In some ways, I feel like I’m the ideal audience for this book: I’ve read Keri Smith’s blog for years and I like her art, and I like walking, and I like art about walking. Five years ago I took part in a learning experience called the Walk Study Training Course, which involved reading about walking/art and then walking and talking about what we’d read. But maybe that makes me not quite the ideal audience: I don’t need to be convinced that walking and unplanned wandering are pleasurable things that can give you room to think and let you see things anew, and I think I am pretty good at being in the moment and paying attention to my senses (though it’s always good to be reminded of the usefulness of that).
The exciting part of this book, for me, was the “Assignments/Research/Field Work” portion, in which Smith presents assignments/suggestions for kinds of wandering to try. Some of it is stuff I have heard of or done before: one of the suggestions is to follow someone (stopping if they notice you), which is reminiscent of Vito Acconci’s “Following Piece,” in which he set out to follow someone passing by until they went into a private space he couldn’t enter. (One of our assignments in the Walk Study Training Course was to recreate this, and wow it’s an uncomfortable experience, even in a busy city like New York where it’s relatively easy to follow someone in a relatively inconspicuous way. It’s also a quick way to be reminded of white privilege and the privilege that comes with being cisgender, etc. But I digress.) Other suggestions were new to me, like: “On a windy day, follow a leaf that blows wherever it goes” (119). Or: “You are to go out in search of something that has been transformed” (106). Smith often suggests documenting your wanderings in your preferred method, whether that’s text/photo/video/drawing/something else, but there are also some suggestions that include prompts for more specific documentation, like the idea of making a video based on “found shapes” or “secret locations” (97). I’m planning to try several of these, and am looking forward to seeing where my wanderings take me.
I was less into the framing device of the book—the idea that Smith had discovered a mysterious group called The Wander Society by chance and then gotten really into finding out everything she could about them—though some of the side-bits related to this are fun, e.g. a phone number you can call to hear a pre-recorded message about The Wander Society, plus a few websites and a Twitter account to peruse. I also was less into the craft-activities/how-tos at the end (e.g. making an embroidered badge, carving a stick, or sewing a neck pouch or belt pouch), and could have done without some of the talk about “wandering as a way to transcend the problems of modern society” and “access a higher plane of consciousness,” which sometimes felt a bit heavy-handed (XXV). Meanwhile, I am pleased with the way this book points to other relevant books and such—it reminds me that I’ve been wanting to read more Robert Walser, and makes me want to read some Walt Whitman (he is quoted/appears often in the text), and makes me want to watch The London Perambulator. Also, I love this, on choosing to be invisible: “You may also want to go unnoticed by others because it is like a superpower of sorts (that is, you are experimenting with being a spy)” (64).
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