Iain Sinclair

Simclair writes a nice mini-essay for the insert of PATRICK KEILLER'S LONDON/ROBINSON IN SPACE DVD SET

Is there an American Iain Sinclair? I haven't read enough Pynchon to know, but is there a NY or LA or Chicago equivalent of "Lights Out..."?

Also does this stuff seem passe' to you now or not? That's not meant as a leading question, it's just that the cities of the Western world appear to have more than their fair share of (amateur) archivists now. I'm still very much interested in all this, but how much more is there to be done in this area?

Also does this stuff seem passe' to you now or not?

i don't want to play into your hands here BUT

he always did!

SIKE

he comes nowhere near pynchon.

but i mean this mainly as a stylist -- i think his stuff is clotted and not much fun to wade through, and he repeats himself a lot.

i don't have a problem with the "genre" so much -- i'm working on something about whitechapel myself that is, i guess, within it, and that i really don't think has been done ('rodinsky's room' by sinclair probably comes close in some ways + his stuff on the ripper maybe -- but i'm not into the occult stuff).

for all that the ch. on cinema in 'lights out' is a 'key text' in brit film studies.

American Iain Sinclair = Mike Davis (esp City of Quartz)?

Sinclair's BFI Modern Classic on Cronenberg's CRASH is really gd - a somewhat predictable pairing of author/subject that actually pays off

yeah that is one of his better things. and probably less predictable at the time than now.

I'm still glad he exists and keeps doing his thing, but he has thousands of pages of Flickr images of London grafitti and headstones and obscure landmarks to answer for. Has anyone seen the film he made of "London Orbital"?

Nope. Actually found the book relatively disappointing. I must catch up with his latest, 'Dining on Stones' which I've heard is good.

Great, great writer, though, absolutely compelling on a rant. I was surprised when I heard him reading his stuff - he seems mild and confiding. I was imagining something like Burroughs in full flight. (Or, yes, definitely, Malcolm Maclaren, as someone suggests upthread - that had never occurred to me!)

I have to say I don't see the Pynchon comparison at all. Pynchon seems much more structured and literary. And, frankly, I was sweating blood struggling through 'V' and 'Gravity's Rainbow' on Alan Moore's recommentation.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n12/sinc01_.html

^^ ok, definitely cashed his cheque with this one. nice knowing you, well, not really, but...

iow: mention of 'long good friday' in this context: instant redundancy.

oh i've never been keen on his film refs, usually just too obscurist and in-crowd for me. so he's gone a bit more populist - doesn't bother me either way.

i've been shying away from olympic cynicism, marking it down as the usual lazy (and depressing) option; but that was (depressingly) convincing. prose is less sparky. more defeatist.

I wrote about "White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings" for one of my papers and I briefly read "Lights Out...". Both, especially the former, were utterly compelling. Will read that piece NRQ just posted with interest.

i must confess i gave up on 'london orbital' after sinclair observes that dagenham is the new barcelona, hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

also i find it v difficult to get worked up about stratford becoming an enormous shopping centre when that's all it is at the moment anyway

ledge -- my point was, he always brings up 'the long good friday'!

im definitely an olympic cynicist, but not on the grounds that it will ruin anything worth preserving.

oops. well that just proves i don't pay attention whenever he goes off about films.

""It's catastrophic. Apocalyptically catastrophic. It's brutalising"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/feb/08/iain-sinclair-interview

guess what sinclair is talking about here.

Thing is he's probably right.

guess what sinclair is talking about here.

Spoiler:

He whips it out when we arrive at the apartments that are being built above the new Dalston station.

Guardian journalists with a turn of phrase...

Thanks for this. Missed a couple of books, and I've got some catching up to do.

London Orbital was pretty boring and haven't tried anything since but will look out for this one, sounds like a laff riot.

I think he's right about the Olympics - it seems like even more of a white elephant now than it did seven months ago.

a waste of money yes, apocalyptically catastrophic, no.

A catastrophe for the Hackney he goes on about, though.

"like basra"

hmmmm.

Whether that is apocalyptic in the grander scheme of things is obviously a moot point, yes. And Sinclair has something of the polemcist about him IMO.

Absolutely, he's a ranter - you either find that funny and accept it, or . . not.

"Mrs Thatcher, whom Sinclair sincerely believes to have been a witch"

erm, what?

Perfectly reasonable POV.

thought it might have been a typo.

bitch? ditch?

just find this pseudo-occult stuff irritating. don't think it is sincere as much as it is attention-seeking, and it's bound to tend towards the fatalistic and apolitical.

I like it, in the way I like Alan Moore blathering on about his personal gods. I think Sinclair would argue that the occult and the political are linked, or perhaps two sides of the same coin.

uh. ive got several sinclair books waiting to be read. how much does he indulge in occult nonsense in his books?

Not much, really, but I suppose it depends on how you feel about psychogeography, which can lapse into (in Sinclair's own phrase) "Will Self walking around Hampstead Heath whilst smoking a pipe".

haha that's good. though he forgot to include 'furtively masturbating'.

WCST is all about a sort of grimy, grotesque polis-brain occult, and the desperate extremes to which it drives its perceivers, and it's fucking *brilliant*, like, really not nonsense at all, just fantastic, allegorical writing which traces three maps on top of each other and lets 'em rip

x-post Yeah that would have iced that cake nicely!

Peter Ackroyd is a good point of comaprison- you wouldn't accuse him of being an occultist, but you wouldn't deny that he or Sinclair talk about places having very specific feels of place about them, for reasons that can be very hard to explain.

"polis-brain occult"

i'll pretend i understand what the fuck you're on about.

The city as sentient being

yeah...ackroyd's bios of blake and dickens had some very irritating occulty shite in them, not to mention some of his others like'english music'. good writer on the whole though obv.

Ackroyd is better as a novelist than biographer I think, apart from the amazing London: the Biography.

London Orbital was pretty boring

I like it for this reason. It's just like the M25 in that way. I really enjoy reading him but he's plain wrong about a lot of things. But I don't think it matters and I don't think even he believes half the stuff he says - it's just put out there. His increasingly apocalyptic tone (something he shares with Jeremy Clarkson's latest rantings) I find irritating though.

Also Ackroyd's one on the Thames looks pretty good (from what I've read in Borders). Lots of "magical" stuff though.

The companion film to London Orbital is good too, also hypnotically boring and repetitive.

Isn't it possible to see the occult elements in Sinclair as a less outrageous but no less self-aware attempt to satirise and attack the establishment? Magico Marxism, as Alistair Bonnett has dubbed it. Stewart Home/LPA pamphlets about Royal Family blood rites and what not? This kind of stuff turns up in The Invisibles and From Hell. Sinclair's more sober, but no less mischievous take is well represented in the MI6/Archer chapter of Lights Out.
Reading Rodinsky's Room at the moment, which is absolutely fascinating. I'm not actually a Londoner, but I know Brick Lane and Whitechapel a little, so perhaps it has more resonance for me for that reason? Or is it just that the story is so absorbing in its own right?

lol Stewart Home

I found Rodinsky's Room fascinating too, and I've only passed through the area once. It's quite different in feel to his other books. I think working with Rachel Lichtenstein pulled Sinclair out of his usual routines, always bringing him back to face the sad facts of the story. (Don't get me wrong, I love Sinclair's schtick, and was delighted with his cameo as Norton, Prisoner of London, in the latest LoEG.)

And, yes, Stewart Home has often made me laugh out loud.

just read that guardian thing which was fair enough

The department store of Bentalls in Kingston upon Thames is a "baroque reef": a nice image, until you encounter, 100 pages further on, "reef-buildings . . . in a sea of concrete" and then, 100 pages after that, "a reef of fabulous stadiums".

then i was re-reading a bit of LoFTT, and strike me down: 'This cruciform reef of shops...' is right there on p. 15

it's your letters

^^ one for the 90s heads

Just started on "White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings". It seems good so far

Picked up American Smoke which is Iain doing the Beats and Black Mountain. I was really curious to see how he brought his apocalyptic geographic history lesson thing to us in the godless west. Digging it so far, I kind of think of it as Lovecraft writes for Travel & Leisure mag.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n21/iain-sinclair/diary

A piece on the 70x70 film screenings. Have to say if I was more in London during weekdays I would've fancied my chances at being the only attendee at some of those screenings. I really like going across London to catch a screening of something I want to see, as well as the trip too.

I think he writes so well about that kind of decay except a smugness has been set for a long-time so maybe I should re-visit -- its been a long-time since I read Downriver, maybe I should revisit to see whether it was ever any good. I suppose the work begins for me at examining the nostalgia for um technicolor garbage.

I also wonder if old London cinema going ever inspired connection making that he describes taking place through screenings of the The Clock?