The Psychogeography of Cairo

Blech.  I realize my blogging frequency has reached new levels of dilapidation (sorry for that sentence, I've been reading Faulkner).  I have fleeting blog post ideas come and go, but then I feel like I ought to be spending what little free time I have on doing Arabic.  A new job and a new Arabic tutor, along with a string of close friends' imminent departures from Egypt have made it very easy for me to justify the past two mostly blogless months.  Well this is post is not really going to fix that, because I'm just going to repost something I read somewhere else.

I don't totally understand what it is as it seems to be talking about a possibly made-up one or two-man society call the "Cairo Psychogeographical Society."  They/he just walk around the city of Cairo trying to experience the city's planning "as 'non-scientific researcher' who encounters the urban landscape through aimless drifting, experiencing the effects of geographical settings ignored by city maps, and often documenting these processes using film, photography, script writing, or tape. In this way, the wanderer becomes alert to the metaphors, visual rhymes, coincidences, analogies, and changing moods of the street."  I like to think I am one of those too.

The whole post is written in a very Borges-style, anyway, there are some wonderful pictures of the city if you don't feel like wading through the strange prose around them.  Here's the link to the post.