Iain Sinclair, talking at a dinner given by The
Idler magazine in November:
“It’s about wandering. It’s not a kind of idle wandering; I gave up on the term flâneur a while back. I went for fugan instead, like the mad walkers of the 19th century who took off on enormous journeys across France. There was a plumber from Bordeaux who walked out the door one day and finished up in Moscow. Then some dreadful writers took up with it and within a few months, the middle classes were all on the road pretending to be fugues. I feel a bit like that now with this whole walking fetish. Now everywhere you go, you find people doing strange conceptual walks, taking photographs of road signs and trying to get arrested in the car park of IKEA.”
Ouch.
Incidentally, careful
readers have questioned that usage of "fugan" and "fugues"
- I kind of questioned it too, and looked up "fugan" on the interwebs
and completely failed to find it, or indeed any word to describe someone in a
fugue state, and I certainly couldn't find "fugues" as a plural for people
experiencing fugue states. Fugees, perhaps? That surely isn't where
the band got the name, which is supposedly from refugees, but maybe that's not so very wide of the mark.
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