Your opinion sought

I'm thinking about using some of Iain Sinclair's work on a module which discusses the ways in which we conceptualise the city. Beyond ethnography and anthropology, there's a movement (largely French) which stresses the subjective and almost unanalysable experience of urban existence.

The British wing consists of the psychogeographers, and Sinclair is the foremost of the them all. He looks underneath the 'regenerations' and rebrandings to highlight the psychological aspects of public and private policy. He spots the occult or unconscious motives and expressions manifested by architecture, policing, redevelopments. He cares for the alternative narratives and histories of the city's shifting inhabitants, the kind of stories and discourses entirely obliterated by the oppressive fantasies of the property developers and bureaucrats - his new book, Ghost Milk deconstructs the Olympic Project's determination to obliterate the messy, scruffy, badly-behaved but real communities of Hackney and the other boroughs on which this global fantasy has landed. Let me know what you think.

In Praise of Sinclair

If I typed out every bit of Lights Out For The Territory for which I've folded down a page-corner (yes, spare me your horrified gasps, most of my books are working copies), I'd be here forever and have no space for anything else. If you haven't, read the book now.

But here are some snippets.

On the rise of the finance scum who've ruined us (despite writing in 1995), he quotes Richard Allen:

His suede heads of the early Seventies, boot boys travestied in mohair, progressed to the Stock Exchange. They were the first jackals of the Me Generation: "An anti-social, anti-everything conglomerate affecting status as their protective cover whilst engaging in nefarious pursuits more savage, more brutal than other cultists…"… the Savile Row knuckleheads of the free-market: Lord Joseph's scum progeny

On Jeffrey Archer's novels:

An object, a brick of paper, good to handle, nice to have around. Inoffensive - except to whinging aesthetes… the power of the novels lay in the fact that they didn't have to be read. The much-edited story was so user-friendly it spoke to you. It talked back. The plot was so familiar that simply bending back the covers was enough, the thick black lines of text (virtually braille) did the rest. 

The role of the poet as cartographer:

… the skin of London should be divided up by poets and seers as much as by gangsters. Pets didn't need brothers. Didn't need a conformity of suits and attitudes. Didn't need dogs. They would service the ground they stole from, haunt a particular territory, tune themselves to notice everything, every irregularity in the brickwork, every dip in the temperature… Maps are a futile compromise between information and knowledge. They require a powerful dose of fiction to bring them to life.
Writers, wishing to 'rescue' dead ground, will have to wrest it from the grip of developers, clerks, clerics, eco freaks, and ward bosses. We are all welcome to divide London according to our anthologies: JG Ballard at Shepperton (the reservoirs, airport perimeter roads, empty film studios); Michael Moorcock at Notting Hill (visited by Jack Trevor Story); Angela Carter - south of the river, Battersea to Brixton, where she hands over to the poet Allen Fisher; Eric Mottram at Herne Hill, communing with the ghost of Ruskin; Robin Cook's youthful self in Chelsea… [etc for several more paragraphs].

What he's getting at is that 'official' truths and 'facts' are reductive at best, misleading, deliberately so at worst. That a place is not a collection of things but a history, often hidden, distorted or denied. That the imagination is where a place really comes to exist. See also Alan Moore's From Hell.

All hail…

…Will Self.

I have never seen anyone destroy an opponent's arguments with such silky skill as last night's attack by the author on the plastic 'legacy' of the Olympics. Last night's Newsnight featured a lovely piece by psychogeographer Iain Sinclair on the top-down 'iconic' regeneration of East London, followed by Self ripping apart Tessa Jowell's claim that a shopping centre and an 'academy' for shopping centre employees are suitable legacies for the borough.

Unfortunately, it's not on Youtube, It's now on Youtube: see it here. but you can see the Self section here (for now), and the whole show here (OB 20.35, Iain Sinclair piece 32.35, Will Self v Jowell 37.37). It's like watching a tiger toy with a mouse. He rips apart the linguistic blancmange used by all management types and employs actual intellect to take the long view - something our triangulating politicians can no longer handle. Compelling TV.

Don't forget: Tories = scum

Amongst the other books I've got on the go at the moment, I'm reading Iain Sinclair's Downriver, a sprawling exposé of the full Thatcherite horror that was London in the 1980s. Now it looks like that pink-cheeked proletariat-rapist Cameron looks like being the next Prime Minister, here's a passage about the Tories from Sinclair's book - the Minister reminds me of Cameron:

Closer inspection… revealed no youth, but a shrink-wrapped young man - who had forgotten to climb out of his lightweight suit before sending it to the cleaners. Or some kind of quantum leap in the field of headshrinking. The Minister looked like a ventriloquist's dummy - which, in a sense, he was: the latex exception that proves the rule. The rest of the Widow's gang split neatly into the Uglies (shifty, weasel-twitching Goebbels clones who breakfasted on razor blades and seven-week embryos) and the Bunters: smooth, fleshy, near-identical, bum-faced nonentities in Savile Row suits and bulletproof glasses. Apocalypse-resistant unflappables. The Uglies had lost ground recently, the time for cracking skulls was past. They were ennobled, sent to the city like feral cats. No longer the nights of broken glass, lycanthropes and zoo-rejects with burning brands: it was the mid-term era of soft sell, Brylcreem-condomed, safe-handed boys, and public men of conscience (and private fortune).

This boy, the Minister, had been picked because he smelt like a political virgin: he was fresh, oven-ready, blatant with coal tar and Old Spice; bubbling enthusiastic, popping up everywhere with endorsements that kept him spinning him dizzily around the outer circle, never quite 'one of us', but very useful as a fag and disposable messenger… he remained, basically, a whipping boy, buoyant enough, and stupid enough, to deflect heat-seeking missiles from such entrenched citadels of the left as the Church of England, the Royal Opera House, and the Sunday Telegraph.