GONE FOR A BURTON

I’ve been walking in Dublin.  I was there for the 7^thSir Richard Francis Burton Conference, where my pal Anthony Miller and I were presenting a paper (possibly just having an on stage conversation) under the title “Burton as Psychogeographer and Walker.” We looked like this: 

 

PHOTO BY CAROLINE GANNON

I don’t think there was anything controversial about this paper.  Most travelers are psychogeographers to the extent that they “study (or at least experience) the effects of the geographical environment, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.”  And one way or another they often end up doing a fair amount of walking, when the car breaks down, when the bus drops you off in the wrong place, or in Burton’s case when the camel dies under you.  This is Burton walking in his own garden in Trieste - I guess he had to hold still for the camera.

 

I’d thought there must be some connection to be made between Burton and Joyce, and no doubt there is, but as part of my research I tracked down an entry in Harold Nicolson’s diary dated 30^thJuly 1931. Nicolson was lunching with a group of literati including his publisher from Putnam, in order to meet James Joyce.  Joyce was “not a very convenient guest at luncheon” and they struggled for conversation.  

Knowing that Joyce had lived in Trieste where Burton had once been consul, one of the guests, Desmond McCarthy, asked Joyce, “Are you interested in Burton?”

“Not in the very least,” Joyce replied.

 

Still, the conference gave me, and everyone else, plenty of time for walking around the city, and it seems hard to go anywhere without getting the feeling that you’re walking in Joyce’s footsteps, which is no bad thing.

A walker doesn’t necessarily need a project but, I found myself noticing and photographing various “establishments,” whether in business or abandoned or somewhere in between, and in some cases I managed to photograph other walkers, walking past these places.  This kind of thing:

Of course we psychogeographers do love a good map and it was easy to find free maps in Dublin, offered by various tourist attractions but this one, not free, and very hard to slip into your pocket, is one of the best 3-D maps I’ve even seen, metal and stone, about two feet across, depicting (unless I'm mistaken) the outline of Dublin Castle.  I mean you probably wouldn’t use it to get anywhere but as a topographical object it’s hard to beat.

Oh and here’s a thing you might like.  As discussed earlier elsewhere, if you go to the Burton archive at Orleans House in Richmond you’ll see a plaster caster of one of Burton’s hands and one of his feet.

 

And if you were drifting around the Dublin streets up by the Glasnevin Cemetery, you might well see this cast of a foot in the window of a shop called Crafty Studio. 

 

Coincidence?  Synchronicity?  The universe sending me a message?  Nah, there’s no such thing.

 

WALKING DUSTY (DUSTILY)

For reasons we needn’t go into, I was thinking about Dusty Springfield.  I looked her up on Wikipedia and found this sentence; ‘She enjoyed reading maps and would intentionally get lost to navigate her way out.^[11]’  Now there’s a thing.

The footnote directs you to, Kort, Michele (1999). "The Secret Life of Dusty Springfield". The Advocate. Liberation Publications (Thomson Corporation Company). Retrieved 2 July 2012. 

In the article you’ll find this, ‘DUSTY SPRINGFIELD LOVED MAPS. She liked to curl up in bed with an atlas and could follow a road map with a navigator's elan. "She was a good person to be lost with," her longtime friend and manager Vicki Wickham has said.’ 

 

Do navigators display elan?  Not the ones I've met, but let let's not argue,  The article continues, ‘Perhaps the certainty of maps, with their solid boundaries and clearly marked destinations, comforted a woman who had to carve her own path through the pop-music jungle for nearly 40 years.’

 

You see, I don’t think you have to be a psychogeographic theorist to realize that most maps DON’T contains certainties, solid boundaries and clearly marked destinations.  Many of them are incredibly inscrutable.  That’s one reason why we like them.

 

And then the Advocate article completely loses its way, ‘But while living in Los Angeles she seemed to misplace her atlas, maps, and all sense of personal geography. America had seemed like a dream to her, but it bred nightmares too.’

 

I can’t tell you whether Dusty was much of a walker.  The pictures scattered around this post suggest she did do a certain amount of walking, in parks, with dogs, on roofs, and it’s worth noting that one album of her greatest hits was called ‘Walk On By’ – make what you will of that.

WILES WALKING

 

I’ve been reading Will Wiles’ novel Plume which acknowledges the attractions of what we 

might as well call psychogeography while also mocking it.  Wiles puts the chief objections 

into the mouth of a fictional writer, Oliver Pierce, who’s complaining about his career and 

his lot, and says ‘I was lumped in with all that psychogeography lot, Iain Sinclair and Will Self 

and so on, and I ... well, I didn’t like that.  There are so many people doing that shit now.  

All the fucking lost rivers, ghost Tube stations, all that shit … - I’m just so fucking sick of 

that.  It makes me want to puke.  It was getting boring ten years ago, it’s just intolerable 

now.’

It’s hard to tell from the novel whether Wiles completely agrees with his creation, but really, what’s to argue about?

Then, with the scent of psychogeography in my nostrils, I read an article online by Wiles, at Aeon.com titled ‘Walk the Lines’ which of course is also the title of a book by Mark Mason about walking the London Tube map above ground, in which I make a brief but honourable appearance.

         Wiles doesn’t echo Pierce word for word but they obviously have a lot in common. A pull quote from the article runs, ‘You read Sinclair, Sebald and Self, and wanted to do the same? Get in line with the others, Mr. Original.’  Ouch all round.

And in the article itself Wiles writes, ‘Meanwhile, walking was being rediscovered as a tool useful to journalists writing about architecture and the city. There’s a similarly long tradition of this, in which the presiding saint of urban studies, Jane Jacobs, plays a prominent role. Her descriptions of pavement life in ‘unslumming’ parts of New York and Boston have become a ubiquitous model. Michael Sorkin’s Twenty Minutes in Manhattan (2009) and Sharon Zukin’s Naked City (2010) are both bound in shoe-leather.’ He also cites, approvingly, Owen Hatherley, Rowan Moore and Jonathan Meades, heirs of Ian Nairn.   

He continues ‘Also, being necessarily introspective and subjective, the genre is equally prone to accusations of pretension. Assuming you are still reading (you are, aren’t you?) you might well have spent the last couple of paragraphs rolling your eyes at the conformist quality of my young non-conformism.’ 

Self-referential, self-hating ouch.

In the end, slightly more positively, he writes, ‘Walking is an aid to thought and will always be an aid to writing – all three happen at the same time. But in London, the dérive has come adrift. A form of writing that I once aspired to has expired.’

Is the psychogeographical party really over?  I suspect so, and it wasn’t a party I was ever really invited to, and yet like many parties it kind of drags on.  There are always a few lingerers who won’t go home.

I haven’t exactly gone home but I have left London. When a man’s tired of drifting round London, it’s time to drift to Essex.