Overview

In 2019 a group of book-lovers began to turn from their usual diet of contemporary novels to read classics of the 'English eerie' like Arthur Machen's 'The Great God Pan'. The documents recovered, (edited by Phil Smith of 'Mythogeography'), and published here as 'Living In The Magical Mode', describe the subsequently inspired attempts of these readers - in a time of virus and social and climate catastrophe -- to live anew, with 'magic-as-ordinary', to do magic as if it were the washing up. At first, the readers fall on new ways of remaking their everyday lives in the magical mode, but the mode soon find ways to remake the readers. Challenging assumptions, magic turns lives upside down and shakes out mysteries. The documents of 'Living In The Magical Mode' describe a pulling back of veils, until all veils but one are exhausted; then the book-lovers put their hands upon the veil inside themselves.... 'Living In The Magical World' crosses dream wastelands, racecourses, motorway cafes, edgeland quarries and suburban valleys, in an adventure of encounters with 'others'. It brings its readers to an occulted realm of unbounded desires that once unfolded refuses to recede. The surviving documents of the book club, reprinted here, describe the final frantic efforts of what remains of its members to understand a collision of many worlds and make novel webs of reconciliation.

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9781913743574

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Dr. Phil Smith is a performance-maker, writer and academic researcher, specialising in work around walking, site-specificity, mythogeographies, web-walking, somatics and counter-tourism. With artist Helen Billinghurst, he is one half of Crab & Bee, who have recently completed an exhibition and walking project called 'Plymouth Labyrinth (funded by Arts Council England), a short walking project in the Isles of Scilly and a residency at Teats Hill slipway. They recently published their book, The Pattern (2020). In his most recent book, Living in the Magical Mode, (an edited collection of documents surviving from a discontinued book club), Phil starts from the insistence that Magic is not a power or command over nature, but a relationship with nature and goes on to explain his view of everything. With Tony Whitehead and photographer John Schott, Phil recently published Guidebook for an Armchair Pilgrimage. He has also developed a 'subjectivity-protective movement practice' with Canada-based choreographer Melanie Kloetzel, published in January 2021 as COVERT: A Handbook. With Claire Hind and Helen Billinghurst, he co-organised the 2019 'Walking's New Movements' conference at the University of Plymouth - on which Walking Bodies is based. As company dramaturg and co-writer for TNT Theatre (Munich), he most recently premiered 'Free Mandela', co-authored with TNT's artistic director Paul Stebbings, about the end of apartheid in South Africa. Paul and Phil have recently written a book about TNT Theatre's transformation from tiny experimental theatre company to global touring organisation. Phil is a member of site-based arts collective Wrights & Sites, who published The Architect-Walker in 2018. As well as Walking Stumbling Limping Falling (2017) with poet Alyson Hallett, Phil's publications include Making Site-Specific Theatre and Performance (Red Globe/Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Rethinking Mythogeography (2018) (with US photographer John Schott), Anywhere (2017), A Footbook of Zombie Walking and Walking's New Movement (2015), On Walking and Enchanted Things (2014), Counter-Tourism: The Handbook (2012) and Mythogeography (2010). He is an Associate Professor (Reader) at the University of Plymouth. You'd think he wouldn't have much spare time.

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