Lost and Found in E11

Caledonian Road - 17th March 2014 Field Study's Man in E11 had pretensions to be on, or at, the cutting edge of experimental psycho-geography. There was, I assured him, little or no chance of that achievement in the dullard and dilettante mind field of Julian Beere. He, the field student, was unconvinced. He had been reading various seminal texts to try and develop 'psycho-' propensities. 'Downriver' is one of the 'texts' and I fear he may have been immersed to the point of total plot loss in its weighty textual darknesses. This morning our search party followed a trail left by the sliced remains of a sacrificially slaughtered wellington boot. We followed the meandering rubber line and found ourselves on Caledonian Road, overwhelmed in an elastic time bending force field. Writhing around, made worms of, our vermicular spasms would have appeared as comical street theatrics, buffoonery even, but for the fact they were invisible to the ordinary eyes of p...

                                                                               unravelled, disappeared, a victim of some wayward cut up poetry experiment. He should have known better than to joke about the spirits of the Beat Generation - 'that'll learn ya!' We are looking for him, exploring every nook, cranny and niche of his vacuous field in the vain hope of finding some trace of his spurious mythology. 

Field Study's Man in E11 got home last night looking quite disturbed. He kept on asking if I could hear a dog howling. " An apache dog howling!" he whimpered. "What?"  "There, there it is. Can't you hear it?" I couldn't. "I think you are hearing things," I suggested. "Yes, yes, a howling!" he insisted. "No, no - hearing things as in things that do not exist to be heard. Figments. Auditory hallucinations.What is 'an Apache dog' anyway and where or who did you get this idea from?" I demanded, sighing heavily, resigning myself to yet more of our nonsense. "I've been to see Iain Sinclair. He was part of an event, a panel discussion, The Changing Faces of the East End, organised by Shuffle Festival , at St Clements Hospital (26/2/14) - linked to the redevelopment of the site of St Clement's Hospital for housing by East London Community Land Trust (ELCLT)." "How...

Field Study's Man in E11 was grieving over the loss of a whole colony of bees or "beeres" as he prefers to say. I asked him to quit using that pun; it annoys me greatly and this is precisely what seems to encourage him to persist in using it. I wonder how you would describe that as a personality trait? Mindf****r? I forgave him for the mind-fiddling as I knew he was traumatised by the loss. However we were 7 weeks into 2014 and, but for a crap cut-up neo-beat pastiche, there had not been a new year report from the allotment apiary. I insisted he engage his stiff upper lip and "make the damn report (Field Study's) man!!!"   I believe in tough love and I was not going to tolerate the lip wobbled speech of a pathetic gibbering field student. Every wobbled "w", fumbled "f" and tongue tied "t" (wtf) met a gruff demand for him to go back to the beginning and start again. It has taken us a long time to piece this report togeth...

Field Study's Man in E11 returned from the allotment caked in a foul smelling mud. The stench was rank; a powerfully noxious blend of sweat and vomit, in which the emetic field student seemed quite comfortable and even pleased with himself, particularly when he belched. His eructations added to the odious miasma which hung around him like a strange aura. He reminded me of a mongrel terrier we had, a great rabbit-er, which would roll in cow-pats and any stinking thing else, to mask her smell for the hunt. I retreated as far from the field student as I could in an effort to avoid the rhizomatic intrusions of his stinking muddy field. I tried to ask him what on earth, or in the earth, he had been doing. Each time I opened my mouth I gagged. We resorted to writing each other notes via a very cheap reporters notebook. Where have you been?       Climbing in the high canopies of the purple sprouting broccoli forest. Hovering above a field of newly emer...

Lost and Found in E11 tries to review an essay from, Patrick Keiller, The View from the Train: Cities and Other Landscapes. Verso 2013. Patrick Keiller occupies a respected place in a field of studies sometimes referred to as 'psychogeography'. The publication cited above represents a body of work admirable for its eloquence, inventiveness and creativity in a variety of media addressing various problems in and of the contemporary landscape. Keiller may have reservations about being cited as a proponent of 'psychogeography' - that as a discipline it broadly lacks the intellectual and academic rigour which underpins his work. Here in, Lost and Found in E11, we are trying to develop our appreciation and understanding of our place (in the world). To do so we have sought out learned texts and other emanations exploring the meaning of place. We find ourselves in a state of doubt about the muddled politics and suspect values of our cultural consumption, that our '...

Field Study's Man in E11 is late (again) with his psycho-geography homework What is our excuse this time? Previously on this blog, we expressed anxieties about exploring and reporting on the sensitive territories of home, particularly if there are dilemmas and disputes concerning the privacy of the territories. Proceed with caution, a voice whispered into our left ear before exiting via the emergency right ear. The urgency of escape expressed by the voice of hopelessness nee caution may have been due to an alarming hollowness of the shell between our ears. Within our limited capacity to imagine, we think we heard a voice echo, 'abandon all hope, ye who enter here '. No, he said, 'there'. No, she said, 'here'.  One of the problems about the voice of caution/hopelessness saying "there" is that we cannot, with any authority, go on to pretend we are clever and/or cultured by sharing the Latin translation of that iconic cliche. We would like to ...