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Ever since Garret mentioned the idea, I've been thinking of Edmonton as a text. Dérive, then, with its attempt to perceive "principal axes of passage," "exits," "defences," and "psychogeographical pivotal points," seems to me like a sort of reader-response theory. Which complicates De Certeau's idea of walking as a speech act—writing—by positioning us as readers, whose bodies and choices interpret the contours of the text that is Edmonton. I'm getting the idea that traditionally, in English departments, there's this attempt to establish reading and writing as binary opposites, when actually they're everywhere inextricable and intertwined. Bodies and cities are just two examples of texts that are both readable and writable—can you think of any others?

The concept of the dérive isn't actually that foreign to me—I've been doing it accidentally for years, ever since I took up walking as my main form of aerobic exercise. In every season but winter, I go walking most days of the week and just drift aimlessly around the neighbourhood for forty minutes. I don't have a preferred path, but I tend to avoid certain places (the strip mall, the main road) and vary my route based on the time of day. During sunset, there's an open field underneath powerlines that gives a beautiful view of the sky; if it's dark, I prefer to be alone in the park. Now that I'm thinking in the context of the dérive, it seems like all these choices might be read as responses to the psychogeographical contours of my neighbourhood.

I don't think my dérives are in line with Debord's purpose, though. They don't pose questions to the city; they aren't aggressive. They probably resemble what Solnit describes more. She makes the point that rural and urban walking are fundamentally different: rural walkers appreciate "the general" (the beauty of nature, the landscape moving by as a "gently modulated continuity"); urban walkers are "on the lookout for particulars, for opportunities, individuals" (174). I'd say that when I go walking, I'm doing rural walking in an urban setting; I rarely take the opportunity to interact with the city around me, relegating it instead to the backdrop. This probably has something to do with the fact that I live in suburbia so banal that it would cause Debord great despair. Solnit writes, "the ideal city is organised around citizenship;" its spatial structure should encourage mobility and public participation. Suburbs, isolated enclaves that discourage social mobility, are totally antithetical to that.

Interestingly, the extension of the LRT down to Heritage (or Century Park, or whatever they're calling it now) introduces a new current of movement to the city that works against the enclaves of suburbia. Now, anyone is just an LRT trip and a bus ride away from Riverbend. I've heard people complaining about the fact that this opens up their precious south side to the homeless and the low-income from downtown—a complaint which I find really problematic and a little infuriating. God, how terrible to have to face a social reality which calls your privilege into question! To have to interact with people of different social classes, treat them with respect, and teach your children to do the same! I'm getting really off-topic, though. What I meant to say was:

When the snow melts, I'm going to start looking for excuses to take walks anywhere but here.

hardly a substantial post, but I just wanted to note --

"The influence of weather on dérives, although real, is a significant factor only in the case of prolonged rains, which make them virtually impossible. But storms or other types of precipitation are rather favorable for dérives."

Obviously, Debord's never experienced an Edmonton winter.

there's no such thing as a disembodied place

As I continue to study texts about Edmonton, it's become apparent to me how central memory and narrative are to a concept of place. But I keep returning to something else: the idea of physical, embodied experience. Different bodies move through the same space in different ways, which can create unspoken "city limits" that we might not even think of.

For example, appearance can code and telegraph certain things about a person, including class, sexuality, or gender, and open up the possibility of discrimination. I'm sure that at some point, all of you have felt uncomfortable somewhere you're underdressed/not wearing the "right" clothes -- now imagine that vague feeling of unwelcomeness magnified into the possibility of danger. I'm reminded of the anecdote in Darrin Hagen's The Edmonton Queen in which Gloria and Lulu, walking down Jasper Ave in drag, have to fend off attackers with their heels. It also brings to mind something Heather mentioned to me the other day: how the lack of gender-neutral toilets on the U of A campus is difficult for transgendered people.

And then there's the issue of various disabilities -- physical, sensory, intellectual; visible or invisible -- which I think is going to be the focus of my mapping project. Architectural ableism all over campus complicates the narrative of moving through the space of a day, presenting choices and defining what can and can't be accomplished.

If you can't do stairs, for example, your options are elevators and ramps. The elevators at the university LRT station sometimes don't work. Rutherford South doesn't even have an elevator. There are ramps for some staircases, but not for others -- and so you'd be limited to routes that incorporate them, routes which probably aren't the most time- and energy-efficient.

Or try chronic pain and fatigue. Let's say a typical day for you involves LRTing to school and walking to three classes scattered at opposite ends of campus. For someone with a fifth of the energy of an average person, it might be hard just to get to those classes, never mind retaining enough energy to stay awake and concentrate.

There's also the issue of mental energy, and what stressors someone is capable of enduring to get from place to place. I don't want to speculate and misrepresent peoples' experiences, but I imagine things like agoraphobia, claustrophobia, and social anxiety disorders (in which people become a factor of the space) would complicate a concept of space, too.

With only my own examples and experiences to draw on -- and very little knowledge of sensory or intellectual disabilities -- I can't even begin to imagine the scope of difficulties people deal with. If you have any other thoughts of examples of how your body, or other peoples' bodies, shape their movement through space, I'd love to hear them.

don't slam the ivory tower

I find it pretty disconcerting to meet the author behind a text. Usually when we interrogate the text in a 1,500-word essay, not in person, but I think I prefer the second option. I won't go off on a tangent about Barthes' "The Death of the Author" -- actually I did, but then I deleted it once I realised this post was already 700 words, and I apologise for that, I really do, no one has to read this. The ideas got out of hand! Next time, I'll try to corral them. (And stay on topic. Sorry for ignoring you this week, Edmonton.)

Anyway. The Edmonton Queen seems to contain two conflicting ideas: drag as an essentialist expression of one's "inner woman" and drag in a Judith Butler sense, exposing and deconstructing the social fiction of gender. When I asked Darrin about it, his answer was that he only learned gender theory after doing drag, and that the tension between those ideas probably comes from his attempt to reconcile the two.

Which eventually got me thinking about the question (which threw me waaay off-topic): why didn't the book reconcile the two? I'm not pointing my finger at Darrin specifically -- it's a problem I have with critical theory as a whole. Theory isn't always written from experience, but when it contradicts it, is that a problem? Which should we defer to? Does one have more validity than the other? Is there such a thing as a test of validity here, and should there be?

It's hard to come down on one side or the other, and I've been on both. For instance: as someone with an invisible chronic illness, I understand very well the complexities of what it's like to "pass" as an able-bodied person, but I have no experience of passing in terms of gender -- I experienced disability, pain, and illness before reading any theory on it, but most of what I have figured out about gender and sexuality came to me first through reading. I don't know if this invalidates the latter in some way. What I have noticed is that I tend to judge disability theory in a more affective way -- if it speaks to my experience of disability, I accept it, and if it doesn't, I have more of a knee-jerk "THAT'S NOT HOW IT IS AT ALL!" reaction. I think it's an oversimplification to map lived experience to affective response, though.

I'd also guess that many feminists have not personally experienced all of the things that they write about (for example: racism, classism, ableism, homophobia, etc.), but that doesn't mean that they can't make meaningful contributions to discussions about them, or act as allies to those who do experience them.

Sometimes, theory lines right up with experience. The social model of disability makes total sense to me. I live it. And I would have taken weeks, maybe months, to work out all of those ideas on my own, versus the couple of hours it took to read articles and nod a lot. But sometimes, it doesn't, and we can't exactly get Judith Butler and Darrin Hagen together to hash it out. I obviously can't speak from experience here, but I think it's possible that some drag queens do drag because it feels right to them, as feminine expression, and would rather not interrogate what that means about the (in)stability of the category of gender, even after the fact (as Darrin did). What does it mean, then, when a feminist co-opts this social phenomenon*, which may have a certain meaning (or several different, individual meanings) to its participants ... and gives it a different one? Does/should one trump the other? Is that question the wrong way of looking at things entirely?

*I can only assume that Butler has no personal experience with drag. I Googled "has Judith Butler ever done drag" -- yes, I really did -- but the internet can't turn up any answers for once.

I guess what I'm asking is, what is theory's relevance, especially to lived experience? And what happens when it seems to be irrelevant?

The closest I can come to an answer is something one of my other profs told me about how to work with Foucault: that his writings aren't meant to be some sort of unified, self-coherent Theory of Everything, but rather a toolbox, from which you can pick out whatever is useful for what you're attempting to think through.

the new york subway as a stringed instrument

A piece of creative cartography I stumbled across via io9: Conductor, a map of the New York subway system (kind of). I have no idea how to interpret the thing in a thematic, English-class way, but it's quirky and neat.

biomapping edmonton?

What fascinates me about Biomapping is how it sort of of disproves one of its own assumptions. It's a space-based concept, mapping emotional response to geographical location, and there were responses to specific, concrete locations ("Beautiful mural by Andrew Schoultz," "Really big hill") -- but there were also random experiences that could have happened anywhere in any city (my personal favourite: "I got startled by pigeons," followed quickly by "Tried to stomp on pigeons"). It might be worthwhile to do a statistical analysis and trace out ratios and patterns, but anyway the data indicates -- maybe -- that what seems like it'd be incidental to our experience of place is actually central to it.

Also interesting: responses to place that relied on memory ("Walked by ex-girlfriend's house"), foregrounding the way the project maps how people are embedded in places. As I discussed with my group at the end of Thursday's class, the map of Edmonton I would love to see is one in which five different people are "released" into the wild of Edmonton at the same spot, then allowed to disperse within a given area. Their autonomous journeys and emotional responses would be recorded and displayed -- each in a different colour, maybe? -- on the same map. While the biomaps we saw gave a sense of a synchronic moment, collapsing time into a bunch of data points, this could fold those scattered, striking moments into diachronic narrative strands, revealing the way individuals appropriate the same space in different ways.

It might also be a revealing experience for the participants. De Certeau says that walkers of a city write urban texts blindly, without being able to read them. A lot of the responses on Nold's biomaps indicated that wearing his scientific mood ring heightened their awareness-- of their mission, but also in general; they were, perhaps, not as blind as the average urban pedestrian.

my edmonton: terra incognita

Typing "my Edmonton" feels like stealing, because Edmonton's not mine at all.

It's sort of like waking up in bed and realising you're sleeping next to a stranger, even after twenty years of arranged loveless marriage. I always assumed I knew my city, but even though I've made its spaces into places they've never cohered for me in a way that gives me a sense of the local.

I go places to do things. Then I come home. It's hopelessly utilitarian. And so my sense of the city is just a handful of isolated, unconnected spaces: my house; bus stops and LRT stations; campus; the Whitemud Crossing library, to which I have paid literally hundreds of dollars in late fines; the Confederation pool, preferable to the YMCA because it's saltwater; friends' places; doctor's offices; bookstores on Whyte and coffee shops along 109th. I have an intimacy with the places themselves, but no idea of the communities that grow in and around them, no idea of their spatial interrelationships because my sense of direction is a joke which my friends laugh at often and loudly.

Rhetorically speaking -- in a de Certeau kind of way -- my Edmonton has no narrative. It's just sentence fragments, walked over and over again to create a familiar but incomplete poem. It's constrained by bus routes and truncated by self-created "city limits" like my comfort zone, mobility issues courtesy of chronic pain, the fact that I am just too lazy to get my drivers' license. (I know, I know.)

It's time to salvage this relationship. It's time to fall in love.

Since I was raised by books, my first instinct is "read lots of Edmonton books!" but I suspect the real solution is the same as it is for a lot of the Grand Theoretical Problems which sulk inside my head for weeks.

GET OUT MORE! DO THINGS!