Psychogeography?

[Venusian Broon]

Peter Ackroyd did the wonderful London: A biography, not fiction but a history that really does accentuate the 'accumulated intensity of the past as present' as you put it @HareBrain. I think it was more compelling because every day I was walking about Old London on my commute and seeing all these areas as described in the work and it really making sense.

Probably because I studied From Hell to death - especially the notes Alan Moore published on each chapter - I tend to think of Iain Sinclair, someone mentioned a lot there, as being somehow at the forefront of London Psychohistory - although I have to admit that I find his writing just a bit too avant-garde for my brain to really make sense of it.

 

[HareBrain]

I tend to think of Iain Sinclair, someone mentioned a lot there, as being somehow at the forefront of London Psychohistory

He's been on my radar for some time as a writer I should get to grips with. Is there anything you'd recommend as a relatively gentle introduction?

I think it was more compelling because every day I was walking about Old London on my commute and seeing all these areas as described in the work and it really making sense.

Even as an occasional visitor, there is that magic to London I just haven't found in any other urban area. A friend of mind once said of the Sussex Downs that every time you came back from a walk you had to wipe the smell of dead Saxons off your boots, and to me London is that times ten.

 

[The Big Peat]

The term makes me think of a biographer's comment on the neo-romantic artist Paul Nash, that (to paraphrase) he wasn't interested in the past as past, but in the accumulated intensity of the past as present. That's very much the feeling I get from some Peter Ackroyd novels (especially Hawksmoor), of all the past layers of London existing at one time. Parts of Alan Moore's From Hell evoke the same feeling, especially the chapter where William Gull drives round various parts of London, talking about their history and their connection with an occult idea (oddly enough, one connected with Nicholas Hawksmoor, the subject of Ackroyd's book).

Arguably, in a very light way, you get the same thing in Neverwhere.

 

[HareBrain]

Maybe, but I just can't do Neil Gaiman, for some reason.

 

[Dave]

I'm still thinking that psychogeography means different things to different people. Gentrification, for instance; aren't the people who oppose it concerned that the rent prices rise and force out the locals who live there, so changing the character of the people who live in that area. Gentrification doesn't change the external architecture or history of the buildings, they just get well needed a lick of paint, new windows, and a basement conversion with a swimming pool and games room! Over time, it's true, the professions of the inhabitants will change, and food that is eaten, hobbies undertaken by the population, their religion and culture, but that is really nothing at all new. Look at the changes in Soho or in Brompton Road since the 1960's. Look at Aldgate and Brick Lane over the last four centuries. There is a cyclical reinvention within those places.

As for that feeling of ancient history within certain places, I completely agree. Old buildings just have 'something' - Oxford colleges, castles, churches, graveyards - it is no surprise that they are all associated with ghosts. If you visit very old cities (i.e. Jerusalem) where buildings are several thousand years old there is presence or air that you can almost cut with a knife. One of the reasons I like Ben Aaronovitch's 'Peter Grant' series is his ability to use his historical and architectural knowledge of London to bring character to the 'Rivers' and the other fae he uses his books. He is following in a long line of authors who create a kind of symbiotic relationship between ghosts and the buildings they haunt.

 

[J Riff]

Yes, I agree.... ) The olde houses around here are alive ... alive, with a sense of...dullness, stupidity and unsanitary habits, you can feel it as you walk the dark almost-empty streets. TV sets light the windows with millions of flashing images, reminiscent of... nothing in particular. I wish I was in Jolly Olde where the buildings have some character, because here even the ancient churches just seem like MacDonalds without the food part. )
Walking is good though... only just tonite I found an electric toothbrush, new in box, with a Disney character theme. It was behind an old, old building, in a box by the dumpster, and I felt a presence there, something otherwordly and strange, like maybe the tooth fairy was around, but the moment passed and it was just a grimy alley again.

 

[Extollager]

He's [Iain Sinclair] been on my radar for some time as a writer I should get to grips with. Is there anything you'd recommend as a relatively gentle introduction?

I've read at least bits of Sinclair's London Orbital, American Smoke, and Landor's Tower, maybe also Ghost Milk and Lights Out for the Territory, and this is an author I just don't seem to get on with. My suspicion -- it is only that, mind you -- is that there's a pretty commonplace sensibility here behind the effort at a surface dazzle produced by a very allusive and self-consciously cool style. Maybe he needed a ruthless editor to make him slow down his productivity and process his material more.

But these are impressions, not fair judgments based on hours with the books.

 

[Extollager]

Excerpt from Sinclair's Landor's Tower:

--'I've got to tell you, man,' Mutton yelled at my retreating back, ' you're copping out. My character has shifted from a Jungian fetch in your first novel, in White Chappell, to a shorthand cipher in Slow Chocolate Autopsy. Your prose is getting really slack, all those one-word sentences, the reliance on a narrow band of imprecise adjectives. Neglect the armature of grammar and the world loses definition. I have to say it, man, I'm sliding into caricature. Some days I don't know if it's worth crawling out of bed to enact myself in such a shoddy cartoon. Where's your subtext? ...I go along with Terry Eagleton when he talks about the literature of a subject people taking refuge in linguistic showmanship, neologisms, farcical excess,' etc.

That's done for you, I. S. I have better writing to read.