SINCLAIRIAN RETURNS OF THE DAY

 I read online that yesterday was young Iain Sinclair's birthday.  80 years and still counting.  So I wrote this post.

    Then, incredibly, I found that not all information on the Internet is 100% correct, and his birthday is in fact on the 11th.  Ah well, it's the thought that counts.

And today the postman brings me a copy of Sinclair's Agents of Oblivion, published by The Swan River Press. I don't know much more than what it says on the front flap.  Four  stories (not necessarily fictions), 'starting everywhere and finishing in madness' inspired by Ballard, Lovecraft, Machen and Blackwood.  What more could you want? Expect a more nuanced response in due course.

And another reason I know it's gonna be good is that it comes with a bookmark and a free badge!

OBELISK FIELDS

I set off to try to see an exhibition of photographs by Paul Thompson, of coastal navigation markers, in a gallery close to Old Street.  This kind of thing:

But when I got there the place was locked up, and peering in through the windows it definitely didn’t look like there was an exhibition of coastal navigation markers inside.

I’d seen these markers from time to time and hadn’t known what they were: they looked like baskets you might light a fire in. though I never saw one that looked like it had had a fire in it recently. I’d also read that Paul Thompson had done a lot of walking while making these photographs, and if I’d got in and if there’d been anybody to talk to, I’d have asked about the walking aspect, but no, there was none of that.

I was disappointed but not devastated, because I knew I was right by Bunhill Fields, the Noncomformist cemetery, burial place of John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe and William Blake.  This is John Bunyan, with pigeon:

I’d been there before and I’d even taken a picture of the Daniel Defoe memorial, and yes I did remember it was an obelisk.

But back then I wasn’t the obelisk obsessive I am today, and now the whole place looks like obelisk central.

I walked around for as long as seemed decent, though you can’t actually walk among the graves, and then I went back to Old Street station.  And here’s a thing – the entrance to the Tube has become vaguely Tokyo-esque.  I mean there’s no Michelin-starred sushi bar, but there are places to eat and drink, places to buy stuff and even a bookshop – Camden Lock Books, which was great, and they had a pile of Merlin Coverley’s Occult London, which I’ve always been meaning to buy, and it was now reduced in price, so I bought a copy and I do hope the author gets some royalties.

Coverley has also been known to write about walking and psychogeography, and in Occult London he (inevitably) quotes Iain Sinclair:

         “The triangle of concentration.  A sense of this and all the other triangulations of the city: Blake, Bunyan, Defoe, the dissenting monuments in Bunhil Fields.  Everything I believe in, everything London can do to you, starts here.”

         

I had read that before, of course, and it had, and still does, leave me with the big question: where in the world does everything I believe in start? I have been thinking about this for years.  I’m still thinking.

Anyway, here’s Paul Thompson’s website:  https://www.paulthompsonstudio.com

WALKING BY TRAIN

I went by train from LA to Chicago: it took 45 hours or so on the Southwest Chief.  I knew I’d do plenty of walking when I got to Chicago but on the train the walking opportunities (obviously) are strictly limited.  

You can walk to the toilet, to the observation car, to the cafe or the dining car but this isn’t real walking, (again obviously).  The train conductor also made many doom-laden announcements about the dangers of walking around the train without shoes.
      And very occasionally you can look out the window and see somebody walking alongside the tracks or along the station platform, but that doesn’t seem very real either. 

However there's lots of opportunity for reading, and I had a copy of the New York Review of Books with me, and in 45 hours you can read every single word of it, including the slightly sniffy review by Ian Jack of Iain Sinclair’s The Last London.  I have only ever seen Ian Jack from a distance and frankly he didn’t look like much of a walker, which may explain something:

In the review he writes, 

“As a playful way of exploring and interpreting urban environments, psychogeography has a history in both England and France that goes back to the 1950s and the Situationism of Guy Debord, but it was Sinclair who resurrected it as a popular, or at least a fashionable, idea. Like ley lines (discovered or invented in 1921), psychogeography wasn’t designed to survive rational scrutiny …”

I think that’s pretty good, especially in a review that is essentially positive, and especially since it echoes my own prejudices about psychogeography and ley lines.

WALKING WITH OBELISKS

I’ve been walking, and thinking about obelisks. If you walk a couple of miles, all of them up hill, from where I am now in East Hollywood, you’ll come to the Griffith Park Observatory, and outside it you’ll find this:

It’s sometimes known as the Griffith Observatory Obelisk, sometimes as the Astronomers' Monument, designed by Archibald Garner, completed in 1934 even before the opening of the observatory, about 40 feet tall, with figures of Hipparchus, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and Herschel at the base. (I admit that I’d never heard of Hipparchus.)

Those statues and the armillary sphere on top give it a rather more complex design than I think an obelisk should have, though I’m not knocking it.  But if you head down the road to the Hollywood Forever Cemetery you’ll find (what seem to me at a least) purer examples of the breed, such as this one marking the grave of Griffith J, Griffith, the very man that Griffith Park is named after.

Further south still, on the University of Southern California campus, you’ll find a line of comparatively short obelisks, each about nine feet tall, which mark the involvement of students and faculty in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.

So clearly Los Angeles has its shared of obelisks even if it’s not exactly famous for them. London on the other hand, has loads, as I found out recently. 

The "biggie" of course is Cleopatra’s Needle on the Embankment (above), a genuine Egyptian obelisk, and that’s a whole obsession in itself, especially how they got it to England: in an iron tube that was 90 feet long – the obelisk itself being about 70 – and they built an ocean-going vessel around it so it could towed all the way from Egypt.  Complications, some of them lethal, ensued.  

I didn’t know any of this story until very recently, and asking around my acquaintances, many of whom like to think they’re pretty knowledgeable, none of them did either.

Once you start keeping your eyes open for obelisks, London seems to be full of them, and again some look more perfect examples than others.  I saw obelisks in Chelsea:

West Hampstead:

Saville Row:

In an antique shop in Mayfair

In Bunhill Fields, an obelisk monument to Daniel Defoe, but Iain Sinclair has claimed Bunhill Fields so fervently I dare hardly set foot there.

And outside of London too, such as this rather wonderful one in Mistley, in Essex. Those are the Mistley Towers behind it, and there’s an inscription on the obelisk commemorating a local woman named Jane Death.  I kid you not.

I also realized that I’d photographed obelisks in the past, while out walking, without really thinking about it much.  This one in Bristol:

There is also this especially fine obelisk on a crazy golf course in Great Yarmouth.

And I know that years ago I was in Washington DC and definitely saw the Washington Monument.  This is the tallest obelisk in the world, 555 feet high, completed in 1844 – there is much discussion about whether or not slave labor was used.  In any case, I only saw it from a distance, and I was young and unimpressionable back then.  There is also an argument that it isn’t a true obelisk, which should be made from one piece of stone – impossible given the size, and also given that there is currently an elevator inside.

And if you’re a conspiracy theorist you’ll be thrilled to see this:

And finally (at least for now, I mean this obsession is only just starting, I haven’t even started on Athanasius Kircher) there is this by the great illustrator Tom Gauld.

It’s a myriorama “inspired by the works of Laurence Sterne, and I’m actually not sure If that walking figure is Sterne or Tristan Shandy, but that’s very definitely an obelisk.  Now, there is no mention of an obelisk in Tristram Shandythough there’s plenty of walking, nor is there an obelisk mentioned in A Sentimental Journey,so this may be an indication of Mr. Gould’s own obelisk obsession.  

         I have, however found a reference to an obelisk in Sterne’s writing.  It appears in Sermon XVIII titled “The Levite and his Concubine” and runs as follows:

“Certainly there is a difference between Bitterness and Saltness, that is, between the malignity and the festivity of wit, the one is a mere quickness of apprehension, void of humanity, and is a talent of the devil; the other comes  from the Father of spirits, so pure and abstracted from persons, that willingly it hurts no man : or if it touches upon an indecorum, 'tis with that dexterity of true genius, which  enables him rather to give a new colour to the absurdity, and   let it pass. He may smile at the shape of the obelisk raised to another's fame, but the malignant wit will level it at once with the ground, and build his own upon the ruins of it.”

         Wit, obelisks, ruins – my kind of sermon.

THE FUGUE IS IN THE HEART

Iain Sinclair, talking at a dinner given by The Idler magazine in November:

“It’s about wandering. It’s not a kind of idle wandering; I gave up on the term flâneur a while back. I went for fugan instead, like the mad walkers of the 19th century who took off on enormous journeys across France. There was a plumber from Bordeaux who walked out the door one day and finished up in Moscow. Then some dreadful writers took up with it and within a few months, the middle classes were all on the road pretending to be fugues. I feel a bit like that now with this whole walking fetish. Now everywhere you go, you find people doing strange conceptual walks, taking photographs of road signs and trying to get arrested in the car park of IKEA.”

Ouch.

Incidentally, careful readers have questioned that usage of "fugan" and "fugues" - I kind of questioned it too, and looked up "fugan" on the interwebs and completely failed to find it, or indeed any word to describe someone in a fugue state, and I certainly couldn't find "fugues" as a plural for people experiencing fugue states.  Fugees, perhaps?  That surely isn't where the band got the name, which is supposedly from refugees, but maybe that's not so very wide of the mark.

THE CANAL AND THE CARNAL

The issue before last of the London Review of Books contained a piece by Iain Sinclair, titled “The Last London.”

Iain isn’t happy about the current state of London, which comes as no great surprise: is anybody?  However, even walking alongs the canals of East London can be a source of distress.  He writes,  

        “Between Victoria Park, the first of the parks opened for the people, and Broadway Market, worlds collide. Two young mothers were texting and being yapped at by older kids, while the youngest child circled on her scooter. There’s a gentle slope down to the canal and the scooter picked up momentum, until the child disappeared over the edge, between two narrowboats, straight into the water. Fortunately, a morning cyclist was stepping ashore. He grabbed the child by the hair. All was well. A little further down the canal, where the path goes under a railway bridge, the mad pumping rush of the peloton swooped through – and a guy on one of those very thin-wheeled bikes was nudged into the soup. Right under, gasping and choking, still in the saddle. I helped to pull him out.”

This did sound a bit action-packed for a Sinclair drift, but I didn’t hold Sinclair personally responsible.   However, at least one reader sort of did.  A letter duly appeared in the subsequent issue of the LRB, from Giacinto Palmieri, London E2, who writes:

“Like Iain Sinclair, I too walk on the canal path between Victoria Park and Broadway Market, but in many years of doing so I’ve never seen anybody fall into the canal. Sinclair, on the other hand, reports witnessing two such episodes, apparently within a short interval of time. Correlation doesn’t entail causation, but I can’t help asking whether these incidents might be correlated with the presence of a psychogeographer wandering dreamily in search of evocative connections in the middle of the path.”
Psychogeography, it's always trouble.

      It’s hard to think of canals and east London without also thinking about Lee Rourke’s novel The Canal.  Walking seems to be start of all the troubles in that book. 

“I simply awoke one morning and decided, rather than walk to work as normal I’d walk to the canal instead.”

The hero sees and experiences all sorts or horrible things canalside, although admittedly the worst of them happen when he stops walking and sits on a bench where he’s menaced by The Pack Crew, a very bad lot.  They throw somebody’s motor scooter into the water, assault his girlfriend, and also try to kill swans with a bow and arrow.  Yep, canals can be mythical places.

Here in Los Angeles I’m not sure we even have "real" canals.  They exist in Venice, but Venice isn’t really Los Angeles, and the canals aren't really canals.  Here’s something – definitely not a canal, could be an aqueduct, could be a concrete creek – in Culver City, which I thought was worth a picture: