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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

NEW IAIN SINCLAIR BOOK! That's me happy...

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

16:09 / 24.07.02

Just went back to see my old boss in the books department at Forbidden Planet. He said "hey, haven't seen you in a while... I've been saving a book for you. The proof of the new Iain Sinclair!"

And I was gobsmacked, not even knowing there was one.

Apparently (according to the cover) it's released in September, it's called "London Orbital", and is along similar lines to "Lights Out For The Territory", only, as the blurb would have it, "in London Orbital, he sets out to map a much less fashionable and previously uncharted area: the vast stretch of urban settlement outside the centre of London that is bounded by the 'collar' of the M25. In doing so, he finds places to which Londoners escaped, places where vast projects such as Heathrow Airport could be realised and places where the poor and the mad of the city were simply hidden away."

I've read the first chapter- it's fucking excellent ("A journey, a provocation. An escape. Keep moving, I told myself, until you hit tarmac, the outer circle. The point where London loses it, gives up its ghosts.")

Sinclair rocks.

yawn - thing's buddy

18:08 / 24.07.02

Sinclair rocks so hard, he's an earthquake, mindquake and paradigm quake all rolled into one big quake-quake!

11:09 / 25.07.02

Indeed, he is truly kewl.

20:58 / 29.07.02

Oh dear, I feel bad about this, but I don't really get on with Sinclair... that's not the Barbelith spirit really, is it? Perhaps I should try Landor's Tower (because I like Walter Savage Landor and I assume that he's the Landor of the title)...

I tried Slow Chocolate Autopsy and couldn't finish it. I forced myself to get through Lud Heat and thought it much better, and even almost enjoyed it (and 'Suicide Bridge' to boot). Didn't gel with Lights out for the Territory, even if it does feature Charlton House (the NLP venue from last year).

*cough*Ithinkheover-writessometimes*cough*

01:27 / 24.08.02

*cough*Ithinkheover-writessometimes*cough*

fair point. I have to be in the right mood to read Sinclair.

Read liquid city on holiday this year, and thought sometimes that the prose was overwrought. I haven't read any of his fiction yet, maybe it works better in a novel.

when he reads his writing himself (bookreadings and the downriver CD) it can be pretty powerful IMHO.

Its great that he's doing another 'psychogeography' book. i lloved 'lights out', 'liquid city', 'sorry meniscus' and some of the stuff for london review of books.

20:51 / 08.05.06

Oh, I do love Iain.

Saw him talk a couple of months back- he was taking part in a discussion called "walking the city, writing the city" and revealed, among other things, why he hates Cambridge so much- and he does have a fantastic stage presence...possibly because he's so bloody tall.

I kinda prefer his travelogues. His fiction is quite dense and he does tend to get rather carried away with all those oblique descriptions. Something about the reality of the journey seems to ground it for me. Plus, I'm a sucker for the whole "all time is synchronous" stuff that comes out of his and Alan Moore's writing.

Having said that, I do like the way his 'novels' are often just fictionalised re-iterations of his own experiences. I've talked to a couple of people who've worked with or been covered by him and the general feeling is that he alters things with little concern for those depicted. The layers of fiction and mercurial nature of his observations are deeply appealing to me and have stoked a deep interest in the origins of our culture.

13:38 / 12.05.06

Hi

I love Sinclair's work, although not Landor's Tower, too much of {a novel about the novelist trying to write it}.

I saw him speak at Warwick Uni a couple of years ago - he was talking about running along an old sewage pipe across the marshes & diving into an old concrete gun emplacement by the river to incubate his visions. I also saw him read at The Tigers of Wrath a Blake celebration on the South Bank a while back. Much more naturally present on stage than Moore who seemed quite self conscious.

I have really enjoyed Sinclair's last two: Dining on Stones & Edge of the Orison.

The first is back on familiar ground, like Mick says - reiterations of his own experiences. It's a weird doppelganger novel. It was so good I started it again when I'd finished & I don't do that much.

Edge is a fascinating combination of travel writing, genealogical & historical research.

The threads are:

The "mad poet" John Clare - Sinclair & his accomplices retrace the steps of his escape home from the asylum, he walked to Northamptonshire in three days.

The writer's wife comes from that part of the world & they investigate possible connections between her family & that of Clare.

Clare was on the scene while the big romatic poet thing was going on with Shelley & Byron & all that lot. There's great scene when Iain goes to the Bodleian library to see Shelley's watch.

My favorite Sinclair was always the early stuff: Lud Heat, etc. I like Downriver & Lights Out but I must say that Edge of Orison might be his best work yet.

BTW wtf is Liquid City? American title for something? Radon Daughters?

Cheers!
Rig

14:14 / 12.05.06

Liquid City is, as far as I can tell, a collection of Marc Atkins' photographs accompanied by occasional bits of Sinclair's prose which focus on the city and regular topics of his such as Ackroyd, Moorcock etc

Totally with you on Lud Heat Rigettle, it's absolutely fantastic. Have you read Suicide Brige too? It's some fanstastic neo-modernist poetry, and if you can track down the 1979 Albion Press edition (?) it has some of Sinclair's photos in there too.

11:44 / 15.05.06

Hi Mick,

I have the Vintage p/b of Lud Heat & Suicide Bridge It's got the line drawings & maps by Dave McKean, but no photos.

Interestingly, in Edge of the Orison he refers to that period of his work:

"I enjoyed my lost years as a book scout, doubling through the East Midlands, Lincolnshire and East Anglia, air bases, dormitory villages, barns stacked with plunder. Being out on the road, red-eyed, buzzing with caffeine, hammered by monologues, the nervous occultism of fellow dealers, was an excellent preparation: for what? For defacing notebooks, formulating skewed theories, misreading signs. Pre-fictional chaos. I abandoned my attempts to construct pseudo-epics that mingled (without distinction) poetry and prose." (p93)

Cheers!

Rig

13:38 / 22.05.06

Sinclair update:

I turned on Radio 4's Today (21-5-06) program just in time to hear Iain being interviewed about the development of the Lea Valley for the Olympic Village of 2012.

They've obviously made some effort to get him on board & he wasn't overly negative, but he was interviewed alongside some dead enthusiastic [young apparatchik] who talked about his "vision" of what it might be like.

Iain said somethimng to the effect that he didn't mind hearing poets talk about their vsions but politicians & quangos doing so made him feel uneasy.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

13:54 / 22.05.06

Ooh! Have to see if I can find it on their site.

19:47 / 10.07.09

I've never read anything by him. After the last LOEG comic, I became interested.

What would be a solid pick for a first-time reader; with which book should I start?

Janean Patience

08:59 / 11.07.09

Lights Out For The Territory is the one that got me hooked. It's kind of a collection of essays, of bits of wandering, of people he knows but it gives you the full picture.

18:33 / 11.07.09

Thanks for the tip!

I was reading about that book yesterday, it seemed to be the first of his concerning psychogeography, and now you mentioning it, this seems to be the choice for the first dip.

Janean Patience

20:39 / 13.07.09

It does what he does very well. At first it's confusing, this whole cast of characters, all these references to films or books you may not be familiar with. The trick is to keep going through that thicket and to allow the detail to accrete, to build into a whole that's much more than all the flotsam of the city it's built from. (Like the Watts Towers.) I remember particular chapters of Lights Out being a pain, the poetry one especially, but it's all part of the journey.

I'm reading Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire right now and it's been very much the same as reading Lights Out for the first time. Hundreds of pages, literally, where the prose is crystalline and wonderful but it doesn't add up to much. And then suddenly it's all adding up, it all matters, and you're in deep.

I prefer the psychogeography stuff to the novels, though. As does everyone else, Sinclair has mentioned semi-bitterly a few times. White Chappell didn't knit second-hand booksellers and Jack the Ripper very convincingly, and I've never got thru Downriver. Slow Chocolate Autopsy is the only Sinclair novel I enjoyed, partly because of Dave McKean's comic sequences and partly because the whole prisoner of London concept is strong enough to hang all the rest of the metaphysical musings upon.

23:03 / 14.07.09

Not sure about 'Hackney ...' I'm a fan of Iain's style, but are the hyper-obscure North London left-wingers he's on about really all that interesting? And is Hackney, actually? As with 'London Orbital' he seems to be on less fertile ground than he was in 'Lights Out ...'

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

22:54 / 12.08.09

I loved it... I also found out from it that Astrid Proll worked as a parkie in my local park when she was on the run in England... which has made dogwalking that little bit more magical.

And he interviews the Moleman of Dalston.

01:23 / 13.08.09

I think what I might do is try and get hold of a King Charles Spaniel, (I'd call it 'Dr Dee') then train the thing to attack to the sound of Sinclair's voice.

And then hang around Victoria Park, waiting.

It's not Iain's fault, but he looks to be suffering from 'Jesus And Mary Chain' syndrome. Which is; there's nothing worse than an original idea what every other yard-dog buster on the scene tries to pass off as their own. And yet the papers are littered with this stuff.

01:25 / 13.08.09

The above aside, I think if you'd met Astrid Proll, Stoat, she'd have really liked you.

09:43 / 13.08.09

*THREADROT* Lord knows, I fancy some Sinclair as much as the next chap (more so, perhaps) but this made me splutter into my cheerios. The line about "Ballard's Sputum" is a mini gem all by itself.

*FURTHER THREADROT* Has anyone seen the Sinclair/Petit Audi ad - filmed, of all places, on Merseyside? Poor old Chris. Reduced to gimpy grunting while Iain warbles. It all seems a little contrived. What, I wonder, was the point?