On Walking... and Stalking Sebald
A guide to going beyond wandering around looking at stuff  
Phil Smith

REVIEWS
"It takes a unique individual, and an even better writer, to pull off a book as scatological, free-ranging and whimsical as this. Thankfully, underpinning Phil Smith’s unruly and constantly surprising account of his walk – retracing a famous route taken by German author WG Sebald around East Anglia – is such a keen intellect and expert grasp of language that you’re enthralled by his continual digressions and crashing together of literary forms. Revisiting his usual themes of psychogeography, counter-tourism and heritage subversion with humour and modesty, this book is a practical guide to walking as an exploration of ‘personal cosmology’, for which the academic and playwright has become quietly famous."
Dominic Bates in Ramblers - Go Walking  ~  See the full review    
"The book’s an autobiography; a drawing together of a lifetime’s ‘performance practice’, thinking, theorising and walking.

The book’s a loom; interconnecting and seeking patterns from, strand after strand of experience, recollection, memory, idea and weaving those strands together into a logical structure, without necessarily coming to any limiting or constraining ‘big idea’ conclusion.

The book’s a walk; one of those rambling, zig-zagging, satisfying meanders across all manner of terrain – leaping streams and not quite making the other side, getting a ‘cob on’ during steep climbs; slowing down to a mindful dawdle and suddenly racing into head-long, breathless chase.

The book’s a cauldron; mission, mystery, mania, madness, myth, mischief, and just about any ‘M’ you might mention, including ‘mum’ are to be found between the covers.

The book’s a generator and perhaps a provocation..."

Nick Holt. Read the full review at Slowboat
"Smith... drifts a coastline of melancholia, beneath a looming nuclear power station, staying in b&b’s, talking and walking, and sometimes wandering through suburbia, surrounded by people, but seeing no-one. So he meets people just as interesting - and just as ordinary as you or me - and he winds up in a cellar beneath an old abattoir, “This is not a room. The blood is not in the river, the blood is here, on the floor of the cellar, dried in the dents, this is a room of meat and blood, four years of killing, we are up to our ankles in offal, I don’t know what I set out to find, but it is here, the change of quantity that changes quality, the place and time when numbers turn into a human being, a few scraps of story into a myth, a middle-aged baby drenched in rubedo.”

...Smith is always real; tangible and unpretentious. He misses his mum, who recently died, and this sense of loss recurs throughout the book as it plays on his mind as he walks. There is a dreary stretch of walking when his mind - trudge trudge - dwells on old humiliations- a long ago spurned declaration of love (after which he fell down a man hole) - trudge trudge - a regretted and unresolved falling out with a friend - trudge trudge - the reality of all this communicates - common ground - the book is never an exercise in narcissism.

All the time there is a freshness of vision, a conscious framing of experiences. “Art” self-consciously puts vision into boxes - commodifies it for external and distanced examination. Smith transgresses the boundaries of art, as he makes us question our acceptance of the culturally determined orderings of history and geography we can so easily take for granted. He helps us stay alive, curious and awake."
Michael O'Leary - See the full review    
"... the book is much more than a travelogue of the author’s trip. It incorporates a mix of poetry, philosophy, and reflections on walking. It is an entertaining, frustrating and challenging read. And is illustrated with photographs that both illuminate and mirror the scatological (in the urban-dictionary sense) nature of the writing.

What I liked about the book:
  • The mix of poetry with prose, philosophy with practical experiences, the abstract and the concrete. This got me thinking about the possibilities available to a writer. You can mix forms, defy conventions, deliberately lead your reader down blind alleys, into mazes and through labyrinths.
  • The fact that the author retraced some of the route I followed during my own coastal walking. It is always interesting to read other people’s very different descriptions of the same walk.
  • The book is printed in a mixture of typefaces. The variation... had the helpful effect of providing visual signposts, alerting me to the nature of a particular section.
  • This book introduced me to new words. It showed me new ways of walking and new ways of thinking about walking and... led me into new ways of writing about walking.
What I didn’t like about the book:
  • The organised, slightly obsessional part of my psyche longed for a more organised structure to the book. I wanted to get on with the walk, and wanted the text to tie in more closely with the structure of the walking tour.
  • I was not familiar with Phil Smith’s previous work. Neither am I particularly familiar with the work of Sebald (although I have read his collection of stories, The Emigrants, and confess I found it hard going.) Many of the references flew over my head.
  • On Walking is published by a small, independent publishing house, Triarchy Press. This, and the fact the book contains colour photographs, means it is rather more expensive than most similar sized paper backs.
  • I have a fundamentally different attitude to walking than that espoused by Phil Smith. He is a playwright by background and considers his walks as physical and metaphysical performances. Whereas I don’t walk to make a statement, neither do I see walking as an act of creation. I view walking almost as a pilgrimage, a way of getting back in touch with the landscape, with the primeval part of my being, with the core of nature.

What I learnt from reading it:
I took the book with me when I returned to complete the final stages of my journey along the South West Coast Path. ...The book certainly had a profound influence on me. In fact, the wooded part of the walk from Lynmouth to Porlock, during which I walked totally alone and in the rain, meeting nobody for 3-4 hours among ancient woods that oozed and dripped, surrounded by a cloud of flies, was one of the most unusual and mind-blowing experiences of my walking life. Phil Smith’s words seemed to have penetrated my subconscious, profoundly altering both my physical perceptions and emotional responses.

Never underestimate the powerful effect of words. This book has opened me up to new experiences when out on the trail and has changed the way in which I see, think and write about walking."
Ruth Livingstone at Ruthless Readings ~ read the full review
Phil Smith fuses walking with performance art. He describes his practice as mythogeography – a method of sabotaging official narratives through experimental drifts to unlock a “multiplicity of stories” in the landscape.

If you’re willing to disrupt your thought patterns, walk without a destination, and look with curiosity at the ugliest, most mundane details, you’ll find that our cities and countryside are ripe with hidden meanings, visual puns and unintended contradictions.

Ghostly apparitions appear in paint smeared walls. Randomly scattered sticks form human avatars. Broken or defaced signs tell bawdy jokes. A fly-tipped door is a portal to another world.

In his short (also highly recommended) book Enchanted Things, Smith writes:
“So much in the visionary landscape with its circus of philosophising objects, floating text and people-machines goes unremarked. Esoteric symbols in petrol station logos, accidental poems made by the breaking of signposts, bathetic business names and massive geometrical puns go ignored.”

Smith’s latest book, On Walking brings together his practical methods and philosophy with an extended journey through Suffolk, following the steps of W.G Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.

This duality of purpose forms a two-tier narrative. In larger serif font, Smith extols the virtues of experimental walking, revealing practical methods of jolting yourself out of your usual patterns of thought and locomotion: start your drift at an unusual time of day; take the bus for seven stops then get off and explore; explore objects with your fingers; leave objects in random places; collect things you find and create a narrative from them; make poems from house names; carry around a burden, such as a door; walk in character as someone else.

Beneath, in a smaller san-serif font, Smith tells the tale of his journey in Sebald’s footsteps. He is by no means reverential to Sebald’s classic book, a blend of fact and fiction which takes geography as a starting point for a meander across time, history and literature...

Sebald’s text becomes a mythogeographic map which Smith uses to liberate himself from his own preconceptions. However, with his late grandfather hailing from Halesworth in Suffolk, he journeys into his own family history, becoming more like Sebald than he might have at first intended. His mother’s recent death is a recurring motif, pulling his thoughts away from East Anglia to locations of his youth and walks from his past.

In this way, On Walking is a joyously irreverent challenge to the way we experience our towns, cities and countryside – packed with practical ideas and tasks. But it’s also a melancholic journey into Smith’s internal universe, illuminating the bittersweet joy, doubt, confusion and hope of the modern British wanderer.

unofficialbritain.com - Read the full review
“I’m hooked. The book was wonderful and thought provoking and made me day-dream.”
Kevin Greenland http://arthausblog.com/  
"On Walking is thought-provoking and extremely well written. If you are a psychogeographer, a keen rambler or just an armchair explorer you will enjoy it. If you are a fan of the works of MR James, Arthur Machen, HP Lovecraft or, presumable, Sebald, you will enjoy it. If you like books that challenge your perspective you will enjoy it. If, like me, you are on a magical path then I urge you to read it and let it inspire your journey."

The Bad Witch ~ Read the full review
Picture
Click on the Book to return to the main On Walking page.
"Just to say how much I'm enjoying On Walking. I bought it a couple of months ago but only started it at the weekend... It's wonderful, thank you."
Joe McGann of The Upper Hand
"...an honest and emotional account of Phil Smith´s passion for walking as a priviledged way of being in the world, being OF the world. You will find tips for walking, treasured memories, descriptions of places, poems, notes on the work of other walkers, clear renderings of theoretical concepts related to the practice of walking and prompts for creative walking and looking..."

From Walking and Art - Read the full review
 "Currently reading ‘On Walking’ by Phil Smith which gives a very different perspective on walking, highly recommended."
​Marged Pendrell at RetakeReinvent
"On Walking... is a lovely little book. Hardback. Color photographs. But that bit of lily-gilding, though tactilely and visually appealing, is almost besides the point.

In On Walking, Phil Smith redefines the experience and possibilities of what we know as the simple pleasure and reward of going for a walk, pretty much totally. It is a dense little book, filled with literary references and philosophical inquiries into the nature of everything, because Phil Smith is such a man: literate, philosophical, but, for our purposes, most importantly deeply playful and playfully deep.

He is a poet as much as he is a thinker and playwright. Early on in the book, he makes these skills, as well as the focus of this book, delightfully vivid:

Walk upset
Walk spoiled
Walk spilled
Walk becoming ghost

Walk winningly
Parade up your own aisle

Carry your heart for a while
Cradle a deeper organ
…

Walk like water behind a dam
Walk released
Call into the grocery store as if it were your favorite museum
Walk like a breaker
Walk like a ball
Walk absurd
Walk unheard
…
Walk

It’ll take time to read this book. Some parts will, at first, seem too obscure. Others perhaps too strange. Be patient in your journey. Be gentle with yourself. Roam around a bit if you need to. Skip chapters. Rest for a while on a page or a thought. Go for frequent walks. The journey, as Phil Smith points out so brilliantly, is, in deed, the reward."
Bernie De Koven ~ Read the full review
“bound to become an indispensable companion to the walking artist”  
Airspace Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent
"Phil Smith a.k.a. Crab Man, Mythogeography, Anton Vagus serves a dish of captivating journey which you can follow in an (un)linear way and the key to that follows through your own individual way of exploring it. Hence the fact that the multi-layered guidebook on how to find the meaning of the journey is effortlessly erratic (?) in a tempting way to lose yourself...

Psychogeography in its primeval form of situationist origin was derivative of surrealism and dada. Crab Man gives a completely new angle on the matter which the reader might find both encapsulating and confusing at the first read especially when you are not into the counter-cultural bibliography.

The second, more straightforward layer is a story of a trip in the footsteps of W.G. Sebald - an author of "Rings of Saturn" - an account of his walk around Suffolk, U.K.

The analogue self-updating vessel of finding stories, references in left-overs, self-references thoughts and ramblings, eruditive wireless globe of microcosms found both in a verse and a puddle, in a found toy or a visage that appears behind the shadow of every-day routine of repeated paradigms of un-scholastic street gnosis, well-trodden paths of silenced movements, not daring enough to create a symphony about it but intriguing enough to make a personal landmark in a pursuit of symbolic understanding.

Given the fact that the layout of the book is so dense - it's definitely a wonderful read to follow on your own and encourages to self-expressed intuitive trail of...(...)"

Hubert Heathertoes - Read the full review
"If you are of a philosophical frame of mind two books are out that might keep the little grey cells working. Neither are easy reads, both being more akin to struggling up a steep hillside, panting away, but catching the occasional glimpses of a beautiful view, noticing something fascinating by the path or having the odd original thought. A Philosophy of Walking by Frederic Gros is perhaps better dipped into rather than read front to back, as it feels like a collection of essays rather than a structured argument. There are well researched sections on the likes of Nietsche, Rousseau, Rimbaud and Thoreau and on particular types of walking, such as the pilgrimage or strolling in public gardens. The author is prone to making sweeping statements in a manner that probably sounds more appealing in the original French, but parts of it are illuminating in a somewhat piecemeal way.

Phil Smith’s On Walking has an altogether more personal touch, picking up on his longstanding career in performance and theatre and any number of intellectual interests, from Situationism to psychogeography. The journey is constructed around a re-walking of German writer W.G.Sebald’s semi-fictional account of a walking tour in Norfolk, ‘The Rings of Saturn’. There’s a little bit of standard walking journal here but with plenty of strange mental diversions, which you will either find intriguing or simply annoying. Smith sets out to subvert everything that’s ‘normal’ about going for a walk, so of course you get what you pay for in that respect. Quite good fun, but only if you like this sort of thing."

WalkingWorld.com - Read the full review