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Alice's Derives in Devonshire Phil Smith

Alice's Derives in Devonshire By Phil Smith

Alice's Derives in Devonshire by Phil Smith


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Condition - Very Good
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Summary

In Alice's Derives in Devonshire, Phil Smith embodies in a modern fairy tale his preoccupations with mythogeography (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.

Alice's Derives in Devonshire Summary

Alice's Derives in Devonshire by Phil Smith

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 a modern fairy tale. It embodies his fascination with the inner and outer possibilities that offer themselves up to us when we walk, think and experience our surroundings on many levels at the same time - public and the private, fact and dream, admissible and inadmissible, forgotten and remembered, past and future. This is mythogeography. Anyone can do it. You can do it. Alice does it. Alice's D rives in Devonshirefollows a nine-year-old girl (Alice) as she walks her way into the layered and muddy underbelly of Devonshire, urban and rural. Her Dad, though a fireman, occupies a world-of-dream somewhere between here and madness and inspires her exquisitely chronicled wanderings. Her mum, though a 'cynical cyclist' who looks after people who are ill in their minds, occupies a world-of-fact where the cooking gets done and the ladder to the loft is always pulled up for safety. As her Dad disappears into a sort of derangement, Alice sets out to look for him, first with Mandy and her brother and a list of ideas, then later, she has to set out on foot on her own, into the hill, into the underchalk, to find Wally Eager and Mister Binns and the Merry Men. Just as magical realism capsized 20th-century fiction, mythogeography turns inside out the ways in which we perceive our-possible-selves-in-the-world. This is the first mythogeographical novel.. It's intended for urban explorers, imaginative walkers, ambulant youngsters, drifters, mythogeographers, psychogeographers, situationists, and all the restless.

Alice's Derives in Devonshire Reviews

From The Foreword by Bradley L. Garrett (place hacker and author of Explore Everything: In Alice's Derives, 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.

About Phil Smith

Dr. Phil Smith has claws in several different worlds. One, large and wide, is in performance and music theatre [he has written more than 100 plays for companies including St Petersburg State Comedy Theatre, Opera North and Perpetual Motion, and he is dramaturg with TNT (Munich)]. From site-specific performances in South Devon beach huts, lidos, tea shops and other unconventional settings, to mis-guides in National Trust properties, to counter-tours and drifts in city streets, Crab Man has long practised what he preaches in this Handbook. He is Reader in Theatre and Performance at the University of Plymouth and a visiting lecturer at the University of Exeter. He is also one of four core member of a group of artist-researchers called Wrights and Sites, who have generated a range of mis-guides, performances, possible cities and forests and other wonders.

Additional information

GOR009179755
9781909470392
1909470392
Alice's Derives in Devonshire by Phil Smith
Used - Very Good
Paperback
Triarchy Press
20141201
216
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use. Overall we expect it to be in very good condition, but if you are not entirely satisfied please get in touch with us

Customer Reviews - Alice's Derives in Devonshire