Alice's Derives in Devonshire , livre ebook

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129 pages

English

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"I'm bursting to say how beautiful, bewildering and breathtaking this book is. I don't want it to end...maybe it never does..." - 5-star reader's reviewThis is a book for urban explorers, imaginative walkers, ambulant youngsters, difficult drifters, artists of the path less travelled, mythogeographers, psychogeographers, situationists and all the restless. Phil Smith author of 'Mythogeography', 'On Walking' and the 'Counter-Tourism' books, member of Exeter-based Wrights & Sites, well-known as Crabman, drifter and walker/performer and prolific playwright has written an extraordinary first novel - a mythogeographic novel.In 'Alice's Drives in Devonshire', he embodies in a modern fairy tale his preoccupations with the inner and outer worlds of psychogeography - bringing them together to describe the possibilities that offer themselves up to us when we live and walk and dream without our usual blinkers."Can a city fall to bits one day and put itself back together the next?I think so, but I am crazy. So why should you believe me? Dad says it's OK to be mad. Bad is the problem.And the city is bad. I saw its badness. For one day its glass was everywhere like broken teeth after a fight between lions and sharks. Big buildings leaning on each other like drunk dinosaurs. The new shopping centre was a cave full of smoke. And everyone was frightened of each other.But I wasn't frightened. I could see that between the pieces of glass were shining gaps. And in the biggest building were passageways and tunnels and I could see that that was the good city. The city of holes and caves. Between the bad was the good, but only if you knew that before you looked."Readers' reviews:"This is a funny, sad, touching, horrifying, hopeful and riveting read about a child walking mythogeographical terrain to find their Dad. You may well find reflections of your selves in these pages, because this is a book about Everything.""I just finished reading Alice's Drives in Devonshire - what a great story! I spent several lovely hours in the disappeared world, invisible, 'being marked on a different map'. Thanks so much!"

Informations

Publié par	PublishDrive
Date de parution	01 décembre 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781909470538
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0375€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Published in this second edition in 2014 by:
Triarchy Press
Station Offices
Axminster
Devon
EX13 5PF
England
+44 (0)1297 631456
info@triarchypress.net
www.triarchypress.net
© Phil Smith, 2014
The right of Phil Smith to be identified as the author of this book has been boldly asserted by him under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including photocopying, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-909470-39-2
eBook ISBN: 978-1-909470-53-8
Cover illustration: Rachel Sved
Contents
Foreword
Beginning
Chapter One ~ Dad
Chapter Two ~ Just Us Now
Chapter Three ~ Long Ago
Chapter Four ~ Everything Is Wrong
Chapter Five ~ Underground
Chapter Six ~ The Machine
Chapter Seven ~ Packing The Kit
Chapter Eight ~ Going
Chapter Nine ~ Everywhere
Chapter Ten ~ Nothing For Good
Chapter Eleven ~ The White Tunnel
Chapter Twelve ~ Looking For The Accidental Museum
Chapter Thirteen ~ The Big House
Chapter Fourteen ~ Dad Again
Chapter Fifteen ~ Psychology
Chapter Sixteen ~ Routine
Chapter Seventeen ~ “The Room We Never Use”
Chapter Eighteen ~ Scrooge
Chapter Nineteen ~ The Fugue
Chapter Twenty ~ Two Dreams
Chapter Twenty-One ~ And And And
Chapter Twenty-Two ~ Back To Normal
Chapter Twenty-Three ~ The Disappeared World
Chapter Twenty-Four ~ Gone Again
Chapter Twenty-Five ~ Dialogue
Chapter Twenty-Six ~ Prison Lane
Chapter Twenty-Seven ~ Swamp
Chapter Twenty-Eight ~ The Dream
Chapter Twenty-Nine ~ Binns and Hill Ltd
Chapter Thirty ~ The End
Chapter Thirty-One ~ Better
Chapter Thirty-Two ~ Late Santa
About the Author
Foreword
Bradley L. Garrett
When we think about the spaces around us, the spaces that we inhabit, the spaces we care about, the spaces that matter, we begin to think of them as places rather than spaces . It’s a slimy, smudged, shattered line between space and place, one that can be affected by our own thoughts, experiences and attachments and one that can be equally affected by the actions of others. Over time, often we find that unless we really work at it, spaces we call places begin to dwindle in number. For many people, home, work and the local pub or cafe are perhaps the only places left in adulthood – the rest of the world slips into an ethereal blur of places that could have been. We are, in the end, just too busy to keep trying to explore the world for new places or even to tend to places we know in a way that gives them the required thickness.
What would a world look like where our actions were driven primarily by desire rather than utility? What if exploring and imagining took priority over working, paying the bills and mundane everyday tasks? One vision of this world is perhaps rather dystopic. Here, hedonistic throngs eschew responsibility, wholly depend on the labour of others, eating and drinking, dancing and drifting their way through the world, leaving behind little beyond memories of good times and a few broken objects hastily swept under the rug. This rudderless lot have radically misinterpreted Buddhist philosophy, living not in the present as a state of concern, but allowing the past and future to fall away simply because too little attention was paid to either. In this rather decadent imagination, the credo of all might be “I want” rather than “I must”.
Anyone who has children will be familiar with this behaviour; it’s the natural state of youth. Why is it then that in our stable, reasonable adult years that we strived so hard to reach, we so often look upon our childhoods with fond nostalgia and a vague impression of a paradise lost? Could it be that for many of us, we sense that the pendulum has swung too far the other way? What is it that still compels us to yearn for irresponsibility and reckless adventure? Perhaps it’s more important than we realise to remember every so often what it is we want to do as well as what it is we need to do.
I grew up in Riverside, California, amongst the neglected remains of what was once the citrus capital of the Golden State. The condominium where I lived with my mother backed onto a few dozen acres of orange groves. My friends and I used to traverse the groves with a pellet gun shooting produce and lizards, spray-painting the bounding breezeblock walls and building forts in trees complete with central hearths, toilets and watchtowers. Every so often we would run away from home and live off oranges and irrigation water for a few days in a fort, pre-supplied for just such an absconsion. At other times, we would come back to the forts to find they had been raided by some unknown force, smashed up and robbed, branches sagging languidly, weighed down by wet toilet paper stolen from our ersatz loo. We would then stomp through the groves for hours, vowing revenge, but never actually encountering the culprits (“lucky for them!” we would shout).
My first kiss was on a windmill in these orange groves, atop a decrepit old hulking machine covered in graffiti that peeked just over the trees and only started up on the rare occasion that the temperature dropped below freezing in the Californian Inland Empire. In our teenage years, we had “orange fights” every weekend, where kids were split up into equal teams and try to nail each other with oranges from the opposing road. It was a messy business.
Throughout all of these citrus adventures, we were of course trespassing – and destroying other people’s property to boot. But we never thought about any of that, not for a second. When I was in my late twenties and had long moved away from Riverside, I was told that our grove had been summarily bulldozed to build a school. Better than a shopping mall I thought.
I feel some sense of melancholy about the loss of the place. But I also know that as children we would have made the most out of whatever environment we lived in. Perhaps if the school had been built twenty years earlier, I would have fond memories of wandering around in the corridors after hours hunting zombies with that same pellet gun or geocaching secret stashes of stuff for others to find. We also would have made the shopping mall our place, somehow. What I can be sure of, in any case, is that those years were ruled by a desire to explore and a desire to explore together. At times, this led to conflict, heartbreak and loss but it also made our lives richer, more plentiful, more prone to encounter and surprise. As I grew older, I refused again and again to give over that desire to utility.
In Alice’s Dérives , Phil Smith captures the wonder of childhood imaginations and reminds us of the importance of continuing to embrace desire, letting it play out through our imaginations. Phil reminds us of the continuing importance of transforming spaces into places. Alice and her friends encounter a world that seems at the same time completely familiar and bizarrely bleary-eyed; they are adept explorers of the everyday, finding the impossible all around them. In transporting us to this world from the perspective of a curious nine-year-old girl, Phil also reminds us that those experiences carry with them a hidden danger, the reason why we fear that rudderless lot: the wonders of the everyday waiting to be found are so tantalizing, so satisfying, that we may never emerge from them. This of course is what many of us are embarrassed to admit in adulthood – the compulsion to run away, to escape, never wholly vanished, we just suppressed it out of supposed necessity.
Even if we step over that line at times to escape into the wonders of the everyday we are so prone to ignore, to speak of the world as somewhere we simply go “out there” to encounter is of course too simplistic a formulation. Each of us builds very particular relationships to the people and places we encounter. Each of us will respond in different ways to the worlds constructed around and within us. And yes, this gets more difficult as we grow older and lose control of time. Yet as the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote, freedom is what we do with what’s been done to us. Sartre suggests that even a prisoner confined to a cell can make choices within that cell; the prisoner retains power of consciousness and is therefore free. The prisoner may find that the most alluring freedom then is in the mind, in the imagination, in the thoughts that cannot be imprisoned (yet) – there is always an open door in the mind, ready to run through.
In many ways, we all live in prisons now, though the walls may be difficult to render or even invisible. To be in the world today is to be chased constantly by an unknown spectre, the watchers, the guards of a panopticon. As the world be comes increasingly constricted, our behaviours surveilled, monitored and circumscribed, our ability to explore physically is challenged in new ways and we may find that our minds wander more; the mind will reach for the freedoms the body can’t find. There is beauty and danger in this, as Alice, her friends and family, find. What we are left with at the end of these wonderful adventures is perhaps a sense that it is not the escape we necessarily covet, but rather the capacity to escape, if we so choose. Having that choice pulls the pendulum back toward the centre. And if Sartre is right, it is up to us to decide for ourselves how far we’re willing to go to keep that door open. Some of us will inevitably get sucked through, never to return. Perhaps the rest of us can learn to live with that or to, at the least, be more sympathetic to the choices others make in (re)staking claim to their spatial sovereignty.
The Situationist International, that beloved group of Parisian urban explorers, once spray-painted a wall with the