Since I wasn’t able to attend this event and I didn’t even have time to announce it, I am using these notes from the “Some landscapes”blog hoping the blogger Plinius won’t mind me quoting him:
“From the industrial sublime to the faintly ridiculous: Saturday evening saw a work-in-progress presentation of Swandown, in which Andrew Kötting and Iain Sinclair ‘pursue a suitably English voyage into the heart of place and politics’ by ‘taking a swan pedalo from Hastings beach to Hackney’s Olympic site via the South Coast, the inland waterways of Kent and the Thames estuary’. There was a lot of joking around on stage but Iain Sinclair was allowed to be a bit highbrow in introducing the film extracts and duly made a connection between them and those recurring Modernist myths of the Odyssey and the Wasteland. He talked about a recording of Basil Bunting, reading from Pound’s Cantos, which he had lost and then been reunited with. I thought of the post on Bunting and Pound I wrote here only a few weeks ago; Sinclair’s method of making these cultural connections across a landscape or on a journey sometimes feels like a form of hyperlinking. ”
