Iain Sinclair

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sinclair and Alan Moore in Cheltenham

Iain Sinclair (born June 11, 1943 in Cardiff , Wales , United Kingdom ) is a British writer and filmmaker whose texts mostly go back to walks on which he explores the changes in places and landscapes due to human intervention, especially in and around London . His forays are repeatedly associated with psychogeography .

life and work

Iain Sinclair grew up in the former mining town of Maesteg in Wales . In the 1950s he attended Cheltenham College and wrote his first film reviews at the age of 16. Fascinated by film, he went to the London School of Film Technique (today: London Film School ) for nine months and then studied at Trinity College in Dublin. During this time, several 16mm films and plays were made . During his studies he met Anna Hadman, whom he married in 1967. The two moved to London, where Sinclair initially worked as a teacher and at the same time began to roam the city that was to shape his work.

“If I had to write about any city - and because of my strong attachment to one place, I did it - it would be London. I could e.g. For example, don't write about Paris, there would be far too much cultural acceptance for what I write. London seems unpredictable, unique like no other place. London sucked me in and I never really escaped. "

In 1969 the Sinclairs bought a house in Hackney , London , where they still live today. It was there that Sinclair created the first volumes of poetry, self-published by Albion Village Press . After giving up teaching, Sinclair took on odd jobs and traded in second-hand books. He traveled a lot in London and also discovered the world of the East End of London . He was particularly interested in the churches of Nicholas Hawksmoor . "I began to be interested in why each of these churches was where it was," he explains in the Guardian , "and how it was related to Blake and other myths." He let all this be in the long poem Lud Heat (1975) flow together.

Over the next few years, Sinclair's reputation as a representative of the British literary avant-garde and as London's leading psychogeographer consolidated , although his works continued to appear mostly self-published or in small presses. He gained more attention with the novel Downriver (1991), which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in the same year and the Encore Award in 1992 . In Lights Out for the Territory (1997) he presented his vision of transforming power and finance into a juggernaut - TS Eliot's “unreal city” - for the first time in non-fictional form. In nine forays through the British capital, he documented the decay in the Thatcher era and set a monument to outsiders and forgotten London artists and places.

There is one question that Iain Sinclair has to ask himself again and again: Where is London's influence ebbing? In an effort to find this out, he continues to circle the city. In London Orbital (2002) he undertook a complete circumnavigation of the Thames metropolis along the M25 ring road .

In addition to his house in Hackney, Sinclair now owns an apartment in St. Leonards-on-Sea, a district of Hastings , which he also calls "Hackney-on-Sea". Comparable to this personal step out of the center, his next books also move out of London: In Dining on Stones (2002) along the A13 to Southend-on-Sea and in Edge of the Orison (2005) on the trail of the British Poet John Clare to Northborough.

With Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire (2009), Sinclair returned to the part of town where he lives: The book, subtitled A Confidential Report, is a personal and at the same time political and cultural inventory of the changes, which Sinclair has been experiencing up close for over 40 years and has been widely discussed positively. In the same year he becomes a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature .

Ghost Milk (2011) describes the dramatic acceleration and intensification of these changes in the London districts of Hackney and Stratford as a result of the "cancer Olympia ", as Sinclair is quoted in the daily newspaper Die Welt in 2012 . The book draws a bridge from Sinclair's earlier experiences with political and economic interventions to the current major project that is forcibly changing the entire social and emotional structure of East London, and he “denounces the grievances of the 'vanity project Olympia'. Criticism that officials do not like to hear: 'The Hackney district administration even canceled a reading by me in a public library to silence me,' says the 69-year-old. "Sinclair does not deliver the" usual gentrification whining ". , as can be read in Spiegel 2012. “Amok hobbyism, that is of course the best definition for the Olympics” and Sinclair actually predicted this development ten years ago in London Orbital , which has to do with “that as a writer he is always a seer and shaman .” In American Smoke (2013), Sinclair looks beyond London again and explores the connection to the heroes of his youth in a political-poetic search for clues in various locations in Great Britain and the USA: the authors of the Beat Generation .

With The Last London: True Fictions from an Unreal City (2017), Sinclair also programmatically bid farewell to writing about the Thames metropolis and its surroundings. Subsequent work led him increasingly to the European mainland, u. a. in Living With Buildings: And Walking With Ghosts (2018) to Marseille and in 2019 in the footsteps of his great-grandfather Arthur Sinclair to the source of the Amazon in Peru .

Sinclair's works in German

Although Rodinskys Raum published a book in German in collaboration with the British writer and local researcher Rachel Lichtenstein in 1999, Iain Sinclair has so far been received primarily in periodicals in German. In addition to articles in the cultural magazine Lettre International , Sinclair was portrayed in an essay in the magazine Merkur in 2012 and in the film magazine Cargo in 2015 . In 2016, excerpts from the collection of poems Firewall were published in two languages ​​on the online poetry platform karawa.net. At the beginning of 2017 a work appeared in German with Der Rand des Orizonts , in which Sinclair follows in the footsteps of the poet John Clare, whose escape from the mental hospital in north London to Clare's home village.

Psychogeography

As early as 2001, Claudia Basrawi named Iain Sinclair an author of "psychogeographical novels, which have London as their main theme and which emphasize the mystical element of the topic". She goes on to say that the term psychogeography is "used today by artists, psychologists, architects and, in a modified form ( geomantics ), by esotericists ". In search of the effect of geography on the psyche of the human being, one claimed "the city as a terrain that one conquered, mapped and marked". Basrawi continues:

“ Psychogeography mainly used the method of“ wandering around ”and in this respect is reminiscent of the stroll of the flaneur as we know it from the 19th century or the so-called“ surrealistic strolling ”, but enriched its playful dimension with a constructive and analytical aspect. Iain Sinclair's walks follow a similar method. The influences of geomantics , especially with regard to the meaning of so-called ley lines and places of energy in their mythical and occult dimensions in his work, have not yet been examined in detail. "

Will Self and Stewart Home should be mentioned as further psychogeographers who work on similar literary territory. However, in an interview in the documentary The London Perambulator , Sinclair points out that he prefers the term psychogeography to that of "deep topography" as coined by Nick Papadimitriou.

The concept of psychogeography in the German-speaking world is being redefined with the anthology of the same name published by Anneke Lubkowitz in early 2020. The texts, mostly published in German for the first time, span an arc between theory and practice and offer an insight into this form of urban exploration.

Key figures and companions

Sinclair's books are full of person and place names. These include numerous well-known artists and writers, such as Mark Atkins, JG Ballard , Renchi Bicknell, William Blake , William Burroughs , Brian Catling, Joseph Conrad , David Gascoyne , Allen Ginsberg , Ted Hughes , Patrick Keiller, Jack Kerouac , Philip Larkin , FT Marinetti , Michael McClure , Michael Moorcock , Alan Moore , Charles Olson , Chris Petit, Arthur Rimbaud , WG Sebald , Alexander Trocchi .

In addition, it also gives voice to unknown or forgotten places and people. In addition to Lights Out for the Territory , the “Anthology of the Absent” compiled by Sinclair, London: City of Disappearances (2006), stands for this concern . According to The Observer , Sinclair is "the key to England's hidden downside, King of Travelers, the Boy Scouts who lead one to all the dissenters, outsiders and marginalized figures who have been excluded from Albion's literary establishment."

bibliography

  • Back garden poems. Poems. 1970.
  • The Kodak Mantra Diaries: Allen Ginsberg in London. Documentary. 1971.
  • Muscat's worm. Poems. 1972.
  • The Birth Rug. Poems. 1973.
  • Lud Heat. Long poem. 1975.
  • Suicide Bridge. Long poem. 1979.
  • Autistic poses. Poems. 1985.
  • Significant wreckage. Poems. 1988.
  • White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings. Narrative. 1987 (originally published in limited edition by Goldmark Gallery ; reissued by Paladin)
  • Flesh Eggs and Scalp Metal: Selected Poems 1970-1987. Poems. 1989.
  • Downriver. Novel. 1991.
  • Jack Elam's Other Eye. Poems. 1991.
  • Radon Daughters. Novel. 1994.
  • Conductors of Chaos: a Poetry Anthology. ed. by I. Sinclair. 1996.
  • Penguin Modern Poets Volume Ten: Douglas Oliver, Denise Riley, Iain Sinclair. Poems. 1996.
  • Lights Out for the Territory: 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London. Stories. 1996.
  • The Ebbing of the Force. Poems. 1997.
  • Slow Chocolate Autopsy. Narrative. 1997.
  • Crash. Essay. 1999.
  • with Marc Atkins: Liquid City. photographic and literary impressions. 1999.
  • with Rachel Lichtenstein: Rodinsky's room. Stories. 1999.
  • Sorry meniscus. Essay. 1999.
  • Landor's Tower. Novel. 2001.
  • London Orbital. Narrative. 2002.
  • White Goods. poems, essays, fictions. 2002.
  • Saddling The Rabbit. Poems. 2002.
  • The Verbals. in conversation with Kevin Jackson. 2003.
  • Dining on Stones. Novel. 2004.
  • Edge of the Orison: In the Traces of John Clare's' Journey Out Of Essex. Narrative. 2005.
  • The Firewall: Selected poems 1979-2006. Poems. 2006.
  • Buried at Sea. Poems. 2006.
  • London: City of Disappearances. Essays, ed. by I. Sinclair. 2006.
  • Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report. Narrative. 2009.
  • Postcards from the 7th Floor. Poems. 2010.
  • Ghost milk. Narrative. 2011.
  • Blake's London: the Topographic Sublime. Lecture. 2012.
  • Austerlitz & After: Tracking Sebald. Narrative. 2013.
  • Swimming to Heaven: the Lost Rivers of London. Lecture. 2013.
  • Red eye. Long poem. 2013.
  • Cowboy / Deleted File. Narrative. 2013.
  • Objects of Obscure Desire. Narrative. 2013.
  • Your Unknown Everywhere, Arthur Make as Presence. Lecture. 2013.
  • American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light. Stories. 2013.
  • London Overground: A Day's Walk around the Ginger Line. Narrative. 2015
  • Black Apples of Gower. Narrative. 2015
  • Sea serpent. Narrative. 2016
  • My Favorite London Devils. Narrative. 2016
  • The Last London: True Fictions from an Unreal City. Stories. 2017
  • Living with Buildings: And Walking with Ghosts - On Health and Architecture. Stories. 2018
  • Dark Before Dark. Narrative. 2019
English-language interviews and lectures
  • When In Doubt, Quote Ballard. Extensive interview with Iain Sinclair about psychogeography, writing and JG Ballard: (Online)
  • London's Lost Rivers: The Hackney Brook and other North West Passages. Lecture, June 2009, Gresham College: (Online)
English-language literature on Iain Sinclair
  • Robert Bond: Iain Sinclair (Salt Studies in Contemporary Literature & Culture). Salt Publishing, 2005.
  • Robert Bond, Jenny Bavidge (ed.): City Visions: The Work of Iain Sinclair. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle 2007.
  • Brian Baker: Iain Sinclair (Contemporary British Novelists). Manchester University Press, 2007.
  • Robert Sheppard: Iain Sinclair (Writers & Their Work). Northcote House Publishers, 2007.
  • Jeffrey M. Johnson: The Works of Iain Sinclair: A Descriptive Bibliography and Biographical Chronology. Test Center Books. Volume 1, Fascicles I-III (1943-1987); 2018. Volume 2, Fascicle IV (1988-1998); 2019.

Filmography

Iain Sinclair
  • 1972: Maggid Street
  • 1993: Ah Sunflower
with Chris Petit
  • 1992: The Cardinal and the Corpse
  • 1998: The Falconer
  • 2000: Asylum
  • 2002: London Orbital
  • 2008: Marine Court Rendezvous (video installation)
with Andrew Kötting
  • 2007: Offshore - Gallivant
  • 2009: Edgeland mother
  • 2012: Swandown
  • 2015: By Our Selves
  • 2017: Edith Walks
  • 2019: The Whalebone Box
with John Rogers
  • 2016: London Overground

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ This article is based on information from the following articles and quotes that are not expressly marked are taken from these articles:
  2. ↑ a b On the road
  3. ^ Martin Conrads: The Poetry of the Autobahn ( Memento from September 11, 2004 in the Internet Archive ) In: Netzeitung. October 29, 2002.
  4. ^ London and the Olympic lie
  5. ↑ SPON - The Critic: Crazy Games
  6. ↑ Iain Sinclair with Andrew Kötting (Swandown)
  7. ^ For the first time in 2005 in LI 071, IN WOLKENKUCKUCKSHEIM - London - Forays through the city behind the city; P. 54ff
  8. ^ Alan Jacobs, On the way with Iain Sinclair, in: Merkur. German magazine for European thinking. Issue 758, volume 66, 2012, pp. 630-638.
  9. ^ Cargo # 25, Jakob Hesler, Der Ausreißer - To the catalog book "70x70" by the London writer Iain Sinclair; Pp. 70-72
  10. ↑ http://karawa.net/content/firewall
  11. ↑ From: Psychogeography. A lecture by Claudia Basrawi . May 12, 2001 at Laura Mars Grp./Berlin
  12. ^ The London Perambulator (full length documentary)
  13. ↑ Sukhdev Sandhu: American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light. In: The Observer. 3rd October 2013.
personal data
SURNAME Sinclair, Iain
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British filmmaker and writer
DATE OF BIRTH June 11, 1943
PLACE OF BIRTH Cardiff , Wales , United Kingdom