Psychogeography: Disentangling the Modern Conundrum of Psyche and Place

by Will Self, Will Self

For those interested in the connection between people and place, the best of the decade long collaboration between literary brat packer Will Self and gonzo illustrator Ralph Steadman.

Opening with a dazzling new 20,000-word essay on walking from London to New York, Psychogeography is a collection of 50 short pieces written over the last four years, together with 50 four-color illustrations by Ralph Steadman. In Psychogeography Self and Steadman explore the relationship between psyche and place in the contemporary world. Self thinks most people have a "wind-screen-based virtuality" on long- and short-distance travel. We drive, take buses and trains, fly. To combat this compromised reality, Will Self walks, relating intimately to place, as pedestrians do. Ranging in subject from swimming the Ganges to motorcycling across the Australian outback, shopping in an Iowa mall to surfing a tsunami, Psychogeography is at once a map of our world and the psychoanalysis of the way we inhabit it. The pieces are serious, humorous, facetious, and rambunctious. Psychogeography, the study of the effects of geographical environment on the emotions and behavior of individuals, has captivated other writers including W. G. Sebald and Peter Ackroyd, but Self and Steadman have their own unique spin on how place shapes people and vice versa.

Genres: Nonfiction, Travel, Essays, Psychology, Walking, Philosophy, British Literature

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

William Self is an English novelist, reviewer and columnist. He received his education at University College School, Christ's College Finchley, and Exeter College, Oxford. He was married to the late journalist Deborah Orr.

Self is known for his satirical, grotesque and fantastic novels and short stories set in seemingly parallel universes.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Disclaimer: This book contains very little psychogeography.

Apart from the wildly entertaining opening piece where Will walks from London to New York, the other 200 pages are travel articles, typical Selfian dalliances, and hilarious blog-style writings about places home/abroad.

What makes this collection stand out are the terrific illustrations from Ralph Steadman which make the whole package an exquisite purchase for the Self devotee.

[Kieran Mcmahon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Paris Street: Rainy Day by Gustave Caillebotte

The flâneur was, first of all, a literary type from 19th century France, essential to any picture of the streets of fin de siècle Paris. It carried a whole host of rich associations: the man of leisure, the idler, the urban explorer, the connoisseur of the street.



The term was coined by decadent poet and anarcho-hedonist-genius Charles Baudelaire, author of Les Fleurs du Mal. Baudelaire is credited with coining the term modernité to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility art has to capture that experience. In essence the flâneur is a walker, but one who does not take for granted every detail and dingy corner of his city environment, who notices what is not there and how the frantic density of urban life is manifested in the faces, manners and lives of those who live it.



What Baudelaire started was later carried on by Guy Debord and a group of Marxist cultural theorists who tried to make sense of the modern urban landscape in the context of capitalism and psychology. Debord founded the avant-garde revolutionary organisation the Situationist International and was most well known for propounded the theory of The Society of the Spectacle which argues that authentic social life has been replaced by representations of social life and that this is a part of a confluence of capitalist, media and government forces which has the result of leading people into lives of degradation and impoverishment of life quality. The London Psychogeographical Society were affiliated with Debord's SI, and formed a loose society around the Debord's definition of psychogeography:

'the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.'

Will Self continues the tradition with Psychogeography, his long-running column in the Independent, collected here under the subtitle 'Disentangling the Modern Conundrum of Psyche and Place' and with illustrations by the inimitable Ralph Steadman. Self sees himself as a 21st century flâneur and psychogeography as a radical individual response to the the enormity of the modern megalopolis. If it all sounds very high-flown and intellectual, it really isn't, he basically walks around, covering long distances on foot, through cities and countryside. While he walks he looks around and thinks about whatever he finds, how it has come to be this shape, what it means to different groups of people, and always walking, ever forward, reconquering the landscape by step and word. It helps I suppose, if you are Will Self and thus armed with an Oxford education, a mind like a literary version of an Edwardian Christmas hamper and a vocabulary that could shoot down light aircraft. I read Psychogeography with a dictionary to hand and swore at the frequency with my reading was interrupted to use it. Here's a few samples of words he uses that I didn't know, and had to look up:

Manicheans: Manichaeism was a major gnostic religion, originating in Sassanid era Babylonia. Although most of the original writings of the founding prophet Mani have been lost, numerous translations and fragmentary texts have survived. An adherent of Manichaeism is called, especially in older sources] a Manichee. The religion is also referred to as Manicheanism and its adherents as Manicheans. By extension, the term 'manichean' is widely applied (often disparagingly) as an adjective to a philosophy or attitude of moral dualism, according to which a moral course of action involves a clear (or simplistic) choice between good and evil, or as a noun to people who hold such a view.

Catafalque: A catafalque is a raised bier, soapbox, or similar platform, often movable, that is used to support the casket, coffin, or body of the deceased during a funeral or memorial service.

Farouche:  1. Fierce; wild: an artist who was farouche even in everyday life.
2. Exhibiting withdrawn temperament and shyness coupled with an air of cranky, often sullen fey charm.



Hydrocephalic: A usually congenital condition in which an abnormal accumulation of fluid in the cerebral ventricles causes enlargement of the skull and compression of the brain, destroying much of the neural tissue.

Phylogenetic: Of or relating to the evolutionary development of organisms; 'phylogenetic development'.

Eructation: The act or an instance of belching.

Cantonments: 1.a. A group of temporary billets for troops.b. Assignment of troops to temporary quarters.2. A permanent military installation in India.

Self has often been accused of a surfeit of cleverness/pretentiousness/contrarianism but his verbosity, wit and anarchic erudition are perfectly suited to the psychogeographic column, where he can digress humorously and fashion literary insurgency or cimmerian anecdotes from his past, from whatever woodland detritus or urban jumble he happens to be walking over. The most significant chapters, and the longest, concern a walk from his house in Stockwell to Heathrow Airport, and then from JFK to central Manhattan. It's a distance of many miles, mostly without pedestrian facility's and it's the purest piece of psychogeographic experimentation in the book. Self has evidently lived in London so long that every step brings forth reminiscence and digression the journey is less a flâneurs London than it is simply Self's London. In Manhattan he has much cleaner slate, and it feels much fresher as a result, although his own American heritage plays a significant in the journey. 



He is generally at his best when he goes off the map, which he doesn't do enough, he could surely have made much more of Rome or Barcelona by venturing away from the Colosseum and La Sagrada Familia into something a bit more terra incognita than the worlds most famous landmarks.

The Ralph Steadman pictures, by the way, pictures are consistently wonderful: psychotic, psychedelic and often more like witty ripostes to the text than mere illustrations. He renders Self himself brilliantly and their collaboration improves the book immeasurably.



Probably best read, as it was intended, as a travelogue to snack on and to come back to, this is nevertheless an engaging read from a never less-than-interesting writer who is rapidly on his way to becoming a national treasure.



In a Word: Exploratory.



What Happens: Novelist Will Self undertakes long walks and postulates cleverly on them, while Ralph Steadman draws them.



Why Read: To vary your literary diet and expand your vocab.



Why Not: It's not as good as it could have been.

[Colin Ellard · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved much of this book. I stumbled across the book because of the title (I've written on topics that connect with psychogeography as it was originally defined by Guy DeBord) and then once I began to read remembered that I'd also read a NYT story some time ago about Self's walk from his home in London to New York via Heathrow and JFK. Other than the long description of this walk at the beginning of the book, the rest of it is made up of reprinted Psychogeography columns from the Independent which are always good, sometimes great, occasionally nostril-snortingly funny and sometimes so desperately sad. I think the story that begins with a description of the death of Chinese cockle diggers in Morecambe Bay was the best of the lot (you can also find it online as Psychogeography #24). Here, among other things, Self argues that knowing where we are is a duty of world citizenship and that not having it is a sign that we're out of touch with what is actually going on in the world: "Disorientation is a luxury that only we in the affluent West can truly afford." I'd wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the psychology and politics of place. By the way, the illustrations are also tremendous. I'm thinking of buying a second copy so I can rip some of them out and put framed copies on my office walls.

[Gwen · Rating 3 out of 5]

1. Will Self believes women are incapable of being situationists, long walkers, free thinkers, and truly mobile (in all mobilities breadth of meaning).
2. He has a tendency to slip words into passages straddling arrogant-declaration and engaging-narrative forcing readers to take a stance before moving past an upcoming period. This may be good or bad, but the point is: Self's pride is trying given the history of narrative and theory he's riding on.
3. Ralph Steadman's illustrations keep him afloat, all the while.

[Lee Klein · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read the first few bits and then skipped ahead to the obnoxious and bone-headed bit about Iowa ("the people are fat and the land is flat") and a few others and made a very negative determination about this author's sensibility (idiotic) and abilities (sneeringly overwritten). The illustrations are cool, but the content seemed pretty much contemptuous to me. Won't even rate it or mark it as read.

[Gregor Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not a bad read, writing style is a bit much for me, never have i needed a dictionary so much reading anything ever. Psychogeography is a misleading title, should be 'Will Self: the Ramblings of a Travelling Cynic Eccentric Elder God'. Couple stories out of the 30 odd that are in here i felt i got something out of, most of it is the odd humerous observation about various cultures in amongst a cloud of over-complicated waffle about nothing of any interest. I do actually like the guy and his outlook, unsure this collection is a great starting point to the ways of Self.

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked the 58-page introductory essay, “Walking to New York,” which gives Self a chance to give his own background, and to talk about some possible modes of psychogeography, all of which are centered on the question of, as he puts it, “the manner in which the contemporary world warps the relationship between psyche and place” (11). Self talks a lot about things that his own mode of psychogeography is not: it’s not travel-writing; it’s not about “discovering” a place or culture; it’s not walk-as-random-discovery; it’s not walk-as-protest in the same manner as the walks of Iain Sinclair, who Self describes as “that Celtic Englishman whose circumnavigation of the M25 (London’s orbital motorway), or travail along the A13 to Southend, were dogged, shamanic attempts to storm those concrete bastions — with their bark-chip, shrubbery-planted revetments — laying siege with the trebuchet of his prose-poetry; and catapulting great hunks of stony verbiage into them, so that the capitalists abandoned their cars and ran, screaming, tongues cleaved to the roofs of their mouths” (13). Phew, as long as we’ve got that clear.

So, what is Self’s mode of walking/working? It seems practical, personal, and also absurdist: to take the first essay as an example, he was going to New York to do work and “to explore,” and he wanted to explore, in particular, his identity in a post-9/11 globalized world as a part-Jewish child with one English parent and one American parent; he also wanted to “walk” to New York (walking from home to airport, sleeping on the plane, then walking from airport to city on the other end) to write about it and because no one else had (13-14).

The walks themselves, especially the London walk, were the most pleasing parts of the essay to me; the London walk is especially great for the way it blends the observed present with Self’s personal past experience of these places and also their larger historical past, as in the below paragraph:

In Battersea Park a few commuters are hurrying along the gravel paths and pot-holed roadways. The gondola that adverts the Gondola Café is heeled over in the muddy waters of the boating lake. On the far shore rises the rockery, where my smaller children like to clamber in teensy ravines choked with empty beer cans. So the sublime ends. I work my way down through the glades and avenues, a Victorian conception of a municipal garden-for-all, impose atop this old shambles where once gypsies camped and knackers boiled horses’ corpses down for glue (23).

The rest of the pieces in this book first appeared as a column in the Independent between 2003 and 2007; they’re short pieces, three or four pages each. Sometimes they're smart and funny and interesting; often, they read more as travel pieces than psychogeography pieces per se. There’s a car ride in France, a ferry in Liverpool, a trip to Varanasi, drugs in Morocco, and protests in London. In fact, I rather wished that the rest of the book was more like the first essay: I wanted longer pieces rather than shorter ones and I wished the rest of the book had more walking in it (and more London), and less acerbity. That said, there were a few essays I really liked: "Spin City," "Hitler in Rio," "Modelling the Neapolitan," and "Bend Sinister."

[Andrew]

He says this isn't a travel book. He's wrong. It is. The "psychogeography" veil might give it a hip edge, but it only barely applies.

That being said, Self is an exceptionally charming travel guide: observant, erudite, and funny as hell. Representative line: "Kent, where chav meets Deliverance in a duel of Burberry banjos." And the Steadman drawings are fantastic.

However, I do feel he could use a better editor. Certain words should not be used more than once in a fairly short book: for example "quiddity," "paterfamilias," and "desuetude." While this may seem a minor point, it makes the writer seem constrained and grasping for wit. While Will Self is a very charming observer and storyteller, he isn't a technically impressive writer here.

[Eric · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm a big fan of Self & psychogeography, but this is not one of his better books. There's no disentanglement here, or even any real thinking on the subject, just a collection of short – and not particularly interesting – blurbs on the author's local and world travels, with half-assed art by Steadman thrown headlong into the mix. The only thing that saves it is Self's usual dark razorwit and playfully creative language. But really, he could have been writing about anything...

[Robert Swanson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Let's start out with the illustations - weird. :-)
So is the writing, in a good way.


Absolutely delightful!
A linguistic dérive; stream-of-consciousness meets wandering feet. Not for the faint-of-heart. You get to the end of a sentence and say "what?" and go back to re-parse the stream to try and suss out the meaning. Often quite hilarious.

Needed a dictionary (TGfGoogle) to suss the Anglicisms/Briticisms, Semiticisms. Fun to read the book with Google Maps up in front of me as well.

Wikipedia: The dérive (French: [de.ʁiv], "drift") is an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, in which participants stop focusing on their everyday relations to their social environment.

Will Self is both American and British, half-Jew. And, definitedly disdainful of the US position in the world. I would not recommend this book as a first read in Psychogeorgraphy, I had read some of the others he mentions Peter Ackroyd, Guy Debord, Nick Papadimitriou.

"A digression: do I believe that men are corralled in this field due to certain natural and/or nurtured characteristics, that lead us to believe we have - or actually do inculcate us with - superior visual-spatial skills to women, and an inordinate fondness for all aspects of orientation, its pursuit, minutiae and - worst of all - accessories? Absolutely. And so, while not altogether abandoning the fantasy of encountering a psyogeographic muse who will make these jaunts still more pleasurable, poignant and emotionally revelatory than they already are, in my continent heart I understand that I am fated to wander alone, or at best with one other, occasional...male companion."
p.12.

After the first chapter, each chapter contains travel impressions, probably newspaper columns, about a given location he has travelled to.

Decoys in Iowa:
"In Iowa the land is flat and the people are fat. Like petrol-driven bowling balls they roll across the plains, occasionally slotting into the groove of a roadway, then rattling to a halt at fast-food joints where they are served with paper cups of 7 Up of Coke the size of oil drums, haystack hamburgers and stooks of fries."
p.96

Like Bill Byrson, Will Self doesn't like middle America. However, he applies his croocked wit to everywhere he travels.

[Ian Mapp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely illustrated book. Just keep your dictionary handy. A new word to be learned on every page.

One of those that you should take your time over. Apart from the first chapter, its a series of two page blog posts about different locations/topics. Reading as a normal book makes it a bit stop/start.

The first essay is excellent. Will Self is travelling to his new york flat from his london home. Rather than catching the bus or getting a cab - he walks to heathrow and then from JFK. This is proper psychogeograpghy - walking the unloved bits, with purpose, but where town planners havent catered for the pedestrian.

Plenty of references to other works. I have already ordered a DVD about London by Patrick Keiler and will add a book called Waterlog by Roger Deakin.

As well as seeking out more Will Self books too.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Psychogeography was something I knew to be a very British concept. Something I had see from Alan Moore and Alan Garner. It was something I'm considering applying to Pittsburgh--there are 90 neighborhoods and I had developed an ersatz quest to visit and walk them all.

It started with my interest in being a flaneur, something I immediatley associate with decadence, dandyism and Baudealire. I later found that Guy Debord latched onto it.

As such, Will Self is a very British kind of intellectual does an experiment with Ralph Steadman (in his longest sustained narrative past HST). Throw around a bunch of essays about walking in cities that scintillate between boredom and pretension while name dropping folks like Peter Ackroyd and you're almost there.

[Daniel Cushnie · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's Will Self. You won't get quite the same perspective from any other writer. Educational, funny, cynical and delightfully wordy. As others have pointed out, it's not exactly pure psychogeography. A lot of passages could more accurately be described as travel journalism or simply journalism, but much is also said about town planning, architecture and all things that concern a psychogeographer. You do get a lot of descriptions of the places that he's been to and about what it was like to walk around them. My only minor quibble is that it's a fragmented read - lots of articles taken from his newspaper column. In Walking to Hollywood you get a more continuous psychogeographic narrative. Still, it made it easy to pick up and put down whenever I had a spare moment.

[Piers · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very much a mixed bag. Certainly what you won't get from this is much about actual psychogeography. Instead it's a collection of essays about Self's various travels ranging from the mundane to the exotic. Perhaps the most engaging pieces are those where Self really does inspect his own sense of self and mental state while walking the streets, parks, and industrial spaces of London and beyond. However, coupled with Steadman's chaotic, unsettling artwork too often it junks plonks out the totem of a cliche and then shovels a bit more on for good measure. So hit and miss. I feel like there was a better book possible here, which leaves a bit of a disappointing aftertaste.

[Michael · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very little psychogeography to be found here- more of a travel blog, and not a particularly insightful one at that. Your friend with too much money and no job can give you a comparable experience, although some of the illustrations are cool. The opening chapter of walking New York in quest for meaning with regards to his mother is the highlight, a wander without purpose finding meaning until he can attach her real background to a real address an interesting part of the whole psychogeographical project. Sadly, there's far too little of that and far too much of "this happening in this foreign city." Predictably strongest when he's actually on his own home turf of England

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Will Self's mom was American and his dad was English and he was raised in England. So, opposite of my situation. After 9/11 he decided to walk from his house in London to Manhattan. He walked to Heathrow and then walked from JFK to Manhattan. That takes up the first third of the book.

The rest of the book are two pages of travel vignettes with a page or two of illustration each.

He doesn't define or discuss what pychogeography is, he is just doing it. He teaches pychogeography at Brunel University London.

He is also snarky, smug, condescending, and has a perchant for making up words. It was delightful.

[Delia Turner · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of essays that is an entertaining farrago of travel diary, hyperbole, oddly intense extended metaphors, unnecessary vocabulary flaunting, and vituperation about everyone's national identity. The opening essay was bewildering to a non-native Londoner but began to make sense about half way through, and after that it was easier going. Ralph Steadman's illustrations are the usual entertaining nightmare.

[Sebastian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mostly read this for the first part, his trip from London to New York. This is followed by a few dozen nice short essays from his travels around the world. It's a nice and enjoyable book, but I feel it needs to be spaced out across several days because Self's pontificating, grandiose style can be a bit too much at times - but that's why we like him! :)

[Holden Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

First impression of Will Self: so up his own arse he becomes quite endearing, a uniquely snarky sense of humour. Cherry picks ridiculous archaic English words to season his lines. 3.3* only really liked the first and last chapters, skimmed through the rest. Would read one of his novels if it fell into my hands, but wouldn't go out of my way

[Alan Fricker · Rating 4 out of 5]

This has been sat on the to be read for years. In the end I rather enjoyed it memories and a few familiar places. I don't know much of self's personal history. The steadman drawings are in places brilliant

[Kelvin Hayes · Rating 2 out of 5]

Parts of it were ok, but man, it was just too long and hence I ended up skim reading it. Also it's one of those books you have to read with a dictionary to hand; a lot of 'language' and new words to take in even for a native speaker of English.

[Cheryl]

Possibly will help me learn to appreciate the place I live.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Psychogeography, according to Guy Debord, who coined the term in 1955, refers to the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment on the internal life and representations of individuals.

Put simply, psychogeography is any playfully inventive method of reconnecting directly with contemporary cities through the body, minimizing or cutting away one's reliance on the numbing comfort of mechanical transport and speed. It is the art, in other words, of extricating one's nervous system from the ever present exoskeleton of petroleum driven technology and commodified space time.

It's less complex than it sounds. According to Debord and Will Self, its as simple as taking a walk.

Novelist Will Self and cartoonist Ralph Steadman produce an ongoing series of columns for The Independent for which Self undertook a few epic walks. One of them took him directly from his house in South London to Heathrow Airport, by plane over the great pond into JFK and from there on foot directly into Manhattan.

This is a feat of psychogeography par excellence, disentangling the interrelationship of psyche and location one footstep at a time. It's also an attempt to break of out of what Self calls "micro worlds," those tiny bubbles of mechanized transport that shield us from the actual realities of the larger urban terrain.

In walking, we destroy the planned complacency of prescribed routes and transport, reinventing the city with our bodies. The real question of psychogeography, it turns out, is "Where am I really?" For Self, a man who dwells richly in his mind, the answer is farther out than you could imagine.

Nobody approaches Self when he chooses to unleash his pyrotechnical verbal arsenal full tilt on the the split between his British and Jewish American soul, especially as he encounters American customs officers quivering with patriotism, or hoofs it through the wastelands of Brooklyn, where his great-grandfather the rabbi once presided.Self is a modern De Quincey, a man as fantastically gifted as he was once drug addled, which makes for some wildly outlandish metaphor described in concise, almost unforgivably vivid language.


His New York essay segues into other journeys that range from Varanasi to Iowa to Scotland to the French Riviera.

There are few people alive better suited for such a project. Steadman's caricatures are famous, and few writers are handier than Self with an arresting image or helpful reference to jar us into rethinking the cozy insularity of late capitalism.

Walk to your local bookstore to buy a copy, and take a notebook with you.

[Clarence]

I've not nearly read the whole thing, but I doubt I'm going to, considering how loosely it's organized, and how easy it is to skip over some essays into others. Happily, unlike a similarly mediocre novel, I don't feel compelled to finish it. I can't believe I even made it through the entire 70 page "walk" from London to New York. But I did, and without a dictionary too, which was a grave mistake. There are at least seventeen completely new and foreign words (to me) per one of Self's sentences. I took the trouble to look up one, "corvid," or, "crow-like," and then felt satisfied enough to slog through the rest barely understanding what the hell he's trying to say. And I've never been one for willful simplicity, plain language, all that, and I'd be the first to encourage writers to use words I don't know....but, with that said, Self's book does absolutely nothing to correct the public perception of post-Situationists and their wandering followers as pretentious assholes. Maybe it's something about the, well, pedantic nature of a long walk that leads Self to believe he can get away with sharing every last thought that comes through his head, from the "ill-advised sex" he had with a neighborhood girl in his teens to his pleasure in shitting out a breakfast of granola and coffee. But a walk must be carefully crafted, just like any other piece of writing, with attention to audience and some reigning in of the author's ego. Endlessly cross-referencing your own books doesn't cut it.

WITH THAT SAID, I have to say, Ralph Steadman's drawings are some of the most beautiful I have seen in my life. They are completely amazing. I feel like crying when I look at them. I'd like them framed and placed all over the walls of my house. The price of the hardcover is easily worth these.

[ValerieLyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am averaging about 2 dictionary references per page on this one. Lots of slang and neologisms. I hope they are getting somewhere...

I read a conversation with Self and geneticist Spencer Wells whilst on a plane from JFK to LAX. Of course, being utterly dislocated at that moment, and more generally for the last year due to work, as well as being a huge proponent of walking as an irreplaceable and in this day and age (and city), almost subversive way to get to know a place, the subject of psychogeography piqued my interest.

Frankly, I expected soft peripatetic musings and leisurely observations about place. Travel writing. This is not Self's shtick. He is a self described 'anarchist abroad.' Which is fine and dandy. But there is an uncanny sense that his essays are pointedly not going anywhere. Maybe that's the point, and a commentary on the implicit agenda of modern life: efficiency-obsessed, mechanised, dismissive of meandering and in disregard of native topography.

Perhaps, too, I am missing more than a few of his UK specific cultural references. But my general disappointment is that when Self is on point, he is pretty fucking brilliant, and he is not on point more often. To wit:

But I'm not 100 per cent certain of this, any more than I'm convinced of where I'm headed as I turn left out my own front door. For most of us our social, political and economic orientation completely obscures where we are geographically. We live out our lives in cities that blot out natural features, while we resort to mechanical transport to annihilate distances and gradients."

And the point of that? Self has good stretches. Other times, he's just wandering.

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Middle age has married itself to Will Self, but thankfully the exasperating cliche of its crisis was dealt with in his earlier incarnations. Here we have Will Self in his haughtier, more florid tones, and it is uncertain if he is having us on with the occasional gobbets of snobbish writing and tinderbox humour. The reader can expect to follow Mr Self on his "exotic" junkets, giving his own trademark perspectives in a re-imagining of travelogue writing under the thematic rubric of psychogeography (a conceptual coinage that owes at least half its due to J. G. Ballard). At times, the anecdotal bits of Self as he grapples with the usual conundrums of middle age can get a bit overbearing, but he is - in the Brit parlance - safe as houses in his entitlement to make his own authorial ego a direct product (rather than decanted through his fiction).

The Steadman illustrations are staid offerings from that iconic gonzoid artist, and they mix between a recycling of his style with the occasional stunning piece portraying an artist in successive development. The usual post-dada cut-ups of anatomical illustrations feature, but Steadman seems to have moved more into colour - watercolour, at that. As accompanying images, at times the selection of subject seems a bit forced, and at other times Steadman's blistering hilarity comes through visually and in the captions provided.

I would say: buy the book. You won't be disappointed. But it is one of those all too clever offerings that will not likely have re-read value. And, as usual fare for Steadman canvas, the pictures should horrify your more delicate relatives.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you don't like Will Self's take on modern life, you probably won't like this. If however, like me, you do appreciate his dry wit and well crafted writing style, then you will almost certainly enjoy this collection. A seemingly random arrangement of his column in The Independent newspaper is brilliantly complemented by the always excellent Ralph Steadman's illustrations.

Self writes on all manner of subjects from the mundane to the profound. Infused with his inimitable sardonic sense of humour and mischief, these essays were for me the perfect length to get just the right flavour of whatever, or wherever, he was talking about or exploring. In places as diverse as Rio de Janeiro, The Orkney Isles, India, Iowa, and English coastal nuclear power stations, he takes you with him as he uncovers little nuggets of the 21st century world we live in.

The extra length introductory essay - Walking To New York - is a real treat as Self travels the usually unconsidered hinterlands of south and west London on his way to first Heathrow Airport, and then from JFK across Long Island over to Manhattan. A very unusual and enjoyable read.

[Jo Bennie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Firstly the hardback edition here is a beautiful book, Ralf Steadman's illustrations are in full colour and intersperse Will Self's text. He speaks of journeys taken by foot, largely over urban landscapes and the palimpsest of histories that land has. His first and longest journey is from his home to Heathrow, a journey made for four wheels rather than two feet, and then from JFK to downtown Manhattan. His use of extended metaphor is just exquisite, the scatalogical and elegaic brought together to show the world not in a new light as such, just better described. I must admit I had to read it with a large dictionary at hand, Self's command of the English language is just incredible. Not an easy book to read, but a real education and enlightenment.

[Shiloh · Rating 2 out of 5]

So far, apart from the art, I don't have a lot of hope for this book. It's wordy, it's trendy -- but I'm really, really interested in this topic. What does it mean to be divorced from place? What does it say about our culture? Do we have psychological needs that need to connect us to some "land, nation, city, whatever?" Or can we continue to sprawl our lives across continents and never explore our own surroundings in any intimate way, close up, as Mr. Self does when he walks. Will a self-important word dispenser be able to answer any of these questions for me? I carry on with many hopes and the knowledge that I will skip the first essay as I didn't understand a single bit of it...

[Stephanie]

NPR interviewed the author of this book while walking from Sea-Tac Airport to downtown Seattle. The author, Will Self, (note that in the catalog you would look him up as Self, Will)captured my attention when he said that one day he realized he had lived some three miles from the Thames his whole life and never seen the mouth of the river. He likened it to living in the Middle Ages when your entire world could be so small that a three mile distance could be a foreign country. Anyway, I haven't read it yet but I look forward to it.