Iain Sinclair » books

“The Face on the Fork: A William Burroughs Triptych” – new booklet by Iain Sinclair

admin — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 17:34:26 +0000

An extract from the booklet that will be published later this month by Kevin Ring’s Beat Scene Press. It’s called ‘The Face on the Fork: A William Burroughs Triptych.’

I have tried to present a refracted portrait of Burroughs through my dealings with him over a forty year period. The portrait comes in three panels.

First, Dublin 1962: establishing contact, receiving a short text from Burroughs.

Next, 1967: my unpublished script for a film with Burroughs that was never made.

Finally, a visit to Lawrence, Kansas, in 1995.

The book is available from Beat Scene Press, 27 Court Leet, Binley Woods, Coventry, England CV3 2JQ.

www.beatscene.net

Price: £6.95 in UK, £7.95 overseas. Edition of 125 copies, numbered and signed.

Cheques payable to M.Ring on by Paypal.

LAWRENCE, KANSAS. WINTER. 1995.

Out on the road, through farm country with no signs, neat houses at the end of long tracks, I thought of In Cold Blood. But this was the wrong part of Kansas and we had a date with the wizard. Paul, my companion, didn’t drive. He operated the recording machinery and produced the kind of sound documentaries the BBC no longer commission. After this shot, he would step aside. It was rumoured that he was working on the definitive Croydon novel. If that epic is still in progress, Paul, your moment, post-riots, might well have arrived.

I didn’t know much about Lawrence, the small university town where Burroughs had settled with his companion and minder, Jim McCrary. Kathy Acker told a few colourful stories about riding around town in a customised ambulance, with Burroughs, acting as bait for college boys. We had an address and a time, and we were early. Stopping at a drive-in convenience store to find a street map, I was awed by the longest, meatiest turd I’ve ever seen, floating like a skinless brown python in the crusted lavatory bowl. Much Kansas beef was tinned on the shelves. Alongside the usual gun magazines, sweet drinks and root beer.

Paused across the street from the boxcar-red weatherboard house, in our dark-windowed car, I pictured us as the two characters from Don Siegel’s film of The Killers, the silver-suited hitmen. And that became the motif of my own story, when I came to report this episode. We were agents of fate, not really implicated in the complex Burroughs biography; hirelings in town for an afternoon, to do a job. Nail the mark on tape. Get the shot.

But Burroughs was too canny, too long in the game. Pale winter sunlight across the table where he sat, waiting for the hour when he would take his first drink. Nothing to be said that had not been said a thousand times before. He talked property prices. He reminisced about meeting Samuel Beckett in Berlin. Beckett stared at the wall. He had nothing to offer, beyond acknowledging that, yes, William Burroughs was indeed a writer.

The voice never rises above a gravel whisper. I have a letter to deliver from Gregory Corso. Burroughs slashes it open with a ceramic knife. ‘Best there is. Cost me $100.’ He reads the message from New York. ‘Humph’, he snorts.

We get the tour, the paintings, the books, mostly science fiction, like unopened gifts on the shelf. Burroughs doesn’t read, he re-reads: Hemingway (‘good on death’), Conrad. A huge cat is sleeping on the master’s sun-dappled bed.

The gaunt old man pokes his cane into the goldfish pond. The orgone accumulator looks like an outdoor privy. We pose for the ritual shot. These visits are about fleshing out the album. In a few years, the writer will fade from the photograph. Strange men standing around an absence on a patch of Kansas grass. ‘One night,’ Burroughs said, ‘a bunch of drunk Indians came over the fence.’

Back inside, books inscribed, drinks poured, Burroughs comes to the revelation. He doesn’t write anymore, he transcribes dreams, a transit lounge to the next stage of existence. He paints, shoots cans. He collects his methadone prescription. A Native American sweat lodge ceremony conjured up, and exorcised, the spirit that had oppressed him for so many years; a spirit in the form of a winged Vietnam War helmet. A spirit representing the ugliness of American materialism and war guilt. A curse laid down at the moment when he shot and killed Joan Volmer in Mexico City. A curse that could only be ameliorated by dedicating his life to writing, taking the dictation of the old ones.

Word falling, image falling. Now those dues were paid. The way was clear to the western lands, that eternity of cinema without horizon, space that never ends. Biography plays back as fiction. It is written. The virus is in the order of words on the page. The old writer lived in a boxcar by the river. 1987. The Western Lands published by Viking Penguin. 1987: Burroughs begins painting, rents a studio in a barbed-wire factory building on Kaw riverfront.

Forty years ago the writer had published a novel which had made a stir… Gradually, as he wrote, a disgust for his words accumulated until it choked him… An old man in a rented house with his cat… How long does it take a man to learn that he does not, cannot want what he “wants”… In Tangier the Parade Bar is closed. Shadows are falling on the Mountain… The last words come from Conrad, ‘I live by my sword’. And from Eliot. ‘Hurry up, please. It’s time.’

Ghost Milk and Other Tales of Walking

admin — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 17:00:15 +0000

Iain will be today at the Bristol Festival of Ideas

Link: http://www.ideasfestival.co.uk/?p=2330#more-2330

Iain Sinclair is a great walker and writer of cities and places. His latest book, Ghost Milk, looks at our possible futures as well as making his most powerful statement yet on the throwaway impermanence of the present. It is a story of incident and accident, of the curious meeting the bizarre. Police raids and mass expulsions jostle with accounts of failed grand projects: the Millennium Dome, Thames Gateway, and numerous other half-completed, ill-advised or abandoned structures. Iain Sinclair will be in discussion with Anita Sethi.
How to book
Price: £7.20 / £5.60. Contact Arnolfini, Bristol on: 0117 917 2300, book online, or visit in person.

Events start punctually and, out of consideration to other audience members and speakers, our policy is not to admit or issue refunds to latecomers. Please allow enough time to collect your ticket/s from the relevant box office (if these haven’t already been posted to you), and make sure to arrive before the advertised start time to take your seat/s.

An exclusive extract from Iain’s new book coming out in few weeks.

admin — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 20:24:01 +0000

Updated 27/11/2011

The new book is now available on the Swedenborg online store

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“There will soon be a new book. Stephen at Swedenborg House is publishing the (revised) text of a lecture I gave on Blake in London.“

Iain

“The working title is Blake’s London: the topographic sublime and it was a talk given by Iain at a conference in 2007 at the Swedenborg Society, and organized in celebration of the 250th anniversary of the birth of William Blake.

It is also the first in a series of small HB pocket books of lectures given at the Society’s neo classical hall. It should be available in around 4 weeks”

Stephen

Check also this previous posts.

Iain has kindly agreed to publish a free taster of the new book:

EXTRACT FROM BLAKE’S LONDON. A talk delivered at Swedenborg House, in March 2011, which will be published in full, in a revised and extended form, along with a further transcript of the Questions and Answers that followed

I had been working as a gardener in Limehouse, and I was cutting the grass of Hawksmoor churches, which were then dirty, grubby and spurned. Vagrants and drinking schools were camped out around the Portland Stone recesses like medieval pilgrims or penitents seeking sanctuary and a dole of British sherry The whole of Docklands, the Isle of Dogs, had failed. The zone was derelict. Thatcherite imperatives would not kick in for quite some time yet. Capital didn’t return to the river until the Heathrow bullion blaggers needed territory in which to invest. So what was the presence of the eastern city? Well, Blake seemed to suggest that it was a figure, a sleeping giant. He imagined a figure of inward, an inward being. This self-forged daemon belonged, I felt, to the ground of London. It stood against the other great project influencing me that that time, the mythopeic structure cast by the American poet Charles Olson in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Olson’s epic, The Maximus Poems, is dedicated to Robert Creeley as the figure of ‘outward’. Olson projects his odyssey as a journey through the local into the star field, going out with the tide, understanding the logistics of fishing fleets, understanding the topography that lay under the ocean—the mountain ranges of the Atlantic—and this push becomes a reaching into the cosmos. Launched with the minute particulars of place Blake talks about, Olson’s second movement carries you right back, a return to the human nest. The particulars have become myth. Blake, of course, is able to do both of these things at once, the outward and the inward. And for some reason the creation of buildings and structures on the east side of London seemed, prophetically, to suggest a new kind of writing and even a new kind of social, cultural, even biological, development.

Commentators at the time, writing about Blake’s Jerusalem itinerary, said ‘Why Highgate?’ And the reason John Adlard put forward was that Highgate was then on the Great North Road – a road which subsequently moved east and up Stoke Newington and out through Tottenham. But, originally, it came over Highgate Hill—it was the great entrance to the city, even though Blake himself says, repeatedly, that he is uncomfortable in this landscape. Highgate is also connected to various forms of belief in Druidic sites. There were books like Prehistoric London: Its Mounds and Circles, written by Elizabeth Gordon before the First War, that suggested there were triangulations of energy across London, there were paths between important loci on Parliament Hill (with a tumulus), the Penton Mound in Islington, and the Tot Hill in Westminster. A projected triangle enclosing so many of the ancient energy generators of London. And Blake seems to have prefigured a lot of that too, but in a higher register. Curiously enough, there’s this curvature, a swerving away: ‘Highgate thro Hackney & Holloway towards London / Till he came to old Stratford’. Well, this was the sticking point for people who wanted to discuss that journey: ‘old Stratford’, this was really peculiar. Adlard suggests, looking at texts of the time, that Blake actually meant ‘old Ford’, which was a point on the River Lea where Saxon and Viking England divided. A very important crossing point on the Lea and not further east to Stratford. But, uncannily, old Stratford is now the epicentre of everything, it is the new city, the virtual city growing up around the Olympic Park, the enclosed city with this huge blue fence around it. A city, symbolised by an Australian super-mall, which has taken itself out of the landscape. You could persuade yourself that Blake anticipates, or suggests the terminology for, future movements throwing up heretical temples, retail parks, structures that have to be confronted, discussed and debated. And destroyed. ‘An Abstract objecting power that Negatives every thing.’

Our kids are going to hell, part 2

admin — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 21:01:49 +0000

Back in 2009 Iain wrote an introduction to a book by photographer Robin Maddock. It was a book documenting police raids in Hackney. The book was called OUR KIDS ARE GOING TO HELL and was published by Trolley Books.

In light of the recent events in the UK, that introduction (titled “Raid”) feels pertinent and makes for an interesting read.

Link to the article

20/12/2011

Back in 2009 Robin Maddock wrote a post for this website to introduce his book Our Kids are Going to Hell: December 2008-January 2009. The email Robin sent went lost in the huge backlog of my mailbox. Apologies to Robin. It’s never to late to post something interesting, I hope. Here you go:

There are many Hackneys, but this is the one I kept thinking about while I lived there. I wanted to know what was at the end of the sirens and flashing lights?

These minor drug raids are events that often don’t even make the local newspapers. Yet the shame is one that anyone would face, it lies in the washing up, ones pornography, or being literally caught with your trousers down.

In briefing before to raids I’ve heard what the suspects have done to other people, seen their faces. I can’t feel empathy for either side. These are cold pictures about a wider view.

A lifestyle of hustle is now a product our Mainstream media feeds off. So to be hand cuffed with your parents by twenty masked police in your bedroom, is now part of a wider confusing picture of Britain.

Drugs are valued equally by both sides, so are usually glamorous in their absence. In these pictures they are only another currency, not a means of prosecution.

Appearances in this big dark city often deceive. People in this book have not necessarily done anything for which they ought be prosecuted. In turn, doubtless some have done far more than they will ever be held to account for.

This is not the aim of this project, rather it is condition of lost meaning and toxic poverty of spirit. No single person can either symbolise or represent this. Neither is it enough to say ‘that’s its how it’s always been’, it is particular.

The main suspect here is this landscape, the contrasts in Hackney’s built fabric speaks for all of our collective disregard. Yet I hope those who know Hackney will recognise more than just the locations shown here.

Between 2005 and 2008 I found that there’s usually nothing at the end of the flashing lights, the real story as ever, is elsewhere.

Futurology: Iain Sinclair at the QE Hall, Southbank

admin — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 18:30:34 +0000

As London looks forward to 2012′s Olympics, the self-styled ‘greatest show on Earth’, Iain Sinclair projects his vision of the post-games future by visiting the ruins of previous grand projects. His new book, Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project, starts out from the East London Olympic site and takes in Athens and the abandoned architectural monuments of the millennium to report back on the trouble to come. Iain Sinclair discusses the book with fellow travellers at this launch event.

Part of the London Literature Festival

Website: http://ticketing.southbankcentre.co.uk/find/literature-spoken-word/tickets/iain-sinclair-59182?utm_campaign=email_lit&utm_medium=email&utm_source=email_lit110617&utm_content=email_lit110617_sinclair