"A sensitive walk up any High Street is a Pilgrim's Progress" Phil Smith - playwright, walk-performance artist and author (Mythogeography and Counter-Tourism) - recently retraced W.G. Sebald's famous 'Rings of Saturn' walk round East Anglia. At one level On Walking describes this blistered walk from one incongruous B&B to the next, taking in places like Dunwich, Bungay, Covehithe, Orford Ness, Sutton Hoo and Rendlesham Forest - with their lost villages, Cold War testing sites, black dogs, white deer and alien trails. Phil Smith's walk soon becomes every bit as remarkable as Sebald's and he matches Sebald's erudition, originality and humour swathe for swathe. At a second level, the book sets out a unique kind of 'hyper-sensitised' walking for which the author is quietly famous. It burrows beneath the guidebook and the map, looks beyond the shopfront and Tudor facade and feels beneath the blisters and aches of the everyday. The Suffolk walk described here is an exemplary walk that goes beyond 'wandering around looking at stuff' and shows how every walk can be art, revolution and pilgrimage. At a third level, On Walking is an intellectual tour de force, encompassing Situationism, alchemy, dancing, jouissance, geology, psychogeography, 20th century cinema and old TV, architecture, grief, pilgrimage, WWII, the Cold War, Uzumaki, pub conversations, somatics and synchronicity.

About the Author
Dr Phil Smith (also known as CrabMan, Anton Vagus and Mytho) has claws in several different worlds. One, large and wide, is in performance and music theatre [he has written more than 100 plays for companies including St Petersburg State Comedy Theatre, Opera North and Perpetual Motion, and he is dramaturg with TNT (Munich)]. From site-specific performances in South Devon beach huts, lidos, tea shops and other unconventional settings, to mis-guides in National Trust properties, to counter-tours and drifts in city streets, Phil Smith has long practised what he preaches in this book. He is a visiting lecturer at the University of Exeter and at the University of Plymouth. He is also one of four core member of a group of artist-researchers called Wrights and Sites, who have generated a range of mis-guides, performances, possible cities and forests and other wonders.


Book Information
ISBN 9781909470309
Author Phil Smith
Format Paperback
Page Count 198
Imprint Triarchy Press
Publisher Triarchy Press