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Imprint: Triarchy Press
Published: 2010
Format: Paperback
Extent: 256pp.
Size: 17 x 24.4 cm
List Price: £15.00 Use code to save 20% 
ISBN: 978-0-9562631-3-1
Tags: drift, derive, wrights & sites, mythogeography, mis-guide, psychogeography,  improvisation, phil smith

Mythogeography  
CrabMan (Phil Smith)

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Readership

Mythogeography is a book for walkers, artists who use walking in their art, students who are discovering and studying a world of resistant and aesthetic walking, anyone troubled by official guides to anywhere, urbanists, geographers, site-specific performers, town planners and un-planners, urban explorers, entrepreneurs and activists who don’t want to drive to the revolution.
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Since 1998 ‘mythogeography’ has developed as a paranoid, exploratory, detective-like approach to space and place. It has prioritised anomalies and ‘in-betweeness’, working in gaps, extolling ‘voids’, and constructing general ideas from the ‘and and and’ of the accumulation and assemblage of disparate parts (Deleuze and Guattari).

But it has also given attention to patterns, chiming with Roger Penrose’s assertion that ‘the mathematics are out there’, assuming such patterns to be an emergent meaning in themselves. Part of that attention to patterns has been a careful positioning in respect of ‘myth’, attempting to use ‘limited myth’; mythic-like accounts which are capable of symbolically representing patterns (e.g. of power or cultural paradigms) but are rendered questionable by their popular-cultural exploitation, blatant fiction or absurdity.
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Mythogeography
A guide to walking sideways 
CrabMan (Phil Smith)

2 parts story
This 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 with a dog trouvé called Pontiflunk.
Buy it just for his inimitable account of the journey.

1 part handbook
The “handbook of drifting” later in the book has 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 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). [There's much more about the much, much more once you get past the mushrooms.]
At its simplest, Mythogeography is a way of walking, thinking and visiting a place 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:
  1. Shops, houses, streets
  2. Tourist sites, visitor centres, museums, heritage industry
  3. Visible archaeology and history
  4. Community/social/collective ambitions, hopes, disappointments, failures
  5. Personal memories and recollections
  6. Invisible and forgotten history
  7. Concealed history (crime, disease, squalor)
  8. Childhoods, loves, hates
  9. Myths, legends and rumours
  10. 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.

Read more:

About the author
Snippets
Not psychogeography
Drift, drive, thrift, thrive
Reviews
5 Ways to Use a Map
See our other books on Walking
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.
Watch the author suggest How to Walk a City...