This Pivot book examines literary elements of urban topography that have animated Alan Moore, Peter Ackroyd, and Iain Sinclair's respective representations of London-ness. Ann Tso argues these authors write London \"psychogeographically\" to deconstruct popular visions of London with colonial and neoliberal undertones. Moore's psychogeography consists of bird's-eye views that reveal the brute force threatening to unravel Londonscape from within; Ackroyd's aims to detect London sensuously, since every new awareness recalls an otherworldly London; Sinclair's conjures up a narrative consciousness made erratic by London's disunified landscape. Drawing together the dystopian, the phenomenological, and the postcolonial, Tso explores how these texts characterize \"London-ness\" as estranging.

Iain Sinclair, Grossbritanniens kundigster Psychogeograf, begibt sich in diesem dichten literarischen Spaziergang auf die Spuren William Blakes. Ausgehend von der Stadt unter seinen Füssen und um ihn herum, die sich täglich vor seinen Augen verändert, setzt Sinclair das heutige London in ein dichtes Spannungsverhältnis mit dem London, das Blake erlebte. Insbesondere geht er der Frage nach, wie Blakes reiche und bildgewaltige Poetik, Sprache und Imagination sich zu einer so präzisen und umfassenden Auseinandersetzung mit ganz konkreten Orten verbinden konnten. So liest sich Sinclairs eigenwilliger psychogeografischer Essay als Einführung in Blakes mystische Stadterfahrung, erzählt von dessen Beziehung zu Emanuel Swedenborg, dessen Einflüsse er freilegt, und zieht eine überraschende ästhetische Linie zu anderen Flaneuren und Wanderern von John Clare zu Allen Ginsberg. Kaum eine Stadt bietet mehr Vielfalt für Flaneure und Psychogeografen, über kaum eine Stadt wurde mehr geschrieben, und in kaum einer Stadt lassen sich dennoch mehr Geheimnisse finden. Und niemand schreibt mit mehr Wissen und Verve über London als Iain Sinclair.

David Cronenberg's Crash (1996) brought down a storm of controversy and opprobrium when it was first screened in London. And yet it's a cool, controlled, formal film, unsensational, more analytic than titillating, a brilliant exposé of modern pathologies. It has almost none of the violence and explicit sexual content of the J.G. Ballard novel from which it is adapted. What is the relationship between Ballard himself and the character 'James Ballard' in Crash? In this book, which includes an exclusive and revealing interview with Ballard, Sinclair explores the uncanny temporal loop which connects film and novel. If Cronenberg's 'adapted' Crash, he also absorbed it, ingested it, made it into something new. But, on the other hand, the novel controls the film, or uses the film to disguise its truly subversive intent. And, for Sinclair, there are more startling permutations still. To what extent, for example, is Crash a premonition of some of the more remarkable media events of recent times?

For much of the 20th century the modernist city was articulated in terms of narratives of progress and development. Today the neoliberal city confronts us with all the cultural 'noise' of disorder and excess meaning. As this book demonstrates, for more than 40 years London-based writer, film-maker and 'psychogeographer' Iain Sinclair has proved to be one of the most incisive commentators on the contemporary city: tracing the emerging contours of a metropolis where the meeting of global and local is never without incident. Iain Sinclair: Noise, Neoliberalism and the Matter of London explores Sinclair's investigations into the nature of conflicting urban realities through an examination of the ways in which the noise of neoliberal excess intersects with the noise of literary experiment. In this way, the book casts new light on theorisations of the city in the contemporary era.

Book Review of: ‘SLOW CHOCOLATE AUTOPSY’ by IAIN SINCLAIR & DAVE McKEAN (Phoenix House ISBN 1-861590-88-1 £16.99 - £9.99 p/back) Fragmentation. Bi-mediality. A spread of forms. These are events in the lives of Norton. Norton or ‘Notron’. As in ‘Not Ron’. The text is spattered and ripped with graphic novel extracts. The graphic novel spliced and intercut with intrusions of text. Norton comes adrift in time. But is trapped by it. He’s there in Deptford (or Debt-ford, as in ‘till Deptford us do part’) for Christopher Marlowe’s death. Then he’s there in the East End for Jack The Hat’s brutal murder. The cover-blurb says so. The plot is less direct. More apparitional. Packed with ill-defined moments caught in entropy enclosures, where ‘a weasel crunching a mouse’s skull is amplified into a collision of icebergs’. And it is self-aware in the post-modern way of things, as Norton rehearses ‘the instructions he will have to write, so that McKean will be able to make a sequence of drawings... a stutter of frames’, or when he puzzles over ‘how to muzzle Anthony Burgess’ (who also did a factional Marlowe). His London is an unedited city, fit only for Comic-Book fiction or Direct-to-Video movies. And he transcribes everything. What he calls ‘the trivia of the real’. The Dysfunks, Petty Crims, Chaos Punters, Sewage Surfers, and even esoteric angles on the Mayans take on football as a ‘fate game reflecting demonic cosmology’. While the text spreads to weave around the lives that intersect Norton’s. Lives that use him as a nexus. For them there is no Last Exit from Deptford. Norton is also a drug-dealer’s alias lifted from William Burroughs ‘Junkie’. A final collage reproduces a page of the Beat Generational docu-novel as a Lit clue. Other references include the unacknowledged use of Bob Shaw’s ‘Slow Glass’ as ‘light came out of him at the wrong speed’. There’s probably more I’ve missed. Iain Sinclair is a poet. You can tell. He writes lines like ‘each breath is a sucking sound. A criminal thirst drinking roses from the flapping wallpaper of memory bedrooms’. Stuff like that. Dense and rich with layers of multiplicity. He did ‘The Kodak Mantra Diaries’ in London in cahoots with Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg and Burroughs had some sex together. They’re both dead now. Norton is still a time-surfing echo drifting in and out of texts and decades. McKean, a some-time Neil Gaiman accomplice, has a charge-sheet that runs from Tori Amos album sleeves all the way to Batman’s ‘Arkham Asylum’. And he’s Sinclair’s perfect foil, sampling and sound-biting his art into precision-blurring treated assemblages that dazzle and confuse. Like the prose it interrupts. This is a novel. But it is one of fragmentation. Bi-mediality. And a spread of forms. Published in: ‘LATERAL MOVES no.22: Camp Issue’ (UK - August 1998)

In fiction, reportage and verse, writers including Iain Sinclair, Ali Smith, Jacob Ross and Andrew O’Hagan reflect on the diversity of contemporary London, its extremes of wealth and poverty, its streets and pubs, and its constantly evolving social landscape.

[mks_dropcap style= »letter » size= »85″ bg_color= »#ffffff » txt_color= »#4e9c5b »]D[/mks_dropcap]epuis London Orbital, paru en 2002 en Angleterre, le très prolifique auteur d’origine galloise Iain…

Tabor Robak, Nic Hamilton and Iain Sinclair discuss what lies at the intersection of audio, gaming and fine art

Iain Sinclair’s “The Last London” may make you want to put yours away, too.

156pp, 170mm x 120mm PB, £9.99 ISBN 978-1907222160More →

John Rogers has been one of the most prominent psychogeographical writers and filmmakers of the last decade. Fiercely independent and with a strong DIY sensibility towards his creative responses t…

Iain Sinclair, the foremost modern practitioner of "psychogeographic" nonfiction, explores the modifications to the London landscape in preparation for the 2012 Summer Olympics. This "scam of scams," as he calls it, is an expression of British state egotism.

All photographs by Al Overdrive John Foxx and Iain Sinclair are two of the most thoughtful chroniclers of London and its changes: from ruins to gentrification and back again, all explored by personally walking through the abandoned, awkward and interstitial spaces. Between them, they’ve explored the city and produced lyrical and engrossing albums (Foxx), books […]

This monograph undertakes the first extensive comparative analysis of the works of Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd, placing the fiction and non-fiction of both writers in relation to the broader cultural, social and political contexts of London from 1979. It begins by tracing the two different Londons of both writers, arguing that their literary and cultural projects are intrinsically linked, yet have remained under-explored in academic criticism. Alex Murray argues that that while both Sinclair and Ackroyd attempt to utilise radical narrative practices to challenge the dominant historical discourses within contemporary London, those challenges must be placed in relation to broader issues of cultural history, government appropriation of historical narratives and debates about the relationship between literature and the city. This argument is traced from the 'radical' historical fiction of the 1980s which launched the career of both writers, through to their extensive bodies of work on creating a specifically London form of literary history, to their engagements towards the turn of the millennium with larger questions of historiography and material history. This study then links these issues of narrative and material history, demonstrating the increasingly problematic relationship that both writers have as their fictionally 'radical' recalling of London is transformed into issues of material history, primarily the issues of politics and ethics in historical representation, and the relationship between history and commodification.

[reviewed by / autor recenzji: Peter Marks || ENG] Iain Sinclair’s London is not a pretty place, it is not maintained nor is it particularly immune to the squalid detritus of celebrity. A con…

El escritor de culto británico está en La Casa Encendida de Madrid explicando un universo que alumbra desde una constelación de temas: la literatura, la ciudad, lo local, la psicogeografía, la contracultura, los procesos urbanos contemporáneos o la política

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El escritor galés Iain Sinclair presenta ‘La ciudad de las desaparaciones’, antología que recopila más de cuarenta años de escritura documental y subversiva frente al poder político y económico del Reino Unido

British author Iain Sinclair’s work is almost exclusively associated with London and more particularly the city’s East End. Meeting him in Paris is a bizarre experience. But eight years after…