On Walking - - And Stalking Sebald

"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

phil smith is completely post-everything-he is SO after that. formerly a big deal perfesser guy, with teaching gigs in vermont, michigan, and illinois, he slipped disability and mad studies cranky rants into courses he taught. at eastern michigan university, as a full professer, somewhat implausibly, he was director of the brehm center for special education scholarship and research, and head of the department of special education. phil received the 2002 vermont crime victim service award, the emerging scholar award in disability studies in education in 2009, and the eastern michigan university college of education innovative scholarship award in 2015. he studied creative writing at a couple of universities, as well as photography, filmmaking, and education. a poet, playwright, novelist, and visual and performance artist, his creative books include pomes; plaze; hagiography, or the electron; hats; keweenaw bay songs; landscapes; machines; doors and walls and windows; still life; the reach; this place is north; poems come; and cutting wood.phil describes himself as a Mad and Critical Disability Studies scholar, as well as a whatever-comes-after-qualitative researcher. his academic work includes two books exploring disability studies, Whatever Happened to Inclusion? The Place of Students with Intellectual Disabilities in Education and Both Sides of the Table: Autoethnographies of Educators Learning and Teaching With/In [Dis]ability; as well as a textbook entitled, Disability and Diversity: An Introduction. his book, writhing writing: moving towards a mad poetics, published by Autonomous Press, won the 2020 American Educational Studies Association Critics Choice Award. he's edited another book for Autonomous Press, Tinfoil Hats: Stories by Mad People in an Insane World.for more than 25 years, in a variety of contexts and roles, he worked as a Disability and Mad justice activist, and served on the boards of directors of a number of regional, state and local organizations, including the Society for Disability Studies, where he was President.he's Mad (but not, mostly, angry) as hell, a walkie, and identifies as disabled. a life-long Yankee, he lived for a coupla decades in Michigan, spending as much time as he could beside Lake Superior, where loons, wolves, moose, and bald eagles peeked in the windows of his cabin. now he lives on the side of a mountain at 1800 feet, in an even smaller cabin without a toilet or running water, fussing and ranting with his tree and animal neighbors.

Summary

Phil Smith - playwright, walk-performance artist and author (Mis-Guides, Mythogeography, Counter-Tourism) uses his retracing of WG Sebald's walk round East Anglia to introduce a unique kind of hyper-sensitised walking. His exemplary walk goes beyond 'wandering around looking at stuff' and shows how every walk can be art, revolution and pilgrimage.

Product details

• Authors: Phil Smith
• Publisher: Triarchy Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 22.04.2014
• EAN: 9781909470309
• ISBN: 978-1-909470-30-9
• No. of pages: 198
• Dimensions: 152 mm x 229 mm x 11 mm
• Weight: 295 g
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > Theatre, ballet; Travel > Sports and active travel > World, Arctic, Antarctic