Writer and film-maker Iain Sinclair grew up in the mining town of Maesteg in south Wales. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and later moved to London to attend the Courtauld Institute of Art and the London Film School. He began his career writing avant garde poetry, and in 1991 his dystopian novel Downriver was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial prize. More recently, Sinclair has published a series of works on psychogeography, including a book that was made into a documentary film, London Orbital, in 2002. His lates, London Overground: A Day’s Walk Around the Ginger Line, was published by Hamish Hamilton earlier this month.
Theatre
First Love
My companion said that she’d never seen me sit through anything in a theatre with such a terrifying grin on my face. Conor Lovett’s staging of Samuel Beckett’s story, First Love, at the Arcola theatre in London, mesmerised its audience by not getting in the way of the words. This was not a play, but a purgatorial incantation from the outskirts of amnesia. A seance-narrative of cemetery, canal, boarding house, immaculately performed in gesture and growl.
Film
Jet Pilot (1957)
I am fascinated by how “bad” or disregarded films can demonstrate the cultural contour lines of particular periods better than their louder brethren, the ones on the film magazine lists. Jet Pilot, a late directorial (dis)credit for Josef von Sternberg, really belongs to the producer, super-spook weirdo Howard Hughes, who spent time and money endlessly reshooting aerial combat sequences of the cold war. And supervising the paranoid cartoon of the erotic dance between Janet Leigh’s architectural underwear and the mastodon shuffle of John Wayne. This promo for the Lockheed F-94 Starfire fighter became the posthumous dream of Hughes in his Las Vegas penthouse.
Art
Sound Strata of Coastal Northumberland
This piece by Susan Stenger is an installation, a book and a series of public events taking place between the Tyne and the Tweed. But, most of all, it is a hypnotic translation of geology into poetry. Delicate colours of rock strata charts from dusty archives become sounds in a delirium of place cooked in the spirit of Rimbaud’s synaesthesia. In the words of Mathieu Copeland: “What you see is what you hear.”
Fiction
The Vorrh by Brian Catling
The Vorrh is a miracle of perversity. A genre-promiscuous fable that is linguistically inventive, broken-mouthed and so gripping that it turns its own pages before you get the chance. A writhing colonial forest and its satellite town are not locations but characters. The living and the long dead coexist, battling for territory. Bakelite creatures haunt basements. Ancient weapons are more articulate than their keepers. Ghosts of history return to repeat their crimes. There is nothing quite like it. Which is just as well, for the preservation of our sanity.
Radio
A Secret Life: Uwe Johnson in Sheerness
In A Secret Life, broadcast on Radio 3 on 19 April, cultural historian Patrick Wright disinterred the curious and unexpected tale of the exile of “major East German writer” Uwe Johnson in Sheerness, that terminal beach on the Isle of Sheppey. The story had all the allure of Wright’s prophetic 1991 expedition along Dalston Lane in Hackney, for a book he called A Journey Through Ruins: The Last Days of London. Johnson is remembered by neighbours and fellow drinkers in the Seaview hotel as a mysterious alien with a notebook. It took a writer of Johnson’s qualities to recognise Sheerness as an alternative Baltic. Here was a telling invasion of Farage territory uncovered with Wright’s characteristic persistence and oblique angle of approach. Radio at its best.
Poetry
As When by Tom Raworth
Tom Raworth’s As When is a well-judged pass by editor Miles Champion across the spectacular ridges of a life in words. “A gesture dear,” the poet says, “not a recipe.” Everybody knows Raworth is smart, his mind “quick as a weasel” (according to JH Prynne). But he is also persistent and wise. And funny like a scalpel: poems doing the job for which they were intended, taking us by surprise.
