Source: Events
Mark Pilkington talks to Iain about his two latest books, Black Apples of Gower and London Overground: A Day’s Walk Around the Ginger Line
Tuesday 7th July, 7pm
Sutton House
2-4 Homerton High Street
E9 6JQ
Black Apples of Gower
Iain walks back along the blue-grey roads and the cliff-top paths of his childhood in south Wales, rediscovering the Gower Peninsula, a place first explored in his youth. Provoked by the strange, enigmatic series of paintings, Afal du Brogwyr (Black Apple of Gower), made by the artist Ceri Richards in the 1950s, Sinclair leaves behind the familiar, ‘murky elsewheres’ of his life in Hackney, carrying an envelope of black-and-white photographs and old postcards, along with fragments of memory that neither confirm nor deny whether he belongs here, amongst the wave-cut limestone, the car parks and the Gower bungalows. But digging and sifting, he soon recognises that a series of walks over the same ground – Port Eynon Point to Worm’s Head – have become significant waymarks in his life, and his recollections of a meeting with the poet of place, Vernon Watkins, is an opening into the legends of the rocks and the mythology behind the Black Apples of Ceri Richards and the poems of Dylan Thomas. Under cliff, along limestone shores, Sinclair comes to realise that the defining quest must be to the Paviland Cave, where in 1823 the Reverend William Buckland found human bones put to ground 36,000 years ago. All the threads of this story lead underground, through this potent and still mysterious cavern, to the site of the first recorded ritual burial in these islands.
London Overground: A Day’s Walk Around the Ginger Line
Echoing his journey in London Orbital over a decade ago, Iain narrates his second circular walk around the capital. Shortly after rush-hour and accompanied by a rambling companion, Sinclair begins walking along London’s Overground network, or, ‘Ginger Line’. With characteristic playfulness, detours into folk history, withering assessments of the political classes and a joyful allegiance to the ordinary oddball, Sinclair guides us on a tour of London’s trendiest new transport network – and shows the shifting, changing city from new and surprising angles.
Iain Sinclair’s books include London Orbital, Hackney: That Rose-Red Empire, Downriver (which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Award) Ghost Milk and American Smoke. He is the editor of the anthology London: City of Disappearances and has also written and presented a number of films for BBC2’s Late Show, collaborated with Andrew Kötting on Swandown and By Our Selves, and co-directed several documentaries with Chris Petit, including London Orbitaland The Falconer. He was born in South Wales, went to school in England and university in Ireland, and now lives in Hackney, East London.
Mark Pilkington is the author of Mirage Men and Far Out: 101 Strange Tales from Science’s Outer Edge. He is also head of Strange Attractor Press, a publishing imprint which has been championing underground and outsider culture for over ten years.
