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 trouve called Pontiflunk.

Attributed to Phil Smith ("the Crab Man") on the publisher's webite.

This is not the first walk in the footsteps of W.G. Sebald, whose The Rings of Saturn was an account of his walk round Suffolk 20 years ago. But Phil Smith's own walk soon becomes quite as extraordinary as Sebald's and he matches Sebald's erudition, originality and humour swathe for swathe. On one level On Walking describes an actual, lumbering walk from one incongruous B&B to the next, taking in Dunwich, Lowestoft, Southwold, Covehithe, Orford Ness, Sutton Hoo, Bungay and Rendlesham Forest - with their lost villages, Cold War testing sites, black dogs, white deer and alien trails. On a second level it sets out a unique kind of walking that the author has been practising for many years and for which he is quietly famous. It's a kind of walking that burrows beneath the guidebook and the map, looks beyond the shopfront and Tudor facade and feels beneath the blisters and disgruntlement of the everyday. Those who try it report that their walking [and their whole way of seeing the world] is never quite the same again. And the Suffolk walk described in this book is an exemplary walk, a case study - this is exactly how to do it. And on a third level, On Walking is an intellectual tour de force, encompassing Situationism, alchemy, jouissance, dancing, geology, psychogeography, 20th century cinema and old TV, performance, architecture, the nature of grief, pilgrimage, World War II, the Cold War, Uzumaki, pub conversations, synchronicity, somatics and the Underchalk.

Since the early 2000s there has been an increase in artists who are walking as an essential part of their artistic practice. This book identifies the unique attributes of walking to develop a definition for walking as an artistic medium. Drawing on historical sources, such as the walks of the Romantic poets, Dadaists and Letterist/Situationist Internationals, it presents a practice based approach to walking focused on the radical memory of the medium. The book covers three contemporary organisations working to develop the artistic medium of walking—London’s Walking Artists Network, Scotland’s Walking Institute and New York City’s Walk Exchange—and looks at how these different organisation’s strategies contribute to the development of the artistic medium of walking. The book is framed by five walking exercises, and invites the reader to create a memory palace for the medium of walking as a practical exploration of artistic walking practices.

In 2010, Phil Smith reinvented psychogeography with his own unique take on the subject. He called it Mythogeography and it is at the heart of any discussion/practice of radical walking, site-specific urban performance, 'drift and dÃ?©rive' and 'guiding and misguiding.' In this new book, he has reinvented Mythogeography. This beautiful book contains an essay by Phil Smith and images by John Schott taken during Phil's recent invitation to be Artist-in-Residence at Carleton College, Minnesota. Phil Smith addresses 16 key themes: 1. On being touched, but not obliged-how to fully engage with places with no surrender of our nomadic self. 2. Pilgrimage-how to weave the practice of pilgrimage in and out of our daily lives. 3. The big picture and the zero-local history, tourist guides, our stories always start from somewhere-everything before that gets deleted. 4. Breadth & Narrowness-the 'narrowness' of everyday lives is often compared to the 'openness' of history. But mythogeographers find and explore them curled up inside each other. 5. Individual embodying an idea. 6. The mob-"I want people to walk mythogeographically, but under their own steam; not led". 7. The compromised body as an agent of joy-put our bodies (not ideas) back at the centre of walking. 8. The "talented" walker ready to pounce-how to leave an action until the last moment. 9. Dread space-how to transform a feeling of sourceless fear into an act of liberation. 10. Walking with your imagined self-we can enter our own fantasies about and in a place as we walk. 11. From classic pilgrimage to ambulant architecture-building new shrines, installing trip hazards, overlaying mazes across the path as we walk. 12. Ritual and repetition-walk a place repeatedly until you make up your own ritual of the place. 13. Using architecture as a magic wand-Find 'new menhirs.' 14. Provisional mythogeography-allow your research and maps to unravel in the face of a place. 15. Fighting the Spectacle with the power of zero-look for the infinitesimal change that can disrupt. 16. Evangelising-readers must do this stuff in their own and better ways. [Subject: Mythogeography, Radical Walking, Psychogeography, Performing Arts]

From the internationally bestselling creator of Wreck This Journal... wan·der verb \ˈwän-dər\ to walk/explore/amble in an unplanned or aimless way with a complete openness to the unknown Several years ago when Keri Smith, bestselling author of Wreck This Journal, discovered cryptic handwritten notations in a worn copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, her interest was piqued. Little did she know at the time that those simple markings would become the basis of a years-long, life-changing exploration into a mysterious group known only as The Wander Society, as well as the subject of this book. Within these pages, you’ll find the results of Smith’s research: A guide to the Wander Society, a secretive group that holds up the act of wandering, or unplanned exploring, as a way of life. You’ll learn about the group’s mysterious origins, meet fellow wanderers through time, discover how wandering feeds the creative mind, and learn how to best practice the art of wandering, should you choose to accept the mission.

A book about developments in walking and walk-performance for enthusiasts, practitioners, students and academics.

A guide to subverting the way that heritage sites would like to be seen.

Phil Smith's walking tour of East Anglia matches Sebald's erudition, originality and humour swathe for swathe.

Shan Hai Jing (The Legends of Mountains and Seas), commonly titled The Classic of Mountains and Seas or Guideways Through Mountains and Seas per Richard Strassberg, was a book that was juxtaposed to the later book Shui Jing (classic or canons on 137 rivers) written by Sang Qin of the Cao-Wei dynasty (220-265 A.D.). For the absurdities and strange things in the book, such as folklore monsters, weird animals, ancient clan genealogies and strange lands (i.e., terra incognita), scholars of different dynasties felt troublesome to determine the genre in the imperial bibliography. In the Manchu Qing dynasty, Ji Xiaolan treated the book as fiction; during the Republic of China, Lu Xun treated the book as sorcery; and subsequently, Yuan Ke treated the book as mythology. Anne Birrell, author of The Classic of Mountains and Seas, pointed out that the book was taken to be of different genre in history, such as geomancy, geography and cosmology, etc., with the Westerners and Japanese going astray in different directions as well, including the claims of cosmography per M. Nazin (1839), geography per Léon de Risny (1890s), tribal peoples per Gustav Schlegel (1892), deities per Edward T. C. Werner (1923), materia medica per Bernard E. Read (1928-39), religious and medical per Ito Seiji (1969), ethnographic per Rémi Mathieu, folk medicine per John William Schiffeler (1977, 1980), gendered motif per Riccardo Francasso (1988), and bestiary per Richard Strassberg (2018), etc. Today, in the context of China's assertion of the grandiose imperial past, the book was wrongly treated by the Chinese to be about ancient geological exploration records, a theme also seen in Henriette Mertz's Pale Ink (1958). The Legends of Mountains and Seas, which would be expounded in this book to be about two different kinds of fortune-telling, sorcery and divination, should not be taken as a Han-dynasty equivalent philosophical 'jing' [canons or classic, i.e., longitude/28 lodges' asterism] learning edited by Confucius and his disciples, nor the nature of the derivative sets of interpretation and commentary books that were known as the Han dynasty 'wei' ['latitude' or "five planets' divination"] series, nor the 'chen-wei' (ch'an wei) prophecy and argot books (i.e., implicit prophecy or cryptology that Jacques Gernet called by esoteric commentaries). While the mountain part of the book could be termed 'guideways' as proposed by Yuan Ke and Richard Strassberg, the 'jing'-suffixed seas' components could not be qualified with this tag. The mountains' part was actually the ancient Shi-fa stalk divination. The Legends of Mountains and Seas was compiled by Liu Xin (53 BC - 23 AD). The book, totaling 18 chapters nowadays, apparently developed the different contents throughout the Zhou, Qin, Han and Jinn dynasties. It was deduced that Liu Xin combined the five chapters of the book on the "mountains" (Wu Zang San Jing) with the chapters on the "[over-]seas" contents to become a consolidated mountains and seas' book. The seas or overseas' components could be further separated into two groups, i.e., the "inner seas" and the "outer seas" sections that were compiled by Liu Xin and the "within-seas" and the "overseas wilderness" sections that were possibly collected by Guo Pu (A.D. 276-324), with the former two sections possibly synchronizing with the Han empire's military expansion, and the latter two sharing similar contents as Lian-shan Yi (divination on concatenated [undulating] mountain ranges), Gui-cang Yi (returning-to-earth hoarding divination), A.D. 279 Ji-zhong tomb divination texts, and the 1993 Wangjiatai excavated divination texts.