Will Self takes a walk...

...and the New York Times covers every step. If you're a journalist assigned to cover a story about a dude going on a long walk, you better hope said dude is of Will Self caliber. It's not that a walk isn't ripe for a ruminating narrative, but I think you need the walker to do some really heavy lifting for this thing to work. Not just anyone is going to give you this:

He seemed relieved when he encountered, next to the bridge over the Long Island Rail Road, a busy, noisy junkyard where metal was being squashed. “The city is flowing out to embrace us,” he said. Through the housing project at the end of Glenmore, a little zigzag and on to Eastern Parkway, where Mr. Self, looking back for a second, said: “There is a deep sadness to American poverty, greater than the sadness of any other kind. It’s because America has such an ideology of success.” But then he brightened and said: “Perhaps we’ll feel better when we get to the Brooklyn Bridge. We’ll hear the skirl of the Gershwin clarinets, and we’ll believe in the dream of possibility once again.”

And it all starts to make a bit more sense when you dip into Will Self's Psychogeography columns at The Independent. The very first column -- published two years ago -- begins in such a way that I tried to convince myself I fully understood the concept of psychogeography:

I've taken to long-distance walking as a means of dissolving the mechanised matrix which compresses the space-time continuum, and decouples human from physical geography. So this isn't walking for leisure - that would be merely frivolous - or even for exercise, which would be tedious.

A few sentences later, I somehow understood more and less. Here:

As Emile Durkheim observed, a society's space-time perceptions are a function of its social rhythm and its territory.

The concept doesn't crystallize in the second column, Lost In France, but it does end with a tit joke:

"See that," says the lad, indicating the fragment of a map Michelin have put on the cover of their France 2003 Tourist and Motoring Atlas. "D'you think they've put Brest on the front so that they'll sell more copies?"

Will Self's office