17 january 2022
It's a snowstorm and it is still coming down. Last night I learned about psychogeography while reading Carrion's Against Amazon, immediately thinking how stupid the name sounded. I read the wikipedia page absent mindedly. But this morning I realized I was still thinking about it. And through the day up until now I couldn't shake it. Though I'm still not sure what it exactly is. Now I'm sitting on my green wool couch in my second-floor apartment typing and periodically glancing out the window. What attracts me to it is what I perceive as its exploratory nature. I used to have that exploratory ambulatory relationship with my childhood home and surrounding area. Now in Ottawa I feel only moderately connected to my surroundings, and often feel that I don't walk enough and when I do that I'm not looking at much of anything. Maybe I'm curious because it sounds like a project and I currently need to be distracted from actual projects that I must do. I'm not sure. I'll read the wikipedia entry again.
I'm back. Read it again (not fully) and I still think the term is stupid. But I would like to try it. Maybe or maybe not today (it is snowy as hell outside, and I have actual errands to run) but sometime soon. A last note: I kind of feel annoyed that the way psychogeography has played out seems in large part to be connected to metropoles like London or New York, cities with either so much history or so much size that you can't 'know' them. I feel like Ottawa, which both has the prestige of a national capital and suffers constant criticism/comparison from Montreal and Toronto, the two cultural and artistic giants, has some story to tell that I'm not aware of yet.
I'll see you in two.
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