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Field Trip Happenstance Psychogeography

Happenstance – 1 (19.02.12 CE)

Scribbling away this morning and consulting Daniel Defoe’s A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain.

Walking in the afternoon near the beach at Kinghorn, and thinking about Defoe’s visit which he recounts in Letter XIII.  Thoughts also turn to Alexander Selkirk who, not that far up the coast at Lower Largo, gazes out, projecting his own haunting presence into the psychogeographic mindscape.  If Selkirk was the inspiration for Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, it is the ghost of Robinson who wanders and stalks through many a tract of the psychogeographic imagination. Witness Rimbaud’s supposedly derived verb robinsonner (to travel mentally, or let the mind wander) or the unseen and unheard researcher in Patrick Keiller’s films London and Robinson in Space.

Later on, in the afternoon, cooking the tea.  Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone on as usual. A haunting over the airwaves:  The Robert Mellin Orchestra playing the soundtrack to The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.  The particular track: (A) Drift.

Now Playing: Erstlaub – I Am the Line Drawn in the Sand Between the Living and the Dead