Anywhere

Smith Phil

Description

A mythogeography of South Devon and how to walk it

Sujets

• Travel writing
• Walking
• Devon

Informations

• Publié par: Triarchy Press
• Date de parution: 30 juin 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781911193135
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Published by:
Triarchy Press
Axminster, England
[e-mail]
www.triarchypress.net
Copyright © 2017 Cecile Oak, Crabman, Mytho and Phil Smith (some rights reserved)
The right of Cecile Oak, Crabman, Mytho and Phil Smith to be identified as the authors of this book has been asserted by them under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution – Non Commercial – No Dérives 4.0 International License. For more information, please visit: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
paperback ISBN: 978-1-911193-12-8
ePub ISBN: 978-1-911193-13-5
pdf ISBN: 978-1-911193-14-2
Contents
Chapter One: A journey begins, Yorkshire to Devon
Chapter Two: Paignton
Chapter Three: Goodrington
Chapter Four: Back into Paignton and on to Cockington Court
Chapter Five: Cockington Court to Corbyn Head
Chapter Six: Corbyn Head to Babbacombe
Chapter Seven: Babbacombe to Newton Abbot
Chapter Eight: Newton Abbot to West Ogwell, Broadhempston, Torbryan, around Denbury Hill and back
Chapter Nine: Newton Abbot to Teignmouth
Chapter Ten: Teignmouth to the Lower Haldon Hills and on to Dawlish Warren
Chapter Eleven: Dawlish Warren to Exeter
Chapter Twelve: Inner Exeter
Chapter Thirteen: Outer Exeter
Chapter Fourteen: To Stoke Canon and back
Chapter Fifteen: Plymouth
Chapter Sixteen: Dartington Estate and Venus
Chapter Seventeen: Whimple, Cranbrook, Crab Man and home
A Mythogeographical Afterword
Appendix
References
About
Note of guidance from the author:
Please feel free to read Anywhere in any way you want and take away from Anywhere whatever you wish; read it is as a novel, as a failed conference report, as travel writing, as a meandering guidebook, as a textbook written by a drunken geographer. Or all of these. I hope that everyone, whether on the ground or in their imaginations, will use this book as a guide to making their own journeys in their own South Devon .
Additional images associated with each chapter of the book can be found at: www.triarchypress.net/anyimages
The Stranger
Cecile Oak was born in Brianclose, Yorkshire. She was educated at the William Beveridge Community School and New College, Oxford. After graduating with a Double First in English, she worked in Paris as an independent curator and as creative director of the Les Nap gallery in the Chiaia district of Naples. After returning to the UK in 2005, she established herself as a leading agent and producer, notably with the Egalit agency. In 2013 she began full-time doctoral studies at Leeds University and was awarded a PhD for her thesis Heterotopian and chorastic trends in the progressive fatalism of Maeterlinck and Villiers De L Isle Adam . She presently lives in the south of Italy with her daughter, and lectures in Performance at the University of Tropea.
The Guide
A.J. Salmon was born in Coventry in the English West Midlands in the late 1980s. Despite a happy family background, he left school at 16 with few qualifications. Moving to Bristol he featured on the performance poetry scene and worked as the tutor of a poetry class in Horfield Jail. In 2009 he was found guilty of stealing over a thousand books from local bookshops and was jailed for six months, enrolling in his own poetry class. On release, he moved progressively westwards. After working as a freelance proof-reader, he dropped from view around 2009 having told a local filmmaker in Exeter that he would be on permanent pilgrimage. Since then reports of him are sporadic at best, but he continues to publish work in various magazines and with Triarchy Press, mailing his work from public libraries in Devon.
Most people at some time or other have wallowed in the Slough of Despond, some have fought fiercely with Apollyon. Almost all have known what it is to pass through the Valley of Humiliation…. All of us, unless we are hermits, must pass through Vanity Fair. A very few of us, rare souls, have talked with the Shepherds on the Delectable Mountains, and even rested in the trees in the Land of Beulah.
Mary P. Willcocks ( Bunyan Calling )
…immersion…. triggered as an embodied state, accessed from within the audience s interiorities and attuned-ness to twenty-first century global migration politics, enhanced by their first hand lived knowledge and/or second hand mediatised awareness of what is at stake for bodies at borders….
Royona Mitra ( Decolonizing Immersion )
No one makes a mythogeography until they learn how to walk in more than one body; until they can walk in a place where they are at home as if they were a stranger, and in a place where they are a stranger as if they were at home.
Phil Smith ( I m Walking Backwards for Quatermass )
Additional images associated with each chapter of the book can be found at: www.triarchypress.net/anyimages
Chapter One: A journey begins, Yorkshire to Devon
Leeds railway station is an odd place to begin a walk in Devon. Yet a walk in Devon can begin anywhere: in Saugor, Trinidad, Venus, R lyeh or Z. Or all those places.
Setting off mid-morning from my home in Yorkshire in the spring of 2016, I catch the train down through Birmingham and Bristol. I plug in Philip Glass, then Gloria Coates, Belbury Poly, Delia Derbyshire and, around Bristol Parkway, the recently elevated David Bowie; covering the table with notes, slim volumes, A4 papers and printouts from online discussion forums. Spread before me like charts for a treasure hunt is everything I have gleaned about the subject of my adventure: the new walking movement .
Until a moment two weeks ago, the only movement walking had for me was the obvious one foot in front of the other. Now I am on my way to investigate a not quite secret, not quite public, obsession of folk for whom walking is at worst a work of art and at best a pilgrimage. I wish I shared the sincerity of their publications; but I am here to improve my chances of what Americans call tenure .
On the train I have been distilling something from the rich jumble of threads and flashes of their books and blogs down to what I imagine, if this conference is halfway representative, will be its themes. All that despite a feeling that this walking movement s picture of itself is no clearer than a Polaroid taken in a blackout.
Rattling past the massive Morrisons distribution depot on the fringes of Weston-super-Mare, a diminutive giant made of withies looms over a small pond. He is a little spiky around his pronounced buttocks. It strikes me, like a first sip of gin, that just maybe what I am working on is a lot of arse.

New cartographies: strategic information or gift wrapping?
The activist s turn towards the spatial: after the Arab Spring, what now?
Walking, sustainability and the Anthropocene: why are we pretending?
Different jokes, but the same comic structure? These are not real papers! They are some kind of fake news, a satire on their own formalism. I dig into the doorstep of extraneous documents and find a rather more likely programme; far less funny, a mix of the startlingly mundane and the contrived unexpected; like a real conference programme. What I have been reading up until Highbridge is a list of fringe provocations written by some clever dick.
I was not expecting walking to be so tricksy.
We cross into Devon sometime after Taunton. Country Life has just declared the county the best place to live in Britain; one of their criteria is the number of entries in Who s Who .
I change trains at Exeter St David s in order to travel on the slow stopper service for the final part of my journey; so I can take in some of the smaller places along the way, referenced in a specially written guidebook supplied with the other conference papers.
Just after leaving the city, looking back on my left, I catch a glimpse of the faded Pussy Riot graffiti promised by the guidebook s author, A.J. Salmon. I know there will be no time for sightseeing for me; no sooner are the sessions over than I am going straight back to my desk in Yorkshire to get things down as freshly as I can. I write fast. I will complete a 20,000-word report in three days, click SEND and hope that someone remembers my gratuitous labours at a future interview; I am on my own now, already playing the game.
I window-shop the Devonian backdrop flashing by as best I can; the quirky detail of the substantial guidebook makes it clear that something rather more thorough is expected. And I am painfully aware that I should have travelled down much earlier. Two days of fringe activities have been arranged informally to precede the conference proper; details of which are supplied with the official papers. However, only yesterday I had the viva for my PhD - awarded with minor corrections, breathes huge sigh - and baulked at the option to travel immediately and sleep on the train.
What gets to me now is not so much the minor depression that I knew would descend around Wolverhampton, after the last fizz of sparkling wine finally left my body, but the prospect of arriving in Paignton at nightfall. Not that I have anything against Paignton, or think it super-sinister after sunset - I know nothing about the town - but I have a phobia about arriving in new places after dark. I fear darkness in new places.
I was a slow starter in academia; I was a mature (they mean tardy ) student; but once I got up steam I slid into a hyper-acceleration that everyone else seems to regard as their (and the world s) worst enemy. Perhaps because I began from a standing start, just to get up to pedestrian has been an extraordinarily big bang for me. I love research: the speed of it, its forensic qualities, hunting across an index, eyes tuned. For this conference I must have flipped a hundred or more books, blogs and papers. I ve read the recent stuff - Careri, Solnit, Richardson, Papadimitriou (I loved Scarp ), and the Fife Psy