn planting engineer in 1910. I haven't started at the beginning and read to the end, I've dipped in and come out with something new every time - something that further enhances my view of my surroundings, and develops my critical faculties. And yet - the book isn't a collection of bits, it is a cohesive whole, with a consistant philosophy and outlook. Perhaps, as suggested by the cover, it is a tool box as much as a book.
It should be central to any library - placed between the Bible and the Book of Sodom.
Thank you Hagstone!

2. Walk - the magazine of the ramblers
The act of walking can be a political protest, personal expression, spiritual discovery and geographical deconstruction – all part of a tradition from the drift and dérive of the Situationists to today’s psychogeographers such as Iain Sinclair and Will Self.
Exeter-based performance artist Phil Smith is a veteran sideways walker and in this book develops psychogeography into mythogeography. It’s a compendium of walking stories, hoaxes and digressions, lists, literary jokes, observations and dense passages of prose poetry-cum- theory.
 Pretentious at times perhaps, but you’d have a hard heart not to enjoy some of Smith’s involving, passionate and often very funny storytelling.
Des de Moor

3. Interface
Presented as a compilation of documents “from the diaries, manifestos, notes, prospectuses, records and everyday utopias of the Pedestrian Resistance,” the book is populated by a horde of similarly unreliable narrators, nested like Russian dolls: sceptical notes from a junior publisher’s assistant and glosses from the mysterious editors (the book seems at first glance to claim no named author or editor) pepper the text, and the collations include documents apparently penned by persons missing, unknown, unnamed, or even – as in the case of the legendary mountebank/immortal alchemist the Comte de St. Germain – both mythical and historical...
This bewildering cacophony of voices is mirrored by Mythogeography’s approach to the constituent parts of the publication. Footnotes, rather than remaining confined to their ghettoes, interrupt and swamp the main text, sometimes for pages at a time. The endnotes appear halfway through, and two thirds of the book is devoted to front and back matter (a joke about inflamed appendices suggests itself here). This text is dense with signposts, and it’s difficult (and probably pointless) to plot a straightforward course through it. Rather it invites diversion, digression, a kind of textual drift on the part of the reader.
And of course drifting is at the heart of it. Mythogeography is cultivar or hybrid of psychogeography, the Lettrist and Situationist Internationals’ term for their field of urbanist investigation and experimentation, and their practice of the dérive is the basic template for many of the activities described in this book. But rather than just an exercise in minting neologisms, mythogeography as its described here encompasses other discourses: Deleuzian geo-philosophy, the mobilities paradigm in the humanities, Doreen Massey’s theorisation of space as constituted by multiple trajectories, and the performative, embodied cartographies of Tim Ingold (zombie films also loom large)... A ‘panography’ of relevant texts at the rear points provides some pointers for further research, and the main body contains many passing references to artists and particular works identified as having an affinity with mythogeography. No care is taken to distinguish real artists and works from the activities of the fictional cell-collectives purportedly responsible for authoring the documents here, but that isn’t really a problem. If it sounds like it’s a satire on tiny and short-lived psychogeographical groups and their quasi-official-sounding naming strategies, then it probably is – probably.
Read the full review at Interface

4. Walking Home to 50
I had taken a book with me – Mythogeography: The Art of Walking Sideways – which I had known about for some time, but not delved into until now. It proved to be a compelling and fresh exploration of the ‘world of resistant and aesthetic walking’, part pseudo-literary account, part manual, part encyclopaedia. Plug:
The reach is wide and deep, occasionally idiosyncratic. The fragmentary and slippery format recognises the disparate, loosely interwoven and rapidly evolving uses of walking today: as art, as exploration, as urban resistance, as activism, as an ambulatory practice of geography, as meditation, as performance, as dissident mapping, as subversion of and rejoicing in the everyday. Mythogeography is a celebration of that interweaving, its contradictions and complementarities, and a handbook for those who want to be part of it.
P1020404
“If I’d known it was this good, I’d've bought the fancy edition…RB”
Read the blog at Walking Home to 50

5. New Theatre Quarterly

With the proviso that the ideas contained in this book can only ever be fully 'realized and theorized on the hoof and in communion with others', this compilation of diary and notebook entries, manifestos and other assembled documents is an intriguing exploration into the practices of a loose coalition of exploratory walkers, pedestrian geographers, and drifting groups.

...Conceived as a series of approaches to walking, as a resistant cultural practice, mythogeography eschews scientific disciplinarity in favour of invisibility and hybridity - the point of this book being not to present a comprehensive overview or a theoretical framework of 'alternative' ambulation, but rather to offer a 'toolbag of ideas for those wanting to create their own mythogeographical practice'.

...Playfully merging fiction, documentary, and theory and interspersed with Tony Weaver's enigmatic illustrations and design, the text unfolds through extensive footnotes and endnotes, perpetual cross-referencing, and various inserts and asides. 
Read the full review at New Theatre Quarterly

6. Frillip Moolog 
The Lovely [edition] arrived yesterday. I’m loving it!
Sadly I can’t just sit reading all day so am having to keep popping back to it. It’s delicious. It’s like sucking a sweetie. You savour it and the taste stays in your mouth even when you’re not reading. ( I am usually a sweetie cruncher but Walking Sideways needs much more respect.) So exciting to enter this wonderfully anarchic world.
I am no writer so I am marveling at it …and I have only dipped my toe into the book so far.
When I read The Third Policeman by Flann O Brien ( years ago) it  ignited my love of the footnote and I am also a huge fan of Forkbeard Fantasy. One of their publications The Suffocation by Holcombe Rogus ( Forkbeard Fantasy) is fantastic, fun and hints at Mythogeography.

But Walking Sideways is brainy stuff and requires concentration. Not that that helps. So maybe  a bag of boiled sweeties to go with it. ( I am Scottish so Sweeties are necessary).

So back to work and Thanks again
Kirsty
Visit Kirsty's moolog beings at www.frillipmoolog.co.uk. Here's one such fantastic being (called Russell):



 7. Invisible Paris
Following in the footsteps of the psychogeographers, then drifting in a completely different direction, the writer and performer Phil Smith explains in a new book the art of walking sideways, or how you can make a stroll into something far more subversive and entertaining. Here he tells me more about the book and the concept behind it.

Mythogeography: The art of walking sideways is a very curious document. Like an unknown city, at first it seems dense and impenetrable, but slowly patterns begin to emerge. Symbols like street signs help readers find their way, but visitors to this world are also encouraged to make their own routes. Unusually, the author is not named, and instead there is a series of more or less reliable narrators and guides. This is a “provocation” says Phil Smith, to encourage “others to adopt the book as a handbook rather than consume it as an autobiographical travel piece”.
Read the full review at Invisible Paris

8. Electric Sheep - A Deviant View of Cinema
[Phil Smith's] new book, Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways is a collection of diaries, letters, narratives, notes and other documents, written by artists and various practitioners of the art of walking that explores its modern uses, from meditative to subversive.

Read which Lucky Man the Crab Man would be if he were a film character at Electric Sheep (that is a meaningful sentence, even if it sounds a mite improbable)

9. Ctrl-N/ Journal

The fragmentary and slippery format recognises the disparate, loosely interwoven and rapidly evolving uses of walking today: as performance, as exploration, as urban resistance, as activism, as an ambulatory practice of geography, as meditation, as post-tourism, as dissident mapping, as subversion of and rejoicing in the everyday. ‘Mythogeography’ celebrates that interweaving, its contradictions and complementarities, and is an attempt at a handbook for those who want to be part of it.
Read the full review at Ctrl-N/ Journal


10. Eugene Byrne

...this morning I spoke to playwright and author Phil Smith about his new book ‘Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways’, which is quite possibly the strangest book I have ever read. Partly novel, and partly philosophical treatise, the book is a sort of field guide to exploring and interacting with urban and rural environments. It’s informative and witty, but mostly a celebration of finding, or making, weirdness in the most ordinary (and extraordinary) places. There’s also a manifesto, but as Phil cheerfully admits it’s palpably impossible to follow.

11. things magazine
"It says a lot for our disconnection with the world around us that walking can be considered a creative, even subversive act. For the men of the post-impressionist era, the flaneurs for whom ready income and social status acted as an access-all-areas pass for the rapidly modernising metropolis, the idea of promenading without intent or purpose was, in some senses, radical behaviour. The modern city had never been explored in this way before.

Now there's Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways, a guide book that accompanies the rediscovery of slowly traversed space. From the blurb: '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'.
...Phil Smith's Mythogeography decribes the role of walking thus: 'as performance, as exploration, as urban resistance, as activism, as an ambulatory practice of geography, as meditation, as post-tourism, as dissident mapping, as subversion of and rejoicing in the everyday.' It's not strictly urban, of course - see Drift, for some rural wandering, or explore Smith's own starter kit for drifting, a way for 'opening up the world, clearing eyes and peeling away the layers of spectacle, deception and that strange “hiddeness in plain sight” that coats the everyday.'
Read the full review at things magazine.


12. The Reluctant Twitterer
The Mythograpedes

Strolling in the cracks of the pavement
Honouring the city’s weeds
Or walking on unlit shores
The mythograpedes

moving unseen,
eyes like split fruit
every year at the height of summer
The Crab Man walks on blistered feet

GPS, a rightly-worshipped Orrery
a Guide, sort of, in the sightless search
of Neanderthals chanting
the Order’s boundary beat.
Read The Reluctant Twitterer's full poem


13. Frank Mills's Empty Space
"There is a sense of ...
  • the disruption of the everyday
  • the seeing of things anew
  • the stimulation of the senses
  • a resistance to the bounding and policing of space
  • a vague sense of common history
  • the taking of pleasure in the luxury of the walk for itself, without it having to serve any purpose.
 ...In [Mythogeography:A Guide to Walking Sideways] we romp, often sideways, through landscapes real and imagined (although not unreal) in the most delightful ways. As I romped through the words I laughed while having my thinking simultaneously, and provocatively, challenged. As I read I explored utopian dreams and unrealized fantasies, both those of the author and of those my own making.


14. Pannage

Geography is about looking at the world in a different way. It isn't about describing, although that can be useful, but understanding and acting towards change. Importantly, geography is inside our hearts and minds and not just 'out there' in an objective sense.

We have become familiar with the term psycho-geography in the writing of Iain Sinclair and others. Will Self has even pinched the word to title a newspaper column

Salmon, AJ et al (2010) Mythogeography: a guide to walking sideways, Axminster: Triarchy Press.

Available in a pretty and plain editions it is said to be "Compiled from the diaries, manifestos, notes, prospectuses, records and everyday utopias of the Pedestrian Resistance."

In the style of a scrap-book, in old-speak, or a blog there is also the invitable website at
www.mythogeography.com

It's a challenging read. There is plenty to catch the eye and much to skim passed. I found it particularly irritating that place-names are semi-concealed by an initial letter and dashes which just interrupts the flow of reading. Perhaps working these out is part of the game.

There is also Twitter action
@mythogeography has a knack of suggesting contrary and provocative tweets such as
"Places are no better than the Space in which they are imagined" but did not respond when I attempted to engage.


15. ARLIS

 
From the Art Libraries Society News-sheet

16. An e-mailer (original may be inspected at our premises)
“PS really like Mythogeography book - really very good - I really like format, moveability of it - the text always has a sense of being on the move, being in motion. Excellent!”


17. Another e-mailer (original may also be inspected at our premises)
“I have just been looking at your Mythogeography book and getting excited. I have been mulling over a walking-writing project for a while now - a way of creatively developing my phd thesis - and it has made me think that I must get on with it! Thank you.” 

18. Venue Magazine (the magazine of Bristol)

"Mythogeography – what’s it all about then? Well, it’s kind of like that exploratory walkabout pastime, psychogeography – but with more strangeness and jokes.” 

Read the full review at Venue 


20. Another e-mailer (original may be inspected at our premises) 
Hi,
I believe you are the publisher of the above book - I simply asked them if you gave student discount and they gave me your email.... And said they would knit me a copy 
I live in Saltash.
Thank for your help
Bxxxxxx Hxxxxxx

21. Compulsion Online

"Andy reads lots of Arthur Machen amongst other things, I read quite a bit of China Miéville, Looking for Jake and Other Stories with people chasing alleys which have disappeared from one city only to reappear in different one, beat up a another street and disappear again. I think our favourite at the moment has to be Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways by Phil Smith though, it's just jam packed with cool ideas and concepts." The Psychogeographical Commission interviewed in Compulsion

22. J R Carpenter - writer of web-based non-linear intertextual hypermedia narratives
J. R. Carpenter

J. R. Carpenter Best book purchase all week: Mytho Geography: A Guide to Walking Sideways, compiled from the diaries, manifestos, notes, prospectuses, records and everyday utopias of the Pedestrian Resistance. 

23. An e-mailer (original may be inspected at our premises)

“Having thoroughly perused the contents of your so-called book in the park yesterday, I realised that I was laughing out loud, snorting and making a general spectacle of myself. Off I go to dress cadavers as pirates - splendid idea, for which hearty thanks...”

24. Studies in Travel Writing blog - Nottingham Trent University

“Neither psychogeography nor situationism, mythogeography demands a different kind of approach. This polyphonic and visually-arresting manifesto practices what it preaches, offering photographs, diagrams, taxonomies, glossaries and found texts including a 'footsteps' narrative written in the third person regarding 'The Crab Man' who walked from Manchester to Northampton looking for trees planted by Charles Hurst, the acorn-casting author of The Book of the English Oak (1911). ”


25. An e-mailer (original may be inspected at our premises)


“Mythogeography arrived today... It has delayed my exit from bed by two hours.”

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