ideas of mapping

I'm in overdrive this morning but this will be the last post today, I promise :o) The idea of wandering and making a map as you go - whether a cartographic document in a literal sense or a sort of mental map that isn't actually expressed as a diagram at all - has quite a long tradition of its own. I've just read a book called Psychogeography by Merlin Coverley. It's very focused on London and Paris, but covers a range of interesting figures from Daniel Defoe and Thomas de Quincey, through Walter Benjamin and the Situationist International, right up to some contemporary wanderers (very British ones, I have to say) like Iain Sinclair, who undertakes strange journeys in and around London and has written about them in books like Lights Out For The Territory and London Orbital.

(Interesting that Sinclair took the title of his book, Lights Out For the Territory, from the end of Huckleberry Finn - it's what Huck does *after* his Mississippi journey.)