what are you drawing? and reading?
Psychogeography
Words by Will Self Pictures by Ralph Steadman
Published 2007 by Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-0-7475-9033-0
‘Psychogeography’ promising. Mind meets earth and writing, the way Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital penetrates concrete to reach the primordial footprints. Our university library catalogue has one book under ‘psychogeography’. From a 1970s psychology conference, it’s an in- your-face Freudian approach to landscape analysis. (The Piazza San Marco has a lot to offer to that particular stream of consciousness). Not my lost river of soul, I fear. Some say French radical Guy DeBord sounds invented psychogeography. I did a drive- by skimming of his Society of the Spectacle , observed his anger and alienation, and chose to project upon them a mourning for the disconnection between human and environment. Oh, the ennui, the futility, etc. DeBord was a product of his time, but that is a subject for another day. Ralph Steadman gets how to combine earth / mind / graphics. Wilf Self, I’m not so sure. The vocabulary is thrilling, the personal reflections and autobiographical musings very interesting and engaging, but forgive me, I did not find the ‘geo’ in what are essentially personal essays that change location from time to time.
Cognitive Map, Rosedale Neighborhood, Evansville, Indiana, c. 1978
One of the first exercises that I have students undertake is to draw a cognitive map of their childhood neighborhood with key landmarks--in under ten minutes. This exercise introduces the relationship between memory, place, and time. The image above is my own drawing from the exercise depicting Rosedale, where I lived from age two to twelve. Rosedale was a shabby little corner of a rustbelt city in the grip of postindustrial decline, a neighborhood of bullies, cracked sidewalks, train tracks, and taverns. Joseph Heathcott New York
Jill Browne Calgary
onsite 19: street, streets and lanes, the straight and narrow, wide and busy
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