Psychogeography | Will Self | Talks at Google

Hi everyone and welcome to today's Authors at Google event. It's my great pleasure to have Will Self with us today. My first question when I found out we were having Will Self, was he going to walk to Google from London? Evidently he didn't. He is the author of four collections of short stories, five novels, and also four works of nonfiction. And he's here today to speak about his most recent collection of nonfiction psychogeography, which hopefully you all have in your hands. Now. He'll be speaking for a bit, taking questions from the audience. If you do have a question during the Q and A session, please wait for the microphone to arrive and then he'll be signing books after his talk. And if I could, I'd like to ask you with your laptops to close your laptops during the talk if at all possible. I know that's a tough thing to do here at Google, but it would be nice and respectful if we could please join me in welcoming Will Self to Google.

It's. A frozen moment at US Immigration JFK Airport, New York. My British passport is scanned. The official scrutinizes the computer screen with a worried expression and then politely asks me to go into a back room. I join what look like 100 Koreans and a miscellany of other potential personae non grata. A Frenchman is being noisily grilled by an immigration officer at a high desk. The officer looks like an ugly acne scarred version of Jim Carrey. The Frenchman looks preposterous. Fur trimmed, je A leather, patchwork shoulder bag, collar length hair. Frankly, I wouldn't try to get into Legoland looking like that, let alone post 9 11America. You say you're a philosophy teacher, the officer insinuates in Grenoble, but you seem to spend an awful amount of time here. Yes, like I say, I have the girlfriend. Yeah, yeah, I know that. In Manhattan. And you're in and out of here like a yo yo. There are stamps in here. He riffles. The French passport for every month of the last goddamn year. The Frenchman shrugs. She is my girlfriend. Hey, whatever. The officer is suddenly bored. He stamps the passport and beckons me up. Now, Mr. Self, are there some little things you maybe aren't telling us about yourself? Well, my voice drawls from deep in clubland, there are perhaps one or two trifling drug offences. Ancient history, really. We're gonna have to deport you. You cannot come in on a visa waiver form with prior narcotics convictions. You'll have to go back to London and apply for a visa There. My heart sinks, then steadies. Look, Officer, I say, would it make any difference if I told you that I was an American citizen? The gym carrier like, scrutinizes me intently. What makes you think that? I tell him that my mother was a Citizen Born in 1922 in Columbus, Ohio, and that she registered me at the US Embassy in London when I was born. Carrie says he will check this information out and shoos me back to the bolt down seats. Over the next two hours, all the Koreans and some Africans with impressive psychotization scars are admitted to the land of the free. The only people left are me and a silently weeping German family comprising late middle aged parents and a grown up daughter. Apparently the paterfamilias failed to get an exit stamp in his passport when he departed in 1987. Jim Carrey and I have struck up an acquaintanceship. We suck mints together and listen to Miles Davis Kind of Blue played on the CD ROM drive of his computer terminal. Finally he beckons for me to follow him and leads me back through a warren of offices. I'm taking you back here, he confides, because we've decided to admit you. But we're going to deport the Germans. And he pauses significantly. I don't want to upset them any more than necessary. In the back office sits an older, heavier set man with a strict moustache and iron filing hair. The Stars and Stripes limps on the flagpole by his desk. He looks up from studying my passport when Jim and I enter. So, Mr. Self, he asks without preamble, what exactly do you think you are? Well, a dual citizen, I suppose. He breathes heavily. Mr. Self, I have been an immigration officer for 35 years and let me tell you something. You are either an apple or a pear. He pauses, allowing this fractious moment to dangle between us. I don't care if you choose to live in London. I don't even mind if you travel on a British passport when you're abroad. But let me tell you this. His voice begins to quaver with emotion. When you come here to the United States of America, you are an American citizen. I snap to attention. The Battle Hymn of the Republic swells in my inner ear as I deftly circle my covered wagon in front of the Lincoln Memorial, leap out, and march forward to receive the Pulitzer. Sir, yes sir, I bark. On the way out, Jim Carrey passes me my British passport. I don't even want to hold this. His voice is also choked with patriotism because it offends me to see you traveling on such a document. Now, a few months later. I am the proud possessor of an American passport. And to begin with, I felt pretty strange about it. To tell the truth, I've never felt my nationality defined me. Any more than my shoe size. Actually, since my shoe size is 12, a good deal less. But since actualizing my American ness. I've given a good deal of thought to whether I feel American or British or European or anything. Am I, in fact, a citizen of a vast Oceania. Which stretches from Brest Litovsk to Honolulu? But on consideration, weighing up all the geopolitical, historical, and cultural factors. It's dawned on me that the possession of two passports. Means one thing and one thing alone. Shorter queues on embarkation either side of the Atlantic. I'm not an apple or a pear. I'm a banana skin glissading through immigration. So that's a little. All of this book consists of little pieces. Except for the opening essay, which is about 25,000 words long. Which is called Walking to New York. And that's about how I walked to New York about a year ago. From my home, which is in South London in England. How can you walk to New York? There is the Atlantic in between. I walked from my house in South London. To Heathrow Airport's Terminal 4. I then flew to JFK and walked from JFK into Manhattan. Why? I hear you think. Or maybe not, because I can't hear you think. What would be the point of doing something so ridiculous? Isn't that the most boring and pointless thing anybody's ever done? I think not. And in fact, I found it one of the most liberating experiences, probably, of my life. Which has been, although not as long as some people's. Perfectly eventful so far. The strangest thing is that in terms of. Of space. The body is still attuned after tens, hundreds of thousands of years. To register perception of space at a physical, not a mental level, I would argue. And my experience of walking to New York seems to confirm that if you walk to the airport, then fly. And then walk to your destination at the other end. Your body tells you that you have traversed a continuous landmass. The plane flight is kind of irrelevant to your body. Your body doesn't register it. Particularly if you fly, club, and manage, as I did, to sleep most of the way. So my impression, as I walked into my hotel. On the Lower east side of Manhattan. Was that I had walked all the way from England. That's what my legs were telling me. My legs were telling me I'd walked 17 miles the first day and about 15 or 16 the second day. I'd been walking for two days and I got to Manhattan. And the body kind of never lies about that sort of thing. You have to consider the fact that barring ships, there was no non ao technical transportation in the world. I just write that up for the hell of it. Until when does anybody know what ao technical means? Nobody. But you're like techies and it's a word with tech in it. Easy to understand. Easy to understand. No good try. Could try. It just means deriving from the body. It means physical forms of transport. So when was the first non physical form of transport? Anybody? What was the first time that human beings traveled? Either not through the agency. I'm excluding ships from this wind power. Either not through the agency of their own bodies or the bodies of animals. Anybody? 1860s. Any refinement on that? You're about, you're out. Anybody know? Sir? Okay, that's non. Oh, hand gliding, that's wind, that's. We're not going there. No, I mean machines, machines, machine transfer. I think it's about 1842. In fact, I think you're about 18 years out. And Stevenson's Rocket is about 1842. So we have Mitochondrial Eve to 1842. Everything is the body. If you go somewhere, if you ride a horse, if you travel, your muscles feel the experience. It's only with the arrival of the steam engine a mere 160 odd years ago that we start to have this phenomenon of machine mediated travel. So our sense of place has always been defined by our bodies. Are you with me so far? The whole idea of place no longer being defined by the exertion of muscular power it takes. Anybody who's ever done horseback riding will tell you that it's tiring, right? Your body feels it. It's only in 1840 that we begin to get. The modern world begins to create itself around forms of transport that don't involve muscular power, that don't involve a sense of the capability of the body and its range. Now we live in a world that is mediated by the technical. You guys live in a world that is so mediated by the technical that it makes me, who is a relative Luddite, feel really queasy, to be honest. But even the world I live in is strange. Now I've been coming to San Francisco Since. For about 17 years. I first came to San Francisco in 1991. Sometime around then I would fly in to the airport, get a cab into the center of town, do A reading of one of my books. Get drunk and fucked up, fall asleep, maybe get up the next day and do the same. And then fly out, usually to Seattle, because that's always the book tour route. Okay, so I've been in and out of San Francisco over nearly a decade and a half doing that. And I never knew where Marin county was. I never knew where Sausalito was. I never knew. I think I went over and did a reading in Berkeley once. I didn't really know where Berkeley was. I got in a cab downtown in San Francisco. It drove me over the Bay Bridge. I looked out either side of the bridge, but I didn't know where north was. I didn't know where south was. I got to Berkeley. What I remember about visiting Berkeley was that a lot of people were begging that year in Berkeley. And the streets of this prosperous, liberal, you know, left liberal American, you know, campus town were full of beggars. That was the abiding image. But I didn't know where it was. I didn't know where Berkeley was. I didn't really know where Sanford. And I certainly couldn't orient myself within it. Does this chime with anybody? Does anybody have this experience of the world? Or am I mad? Because I'm prepared to accept that I'm mad. I'm very open minded. But my experience of the world is that it now consists of micro environments. Like, here's my San Francisco micro environment. Always stay in the Prescott Hotel on Post Street. And I remember vaguely there was Union Square there. And I remember Market street because again, it was full of crackheads and beggars. And I remember that. I remember really being struck by that because basically my mother was American, but I'm basically an English guy. And for us, the image of San Francisco in California is of a prosperous, open hearted, liberal environment of caring. So to get to this city, here's the Prescott, and walk a couple of hundred yards down the street and see people shooting up in their groins. Was kind of a bizarre experience for me. Okay, this is going back 15 years, but hey, you know what? It's still happening. What a surprise. Okay, so that was. That's my mic. My San Francisco microworld is like a little island and it's connected via plane flights with my microworld in Seattle and my micro world, you know, actually my microworld in Delhi. I've only been to Delhi a couple of times in my life, but hey, what do you know? Both times I stayed at the Oberoi Palace Hotel. So I got a microworld in Delhi and I got these microworlds scattered around the place that have no connection between them at all and are internally disoriented. In my San Francisco microworld, I don't know where north is. It doesn't have any points of the compass. I don't know where the sea is. You know, the key psychogeographic epiphany for me that got me thinking about this stuff was I live in London in England, quite a big city. It's a unified conurbation. It's not like this conurbation, which is really an edge city. I was driven here up the El Camino Real highway and I had it explained to me a bit of the history that you've now got. Continuous buildup from San Francisco all the way up to San Jose. An entire 50 mile edge city, 8 million people. London's just a blob with 8 million people in it. And through it runs a river called the Thames, okay? And the Thames goes like, it squiggles through the city and it goes into the sea here, which is about 35 miles away. Okay? Now, I was born here and I live here. And I've lived all my life here virtually. I lived a year in the States when I was a kid. I lived about a year in Australia in my 20s. 20s, but basically that's where I've lived my entire life. Okay? Now, one morning in about 1988, I was standing, I went into work. I was working at a publishing company in Mayfair in London. I got into work and somebody had lost the keys to the office, so we couldn't get into the office. And I had this kind of unexpected day off and I had this weird epiphany. I was standing in Mayfair and I thought to myself, I have never seen the mouth of this river. I have never seen where it meets the sea. It came to me out of nowhere. I don't know where this came from, this thought that I'd never seen the sea, the point where the Thames reaches. And I thought to myself, if I went to the Amazonian rainforest and I met a peasant, an Amazonian peasant on the banks of the Amazon, 30 miles from the mouth of the Amazon. And I said to him or her, have you ever seen the mouth of the great river? And they said, no, no, we never go there. It's too far away. I would think you are a very, very ignorant and territorially confined peasant. And yet it occurred to me that I was exactly that peasant. That's who I was. I had no more understanding of the physical geography of where I lived than this person. Now, whether, you know, an evolutionary psychologist might explain this by saying, as we've been talking about, you know, ao technical means of transport, we're not actually hardwired to, you know, we're hunter gatherers, we live in small groups, we have a restricted range. We're not meant to see the mouth of the river. Maybe that's an argument, I don't know. I got in my car and I drove to the mouth of the Thames. I thought, I need to know this. I need to know where I am in some sense. I need to know where I am outside of this kind of world that I'm living in. I need to know how physical and human geography really marry up. Because there are an awful lot of forces in my life that are encouraging me to live in a different kind of spatial awareness. To live in a spatial awareness that is defined in Europe. This is particularly true. It's not so true here in North America, but in Europe, because of fierce competition between airlines, I can fly to almost any European city more cheaply than I can take a cab across town. So the encouragement for me to live in these microcosm environments that are linked by air travel is enormous. It's an enormous commercial inducement for me to continue living in this micro environment, okay? Everybody's keen for me to do that in where I live, where There are some 60 million people living in an area far, far less than that of California. I think maybe about a sixth the size land area of California. The car is not a means of freedom. The car is not a means of freedom. The fact that I can turn the steering wheel or activate the accelerator gives me an illusion that I can choose where to go because I can't choose where to to go because there is too much fucking traffic, okay? There is too much fucking traffic if I simply cannot go to the places I want to go. If you wanted to conceive of England, England is very comparable to California. We basically deal in retail services as an economy, okay? We don't have any industry anymore. We provide mass. We provide mass entertainment, advertising, retail services, merchandising, we do all of that shit for Europe. We're this kind of California moored off the coast of Europe. And like California, Southern England is like LA in the Valley now. It's that crowded. My parents in law live in Scotland, which is empty for obvious reasons. And you know, for me to drive from London to Scotland, Scotland, it's a. I don't know, it's about a 400 mile drive. I had to for family reasons. Do it in the day. The other day in the evening, and it took me. I traveled, I think, at an average speed of about 30 or 35 miles an hour across the entire country. It's that crowded on the freeway system. So the idea that the car is destructive of these micro environments is, of course, meaningless. Now, you guys who work a lot with virtuality, of course, have an even more, you know, a world with many, many more micro environments. It seems to me you are going places. When you look at a screen, part of your psyche is traveling, even if your body remains firmly here. I was saying to somebody over lunch that it's interesting that the setup of what you see is what you get, which goes back to the old HyperCard system, is still an analog system. The way you interface with the computer is an analog system. This goes back to evolutionary psychology. If you read Steven Pinker on language acquisition. Most of the way our language has grown up is to do with putting things in things. It's to do with wrapping sinew around arrowheads. That's what we need to be able to describe. The way we interface with the inside of a computer. Which, of course, isn't an analog system, is via analogs. The desktop is arranged like an old office. It's a spatial form of awareness. There's no real necessity, is there, for that to be an analog digital interface? Or is there? I don't know. Anyway, you've got lots more micro worlds which are the Internet's sites or whatever it is you visit, which, of course, have no internal orientation at all, do they? I mean, if you spend all your day looking at a webcam that is positioned in St Mark's Square in the Vatican in Rome, there's no necessity for you to know where the Vatican lies in relation to the Tiber or any of that. And yet, in a very important sense, your mind is spending time in the Vatican. You could have an audience with the Pope via your computer. So all of my practices as a psychogeographer are to do with not living in that kind of atomized world. All right? Now, on this North American book tour, I've started to reclaim some of these cities that I've been visiting for years and years and not really being in. It's really simple to do. It's really easy to do. All you got to do is walk. You've got to get back to an AO technical form of travel in order to do it. Trust me, I'm an evangelist for this. I am an evangelist. I believe in this shit because it works. Yesterday I destroyed My San Francisco microworld, I just blew it apart. In fact, I started blowing it apart when I came in from the airport. One of the biggest enemies of the psychogeographer is the cab driver. We hate cab drivers. We hate them big time. Why do we hate them so much? When you buy a cab, when you rent a cab for a period of time. You're not just renting the engine and the car. You're renting the brain of the driver. Now, a halfway decent cab driver. Is going to know way more about the town that you're in than you do. And you trust that knowledge. You don't bother. You don't get into the cab and say, which way's north? Or how are you sure that's the right road to take? Because you don't have a clue. You've rented their ability. Although, interestingly, in London nowadays, which we have a very, very. You know, we have a burgeoning immigrant community. And we also. The cab drivers, not the licensed cab drivers. But the minicab drivers drive using sat nav entirely. So you get into a cab so they. Unless you have a zip code, they won't carry you. They can't carry you, in fact. Because they don't know where they are at all. They are more familiar with Lagos than they are with London. So if you get into a cab. They plug the zip code of your destination into the sat nav. And then they drive solely on the sat nav. They do not know where they are anymore. So that's an exception. Maybe we're evolving entirely into this micro world. Where nobody's going to know where the hell they are. But in the meantime, when you get out of the airport terminal. And you rent a taxi in a strange town. You're hiring that guy or girl's ability to drive you to a destination. And you forget about where you are. Now, just the act. When I arrived at San Francisco airport on Saturday afternoon. I took the bus into the center of town. Now, just the act of bothering to take the bus. And needing to know that it had a prescribed route. And where it was going to drop me in the center of town. And walking to my hotel. Only four bucks, incidentally, and it's perfectly fast. It takes half an hour. Started to destroy the San Francisco microworld. Because in my San Francisco microworld. I'm always just arriving at the Prescott. Okay, I don't really know where Union Square, which is about 200 yards away. And market street, that's my microworld. The bus dropped me down here on First Street. So immediately I came up this way. I've never done that before in 15 years of coming from San Francisco. And then yesterday I blew it apart because I came out of my hotel and I walked right clear across town to the Golden Gate. I walked over the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito and I took the ferry back. That's it. My San Francisco and Bay Area world is now fully oriented. It took me a mere six or seven hours to do it. It's never going to be the same place for me again. And it wouldn't have worked any other way but by using my feet. Because the act of using your feet and the act of navigating with a map forces you to constantly orient yourself within physical geography. Of course, the street plan I've got of San Francisco doesn't include the hills, although a big clue should have been that it said Nob Hill or Russian Hill. That should have got through to me, but it didn't. So I'm following the grid pattern. I'm going up and down like this. And I could have probably taken a more picturesque route had I had a topographical map which nobody sees fit to print. But it really didn't matter because the fact of the matter is it's never going to be the same place for me again. The other strange thing, I'm going to just tell you a few more now. This whole idea of psychogeography goes back to a guy called Guy Debord. I don't know if anybody here has ever heard of him. Yeah, you have. Okay. He ran a group called the Situationists, who were a French group of Marxist intellectuals, Marxist communist revolutionaries in 1950s France. And they believed. He wrote a book which I urge you to read a fascinating book. It was published in the early 1960s. It's called the Society of the Spectacle. I'll tell you afterwards, because you can't read that. I can't read that either. The Society of the Spectacle. Now, he believed that our kind of societies, what he called late capitalist society, because he believed that it was like, over. How wrong he was. He thought late capitalist society created a spectacle. It created an illusion within which we live. And he saw this kind of micro environment, micro world that I'm talking about as evidence of that, the way in which we don't know where we are. He thought that the powers that be loved us to be disoriented in that way. He felt the powers that be loved our world to be comprised of work, home and consumerism. Those were all the things we needed to know. That was the Only we only needed to know where those things were. We didn't need to know where we were. And indeed, to know where we were would be a dangerous and revolutionary and rebellious act. Now, you've got to bear in mind that his field of operations was Paris, which is a fascinating city, not least because under Napoleon, Napoleon's town planner, the Baron von Hausman, constructed the grand boulevard of Paris. Does anybody know why they're so long and so straight? It's a famous fact about town planning. Hmm. Partly, yes. It's for moving troops at speed, you're right. And also firing artillery to put down the Parisian mob. Okay, so he was living in a city in which the road structure had been devised in part for civil oppression. So the Situationist idea was if you take a path across a city that is aimless, you're destroying the city in a way. You're destroying the way in which the city is set up for reasons of hierarchy and power, just by that fact of how you move across it. So he and his pals would get hopelessly drunk on red wine and totter across town to the Ile de la Cite by Notre Dame, where they'd lie drunkenly in the park, confident that by this act alone they would soon bring all of capitalist society crashing to its knees. Sadly, they were wrong about that. Or, happily, they were wrong about that, depending on which way you look at it. I think I've given myself away. But they did give birth or new life to this idea of the psychogeographer in French society. It has a longer lineage. Debord was only really picking up on the idea of the. Of the. Yeah, you know about this, okay. Which goes back and back and back in Parisian. It's really seeking an experience of the world, usually on foot, unmediated by technical means. Okay, now, I think. Is that. Have I said enough? I think I probably have. Shall I take some questions? If you have any questions. Is that a good idea? Should I do that? Does anybody have any.

Sorry, use the microphone, please.

Do you get to hike in London anywhere? Do I hike in London? Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that what surprises. Surprises people a lot about the airport walks is everybody says, you know, this is about people not knowing where they are. So if I tell you I walk from Central London to London Airport, native Londoners who've lived there all their life will say, what did you have to walk along the M4 along the freeway? And you're like, duh, excuse me, that would be A, illegal, B, really dangerous, and C, really fucking dull. Like, why Would anybody want to do that? You can walk from central London to London airport, which is 17 miles. Only walking two miles on the public road. You know, London, you can walk along the River Thames for a lot of the way and then there's another little river that takes you almost all the way into the airport. I walked from Pearson outside Toronto Airport into Toronto when I arrived in North America a few days ago. And again, I hardly walked on a public road. It can be done in a kind of countryside that's within the city. So immediately you're starting to view the city in a different way. But as it happens, even walking on public roads, London is a very pedestrian friendly city city. And there's a lot to look at. I mean, it's been there 2,000 years, so it's got quite a lot of history. Anybody else? Gentlemen here.

When I stationed in Europe, one of the things I had an opportunity to do was just to travel all over. And I kind of echo what you mentioned by walking around town, you know, walking around Paris, walking around Copenhagen, Stockholm, Vienna really gave me a sense of the town. But one of the things that I used to do that I seem to disagree with what your point is about driving and that I found it very. It gave me a different sense of where I was going and just getting to that destination. And I just would kind of like to get your thoughts about, you know, is it the traffic that that's an issue or is it the fact that you just feel like you're locked in your car? Because when I travel to a destination, I would often take a break or I would go off the beaten path to give me a better sense of where I was. I'm just kind of curious as to why you think that, hey, driving isn't okay.

I think that's fascinating and you may be a good driver because you're right. If you break the, the journey, if you negotiate a different route, if you make an effort. I mean, these things sound trivial, but I don't think they're trivial at all. But if you make an effort to get out of the car, then that helps. But in practice, because our paradigm for using the car, going back to Debord and the society of the spectacle, what a lot of us use the car for is functionality. You know, it's a functional means of transport for us. It's not a recreation means of transport. So we start thinking about the car as an A to B means of travel. It's also, and I think this is a non trivial point, what do you look through at the world in a car, you look through a windshield which is. Well, it's shaped like an old 70 millimeter film. It's kind of a widescreen. It might be curved a little bit at the edges, but basically it's a screen, you know, so your perception of the world, it's not, you know, I can see up here, I can move my head round, I'm in the world in a 360 degree way, which you're kind of not in the car. And I think that's but the most conditioning, the paradigm of the A to B journey gets in the way of your good driving. You know, I applaud you for staying true to the idea. The car, which should be a device for freedom, can still be employed that way. But I think for too many of us, and particularly those of us who are living in high density conurbations, it's hard to hang on to that idea. You know, it's hard if you're, you know, stuck on the freeway in Stop Go traffic to think, hey, I could pull off here and open the door of the car and spread out a little rug, maybe take a little stove and brew myself some coffee or tea. I've started to do all of this shit. You may laugh and smile about it, but in order to make it remotely bearable to drive, you're right, you've got to do that. You've got to start creating discontinuities in car travel because otherwise it's just too deranging, I think. Yes. Oh, you've got to wait for the mic. It's very. We're all very MIC oriented around here. Okay, got it. Now, has psychogeography changed your approach to writing or your style? I don't think it's necessary. I mean, I'm principally a novelist. That's what I mostly write is fiction. And actually, you know, it has in some ways, but I think that's more to do with age than the particular practice of psychogeography. The great thing for a writer about travel of any kind is that it supplies its own narrative. You know, I decide to go somewhere and just the journey, you know, in a novel, you know, a well constructed novel is a world, it's a virtual world. Yeah. When you read Dickens or Tolstoy or Flaubert, you don't question the furniture of that world, do you? You don't think, oh, there's a continuity error in this world. It doesn't though, actually, there are some astonishing continuity errors in some of the great novels. But you take it on trust the brilliance of the writer is that he or she, with their words, creates a totally believable multi dimensional world in which the narrative, the story works its way through. Okay, here's the world and here's the line of the. Well, a walk or any kind of journey is just the same thing. It's a timeline of narrative going through it. So it's a natural for a writer. It's also a form of story that has a great deal of historical validity. I mean, the Canterbury Tales, the Pilgrim's Progress, Don Quixote, these are all what are called picaresques. They're a series of events strung out along a narrative line. So this kind of practice of psychogeography is kind of natural for a writer. It fits perfectly with what one would want to do. So I don't think it's changed me in that way as a writer. I think this business I've never. Which I've been passionate about, about kind of reclaiming our position in the world free of technology, I'll be honest, it's a kind of, it's a bit middle aged, you know, kind of young people aren't really concerned with that concern. It's unusual to find somebody young who's that much concerned with this because they're too busy having sex and, you know, falling in love with people and, you know, they want the micro. You try and talk to a young person about this stuff and their eyes film over and they start looking really bored because they're interested in sensation and in immediacy and the micro world promises that in abundance.

Okay, okay. In a counter example, as you know, I just came from India visiting my 20 year old son who's been there since July. And one of the things he said that's been very disturbing is he hasn't been able to get to know Delhi because he can't walk it, because it's very difficult to walk and not get.

Hit by a bus.

So in fact, he finds that extremely disturbing because he feels like he doesn't know the place and where he is.

Okay.

And he is falling in love too.

But he is falling in love, but I mean, also he's in Delhi. So for a start, he's obviously, you know, a guy who's interested in different places.

Yeah, well, but no, this is placing himself in that he can't place himself and he can't place himself.

Well, I mean, northern India is a fascinating culture in all sorts of ways, but one of the most, I mean, we were talking about this over lunch, but one of the most interesting I mean, one of the most culture shocky things for a Westerner going to north India is that you kind of have no privacy as a person, you know, as a Westerner in India. So you're, you're. But it's true, you know, I'm sure that's right. I mean, I think you'd be a tough, tough prospect indeed to walk across Delhi, though. I'm considering doing it, sir. So my brother gets out a lot more than I do. He's a biker, a bicyclist, and he insists that the bad weather days are part of the journey. So has walking changed your view of how you relate to the weather? Well, I've never understood why the pathetic fallacy is so cold in that way. I mean, you know, for me, rainy, dark, cold days kind of are depressing, actually. And, you know, if you're out a lot, I think they're more depressing. And I think your brother is not really talking. I mean, is he like a toughie? Is he like a kind of sporty toughie guy? Yeah, well, that's what he's talking about. It's like a bodybuilder saying, going for the crunch or the burn or whatever they call it. Let's call a spade a spade here. He is a masochist. Yes, of course, you know, it's dull as ditch water. If weather is just the same all day every day for weeks and months on stretch. You want weather variation. That's one of the exciting things about being in a natural environment. But to say you actually like, as we English say, getting pissed on. No, he's wrong. He's just wrong. He has issues. He needs help. I can't provide it. Oh, maybe I can. I don't know. Interesting. I'm a cyclist too, and I cycle. That's my main means of, of personal transport in London. But it's not. It is an aotechnical form and it's not an aotechnical form. It's an interesting hybrid form of transport because its motion is like any other. You know, it's like a machine vehicle, but you kind of are the machine. But I really stick to the idea that this is best done on foot if you're going to do it. Seriously. Anybody else?

Yes.

Sit down.

It is on. Seems to me that this whole idea is kind of. It's part of a larger picture. Kind of like you said, that guy Debord, he saw it as part of societal control. You see it a lot in the writing of the Romantics, maybe. I don't know if Return to Nature is kind of. It's a similar parallel idea of psychogeography. So it seems to me that by just like kind of like you said, he just went out, he got drunk, they ran around. You know, it kind of didn't really achieve anything or didn't achieve its ultimate purpose. So in a similar modern sense, you know, if you just kind of walk around the cities, but then you kind of go back to your cubicle or whatever, I mean, do you see this as part of kind of a larger idea, a larger purpose and kind of what's the ultimate goal?

Yeah, I do see it as a larger purpose. And I don't think it's futile. I think it's about. I mean, the thing about psychogeography is it's not really a field in its own right. It's a discipline that transects other fields. And those fields are the built environment. So anything connected with architecture and city planning, the environment, you know, literature, it moves through all of these. And, you know, the Romantics succeeded only too well, in my view. The Romantic succeed. Succeeded really well. Because what the Romantics did is they said there are certain things that we define as beauty in the natural world. And they were really kind of hard line about that, about what was to be considered beautiful. The notion of the sublime is a very precise idea about how you approach the natural world. You know, in the early 19th century, when your Romantics went out to look at nature, they would take an empty picture frame with them to frame what they were seeing, because they wanted it to appear as a pictorial scene. In that way, they succeeded because that's what we've inherited. You're laughing about that, but that's what we are doing. When we get on a plane and we go, we're taking a frame with us. That is the frame. The plane journey provides the frame. The tour company provides the frame. I love hiking. Somebody says, I love hiking. I just. I live for it. I get in my car and I drive 50 or 100 miles into the mountains to a place of designated natural beauty where somebody's already held up a frame in advance of me. And despite the fact that I'm fit and healthy and I've got all the. These good accessories, all this good gear to do it in, I'm still accepting that romantic definition of what is to be considered as the beautiful. I can't do it here. I can't walk down the El Camino. That would be deranged. There's no beauty to be found there. That is an area of designated Non natural beauty, you know, but what I'm saying is that. That this method is about reappropriating what is beautiful. Why shouldn't we live in a world that if we can't consider it as being beautiful the whole time, we can at least consider that we're actually in it. We can at least give it that much respect. And I think that is an important and a revolutionary thing because I think it makes us less inclined to despoil what we have and to ignore what we have and to condemn other people who don't have our purchasing power to live in the shit. Okay, I think it's about that too. I think it is a socially leveling thing to do as well. So, you know, I do think it's important. I don't happen to go the whole situationist way and think that inevitably it will bring down capitalist hegemony. But I think it is an important new way of thinking, viewing those things. Yes. Anybody else?

I have to go early, sadly, but I have to go early, sadly. But I did have one question. There's this phenomenon in Japan where people are actually not coming out of their rooms. They stay in there for years and years on end.

Yeah, I've heard about it.

And there was like some French. I think it was a French book where someone was. He fell sick and so he was sitting in his room for 30 days and he described his room as though it was a journey. Would that be the opposite of what you're talking about?

It's very interesting, what you said.

Or is that like a micro version of explorer's?

I think the two are related very, very strongly. I mean, as much as we have an impulse to get out, we also have an impulse to get in. And arguably where those impulses are strong, you get creativity at both ends. I mean, it's fascinating. If you look at the history of the English language novel, you have. Laurence Stern wrote a book called Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, which is very early on, very early on in the history of the novel and the travelogue in which he spends an entire chapter getting from the door of the coach to the door of the inn. So, you know, that idea of intense interiority as an aspect of a journey is present very early on. Or to go back to the flaneurs and the French, you have the textbook of the decadent movement against nature, which is entirely about that, about a guy who rejects the natural world, shores himself up in his house at one point in the book. I urge you all to read it. If you never had It's a very funny, very dark book. He decides that he has to break out this French aristocrat of his mansion in Paris, where he's been isolated and go to England. But he gets to the Gare du Nord where you get the train and then the boat for England. And he is so repelled by the Englishness of the people in the bar at the Gare du Normal. They're so beefy with their big red faces, eating beef and drinking beer, that he goes right back home again and shuts himself away for the rest of his life. So, you know, maybe that's what's going on with these people in Japan. You know, maybe that, you know, that enclosure has made them hypersensitive to the external world in that way, to this kind of micro environment.

We have time for perhaps one more question. Question, anyone?

Okay, well, can I ask you guys one question? How do I get back to San Francisco? Because I don't have time to walk. I don't have time to walk. Does any. Has anybody ever taken public transport from the Google campus. From here? Fantastic. Or train. There's a town train that goes up to San Francisco. You get a good view along the side. Have you done that? I just did that this past weekend and I walked two miles from the train, three to level. And did you enjoy it? Enjoyed it. Saw a lot of nice things, found a historic park. Enjoy what? Totally enjoyed it. Okay. I knew why you were being so quiet. You know, all of this stuff. Thank you. And yeah, where do I get the train from? Mountain Lou Station is the closest one. There's a shuttle that goes down there if you want to take that. So I can take the shuttle to Mountain View and then get the train from there. Okay. You're going to walk there too? It's maybe a 45 minute walk. 45 minute walk to Mountain View. Okay. Thank you. Thank you all. I hope you enjoyed your time with me.