{"title":"Books by Phil Smith","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9781909470309","title":"On Walking","description":"\"A sensitive walk up any High Street is a Pilgrim's Progress\" Phil Smith - playwright, walk-performance artist and author (Mythogeography and Counter-Tourism) - recently retraced W.G. Sebald's famous 'Rings of Saturn' walk round East Anglia. At one level On Walking describes this blistered walk from one incongruous B\u0026amp;B to the next, taking in places like Dunwich, Bungay, Covehithe, Orford Ness, Sutton Hoo and Rendlesham Forest - with their lost villages, Cold War testing sites, black dogs, white deer and alien trails. Phil Smith's walk soon becomes every bit as remarkable as Sebald's and he matches Sebald's erudition, originality and humour swathe for swathe. At a second level, the book sets out a unique kind of 'hyper-sensitised' walking for which the author is quietly famous. It burrows beneath the guidebook and the map, looks beyond the shopfront and Tudor facade and feels beneath the blisters and aches of the everyday. The Suffolk walk described here is an exemplary walk that goes beyond 'wandering around looking at stuff' and shows how every walk can be art, revolution and pilgrimage.At a third level, On Walking is an intellectual tour de force, encompassing Situationism, alchemy, dancing, jouissance, geology, psychogeography, 20th century cinema and old TV, architecture, grief, pilgrimage, WWII, the Cold War, Uzumaki, pub conversations, somatics and synchronicity.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56308809466229,"sku":"9781909470309","price":20.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781909470309_6c25ec4b-487f-4610-9533-d9c411408756.jpg?v=1786029594"},{"product_id":"9781911193593","title":"Guidebook for an Armchair Pilgrimage","description":"Phil Smith (Crabman\/Mythogeography) and Tony Whitehead join forces with master photographer John Schott to lead readers on a `virtual' journey to explore difference and change on their way to an unknown destination. \"What is most real is what you have still to discover.\" \"Relax in your seat. Allow the train to take you along the water's edge to the beginning point of your walking pilgrimage... When the train pulls into the platform, step off. Hidden behind the platform is a broken machine; a mechanised fortune teller - the `voice of truth' - discarded from the nearby arcade of slot machines. Propped against the side of a building, its mouth is silent, its pronouncements have ceased; any truths you find today will be your own.\" Pilgrimages - real and imagined - are always popular, sometimes compulsory. Bodh Gaya, Santiago, Mecca, Jerusalem, Puri: a few of the sites that beckon. The pilgrimage to the authentic self takes a similar path in an interior landscape. In the 15th century, Felix Fabri combined the two, using his visits to Jerusalem to write a handbook for nuns wanting to make a pilgrimage in the imagination, whilst confined to their religious houses. For Guidebook for an Armchair Pilgrimage, the authors followed Fabri's example: first walking together over many weeks - not to reach a destination but simply to find one - then, in startling words and images, conjuring an armchair pilgrimage for the reader... along lanes and around hills, into caves and down to the coast. \"We arrived again and again at what we assumed would be a final `shrine', only to be drawn onwards and inwards towards another kind of finality... rather than reaching a destination, the pilgrimage was repeatedly reborn inside us, until its most recent rebirth in this book.\" Over the course of the 19-day Armchair Pilgrimage, they invite us to experience the world around us just as they did as they walked. So, over the first three days, they suggest that we contemplate, among other things:* Our habit of generalising - acquired 40-50,000 years ago, when our `chapel' mind of specialisms became a `cathedral' mind* Our tendency to let one thing remind us of another thing* What it might be like to be an ocean where fish swim through us* How the world experiences us just as we experience it: `gently feel for the feelers feeling for you'* A world where we tend to `add' meaning and intensity* A world where we let go (without the aid of dementia) of memory, imagination, desire and wild fancy.   And, as the pilgrimage concludes: \"Returning is never going back to the same place.\"\"A brilliant idea, inviting us to `be present' to a reality that is imagined and recorded, mediated by words and images. The feelings and emotions are no less `real' than if we were actually standing in and experiencing that reality.  I love the genius of words and images displayed here -- no less than the reality itself.\" Carol Donelan, Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, Carleton College, Minnesota","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56308937589109,"sku":"9781911193593","price":15.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781911193593_679855f5-192f-4dff-8b45-63c874477eee.jpg?v=1786029098"},{"product_id":"9781913743062","title":"Bonelines","description":"In their 'Guidebook for an Armchair Pilgrimage', authors Phil Smith, Tony Whitehead and photographer John Schott lead us on a ‘virtual’ journey to explore difference and change on their way to an unknown destination. They create a pilgrimage that any of us can follow, even if we are confined to our homes.   To research the 'Guidebook' the authors went on an actual journey. 'Bonelines'? is the secret story of that journey. Given the present circumstances it now appears prophetic, prescient and helpful, so they have decided to bring it into the light.  ?It is written as a novel.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56309234237813,"sku":"9781913743062","price":15.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781913743062_23399e08-5fac-4732-b83e-4bca0ae057eb.jpg?v=1786030492"},{"product_id":"9781913743833","title":"The Silversnake Project","description":"As our relationship with the world around us becomes more fragile andunpredictable, more paraded and more desperate, the role of ecogothic literature isto give voice to some of the growing fears and deepest feelings we have about ourenvironment and climate change.   The three ecogothic novellas in this collection show us individuals and societiescoming apart at the seams in the face of an eerieness that is often hiding from usin plain sight. The toolkit at the end proposes walking, hypnagogic and ‘new ritual’practices that draw on the novellas and invite refl ection and reconnection.   The whole book was written and devised as part of Phil Smith’s groundbreakingresearch as a member of the School of Society \u0026amp; Culture at the University ofPlymouth (UK).","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56309235908981,"sku":"9781913743833","price":20.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781913743833_67fd6892-55cc-4516-a0eb-fc067a50fdac.jpg?v=1786030511"},{"product_id":"counter-tourism-the-handbook","title":"Counter Tourism The Handbook","description":"\u003cp\u003eFor anyone who's ever been a tourist, Counter-Tourism is an invitation to completely transform our experience of the heritage-tourism industry and its many sites (castles, National Trust properties, etc.). It provides a set of powerful lenses, designed to bend a whole world of conventional tourism into a spiral of new perspectives and experiences. Beneath those simple sounding stories in the Visitor Guide and behind the locked gates marked PRIVATE in heritage sites, there lies a multitude of inconvenient stories, hilarities, wonders, absurdities, extremes and entertaining outrages. When Counter-Tourism opens the doors, tourism becomes a funny, shocking, revealing, subversive and life-changing experience rather than a deferential procession through the unrevealing stately homes of Heritage plc. Counter-Tourism upsets the sanitising efforts of the heritage industry. Counter-tourism is also a journey of mini-pilgrimages, challenges and pleasures. It celebrates the multiplicities of meanings in every heritage venue and upsets all the heritage industry's attempts at meaning-control and homogenisation. With hundreds more tactics and images, philosophical diversions and asides, the Handbook is for anyone who wants to explore the ideas of counter-tourism in more depth. Part 2 of the Handbook has ideas on how to extend the tactics described in Part 1 into interventions that can be planned and performed in heritage sites. And Part 3 goes on to suggest open 'infiltrations' that can be used by artists, performers, radical tourists and even heritage site managers themselves to reinvent their own sites. Alongside this there's a photo-essay on using the tactics, and a full bibliography.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57490291392885,"sku":"9781908009869","price":25.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781908009869.jpg?v=1786442178"},{"product_id":"mind-the-gaps","title":"Mind the Gaps","description":"What if the universe is stitched together with absences? What if our deepest realities – personal, political, cosmic – are not shaped by grand ideas or all-encompassing ‘explanations’, but by the tiny, unremarked gaps between them?In this kaleidoscopic essay, Phil Smith covers some unlikely terrain: from the quantum unevenness of the cosmos to the haunted ruins of mines and the fragile misadventures of lost mariners. He rejects the siren call of big, smooth answers and plunges into the turbulent space where anomalies, coincidences and disturbances matter.   Phil gathers stories, observations and practices from the disturbed edges of culture, ecology and everyday life – inviting us to attend to absences, to find hope in the vacuum and to experiment with living differently in the leaks and loopholes of existence.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57492366950773,"sku":"9781917251129","price":12.5,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781917251129.jpg?v=1791213148"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-phil-smith.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}