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Ghost Milk and Other Tales of Walking |
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.
Iain Sinclair is a writer, documentarist, film-maker, poet, flaneur, metropolitan prophet and urban shaman, keeper of lost cultures and futurologist. He is the author of Downriver (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Award); Landor’s Tower; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings; Lights Out for the Territory; Lud Heat; Rodinsky’s Room (with Rachel Lichtenstein); Radon Daughters; London Orbital; Dining on Stones; and Hackney, that Rose-Red Empire. He is also the editor of London: City of Disappearances. His latest book is Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project. www.iainsinclair.org.uk
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December 6th, 2011 at 12:58 pm
The name Iain Sinclair is a revered one for anyone like myself who is interested in the concept of the city. Not the city of the guide book or the A-Z, I should add, but the city that hovers mirage-like at the margins of and in the interstices of our everyday environment, flickering constantly between the past, the present and a spectral gallery of alternative futures.
Sinclair took us on a mesmerising verbal expedition through his latest book, illuminating the way with his perceptive take on the fragmentation and disintegration of the public realm that is a by-product of the hubristic vision of what he calls the Grand Project.
Leading with the example of what he called that “dubious piece of real estate” Paternoster Square -”a pastiche of its own history” – Sinclair discussed how London is being sanitised, “secured” and ultimately diminished in the name of “progress” and the pursuit of a fat profit.
The Olympic site came under particular scrutiny. Long established allotments (the area was not the wasteland that the “manipulators of history” would have us believe) have been torn up and common land has been eradicated. In their place is a tightly controlled space, surrounded by security fences, policed by airborne drones and where you or I could be arrested for simply taking a photograph.
For me, the way that the Olympic ideal has been perverted by capital is exemplified by the fact that visitors arriving at the Games by rail will be funnelled inexorably through the gigantic Westfield Mall and past a large casino.
With regard to Sinclair’s concern about the erosion of true public space, I brought up Anna Minton’s book “Ground Control”, and asked if he felt that there was anything we can do to counter this deeply undemocratic tendency. Sinclair suggested that a good start would be to keep talking about the issue in public meetings, so that people are made aware of the problem. I am therefore unapologetic about bringing this up again.
Sinclair seems to have turned his back on the term psychogeography, claiming that is has used up its life as a useful label.
However, whether one calls his pedestrian voyages “walking the wrong way”, as an audience member suggested, or (in Sinclair’s own words) “repudiating imposed narratives”, the results of his perambulations are a vital reminder of what we have out there – and how easily it can be lost forever.