Some Thoughts on Iain Sinclair’s London Overground

Iain Sinclair’s London Overground opens with the image of a pigeon that has been splattered on a road, inviting other birds to pick at the carrion and causing further carnage. It ends with a picture of Andrew Kötting’s mutilated leg, pieced back together after surgery. It doesn’t get much less gory in between as Sinclair and Kötting follow the eruption of the London Overground around the landscape.

I am definitely an Iain Sinclair guy now, I can’t help it. I think London Orbital (which I reviewed here) is a masterpiece of monomania and a real non-fiction treat for any Ballard fans out there. I’ve also got a copy of Lights out for the Territory that I’m gonna start working my way through soon. I really dig his blend of fiction and non-fiction, of memory and the present, of travel writing and memoir. He’s got a really particular voice, and having since watched some of his work on film he seems to me to write how he speaks, which is an incredibly effective technique that is deceptively hard to do.

(It also means he speaks how he writes; in opaque prose poetry. I do not mean this as a criticism.)

If you’re reading this you know what psychogeography is. I tried to describe it to someone the other day and ended up saying something like, “it’s like walking around things you’re supposed to drive around and recording your impressions.” Yeah, I know it’s not quite it, but I was thinking of Sinclair’s two circuits around London as I spoke to them.

I knew going into this stuff that I was going to love it, but if you’re at all worried you might not, London Overground seems to me to be a good starting point. It encompasses a lot of his main concerns, it seems very typical of his style, and despite being much shorter than London Orbital it still describes a difficult odyssey.

A criticism I’ve seen of Sinclair is that he just likes to moan about things. I don’t disagree that he’s often depicting the more negative aspects of postmodern living, but I’ve met plenty of pub bores, and if any of them were half as erudite as Sinclair is I would have enjoyed my local pub a whole lot more. You often get the feeling he uses these walks as an excuse to talk about his reading, his favourite authors. If that is the case… it’s fine. He’s interested in fascinating writers. He’d met both J.G. Ballard and Angela Carter, and uses large parts of London Overground to talk about his memories of them, as well as the importance of their fiction, and the areas of London they wrote about. Memory presses upon these pages heavily, more so than before perhaps inevitably considering the nearly twenty years of living between Orbital and Overground.

Another figure that looms large is Sigmund Freud. Sinclair mostly seems concerned with his illness, the cancer that killed him. I didn’t think too much of it until I was flicking back through after I’d finished it to extract some stuff for my commonplace book and noticed the death and sickness that opened and closed the book. We’ve broached his grouchiness; I’ll give you one guess as to whether Sinclair things London is improving or getting worse, the walk in this book having taken place right in the post-Olympic hangover.

I mentioned in my review of London Orbital that he makes sure to include foils for himself. Andrew Kötting is his foil in this one, and what a foil he is. It’s like watching the Dionysian and the Appolonian perambulating around London. Sinclair is documenting relationships as much as he is places and feelings, and his works highlight his own friendships as much as they do anything else. It’s really… nice, I can’t think of another way to put it. If I had a friend who produced something like London Overground as a document of our friendship I’d count myself a loved and lucky man indeed.

London Overground is great, a nice little slice of what Sinclair does, a circumscribed document for a limited excursion. I’m still pretty early in my engagement with Sinclair’s work, but I can really imagine this functioning as an accessible entryway.

Some Thoughts on Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost

The Rebecca Solnit I really want to read is Wanderlust: A History of Walking, (because I’m finally entering my psychogeography era), but when I was in Waterstones the other day and had cash in my pocket I saw A Field Guide to Getting Lost and couldn’t leave it there. What a title, for a start.

(The first Solnit I’d read was her piece about autonomous cars and San Francisco in the LRB, which I thought was great.)

I’m not sure how to talk about A Field Guide, which is fitting with its theme, I think. There are through lines but it mostly functions as a mood piece and a meditation. Solnit is wonderfully multidisciplinary; she uses memories to prise open and examine history, and history to unearth and interrogate memory. All of it is within her scope. She talks about lost tribes, lost people, lost objects, lost relationships. She talks about actually being lost, and the difficulty of finding yourself.

In structure it’s a series of essays; some of them on more specific things like the history of European settlers integrating with Indigenous cultures in America, or a dear friend’s passing (the chapter on Marine is a beautiful portrait and heartbreaking), and sometimes they are interstitial, The Blue of Distance, a talking over and around the theme. It’s a good rhythm that, ironically, stops you getting too lost in the text. She always knows when to bring you back, when to talk about something concrete.

The vibe was at once strange and familiar and I spent a lot of the book trying to place where I’d felt it before, a feeling that meant this book absolutely succeeded, and I realised it was in reading some of Roland Barthes’ more personal works, like Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, and, A Lover’s Discourse. That’s a great mood to be able to evoke. If I could do that I’d never do anything else.

I can only do this book an injury by trying to describe it any further. It’s about 200 pages, the perfect length for something like this. If you’re reading this review you’ll already know whether you’ll dig it or not. If you haven’t read it, just go do it.

Some Thoughts on Henry Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare

I think the most remarkable thing about this book is that it’s a Henry Miller without any sex in it, although I can’t recall there being much, if any, in The Colossus of Maroussi, either. I started The Air-Conditioned Nightmare pretty directly after having put down Colossus because I was expecting them to be of a piece, but I was a little bit disappointed.

Colossus was fantastic, I thought, chronicling as it does some of Miller’s journeys around the Mediterranean while the rest of Europe is getting engulfed in what would become World War 2. I was reading it not long after the current conflict between Ukraine and Russia reached the milestone of a year, and the resonance was hard to ignore. I’ve read the Tropics, and while they go in to some detail about Miller’s feelings on the contrast between America and Europe, Colossus focuses on it. Otherwise he travels, carouses, writes, mixes with interesting locals. As far as I can tell the difference between a Henry Miller novel and a Henry Miller piece of non-fiction is that in the non-fiction, he leaves out the sex.

Miller doesn’t really say anything new in Colossus, but that doesn’t matter. As far as I can recall (I read it a year ago), he draws a distinction between a Europe with a real, ancient, tangible history, and an America that has paved over anything you might call history and indigenous culture and thrown up shopping centres and TV antennas. Not the first guy to make the point, I’m sure, but he has a kind of lyrical way of making it when he’s in full flow, and he can go from a record of a dinner party where he met interesting people to a free-flowing, prose-poetic meditation on the relevance of ancient Greece today. It’s some range and some performance.

(As an aside, here’s my paperback copy of Colossus. I think it’s the rattiest paperback I have, or close to it, anyway. I bought this on the used book stall at Peterborough City Market. Back when we had a market.)

Just look at it. No, I can’t get the sticker off.

Maybe you won’t care if you don’t like Henry Miller already; I like Henry Miller a lot and to me it’s just fine, like listening to a favourite dirty uncle talk about politics. Fundamentally you agree with him, but you’d never put it the way he does.

The Air-Conditioned Nightmare is ostensibly more of the same, picking up where Colossus left off as Miller gets deposited on a dockside in New York. If Colossus is Miller taking a last look at a Europe going up in flames, Nightmare is Miller getting reacquainted with a country he’s not seen in a decade. It’s an intriguing premise.

It just doesn’t quite come off the same way. Whether it’s the change of locale or a change in mood, the same frisson just isn’t there. I mean, at its very simplest, Miller’s idea is that Europe is a place where things (good, bad, otherwise) happen, and America is a stultified, sanitised place. It’s borne out in his work about it as well.

There is a disconnected feeling where Colossus follows a thread. The chapters of prose poetry are as marvellous as ever, but contrasted with some essays on his mates and their artistic practises, it just doesn’t hit the same. The fault might be with me; if I had more of an interest in American visual art during the war I’d probably be in love with it, but I think he wrote in a more penetrating, interesting way when he was in Europe encountering poets.

He’s still brilliant by turns, though. One of the later chapters, Soirée in Hollywood is an account of a boozy, upper class dinner party he kind of falls into when he gets to LA. The conversation is hilarious, the paranoia is thick, and Miller plays the straight man beautifully. It has the same energy as this James Acaster bit. If you know, you know:

Nightmare is still worth reading if you’re a Miller fan, but definitely read Colossus first, and before that read the two Tropics. I haven’t read the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy yet but it’s on the list.

Some Thoughts on M. John Harrison’s Wish I Was Here

Just before sitting down to write this, I learned that Christopher Priest passed away, on February the 2^nd, 2024, at the age of 80. He was a contemporary of M. John Harrison’s, and it made me all the more grateful that so many people from the New Wave are still around and working. Rest in Peace, Christopher.

–

I’ve been broadly familiar with M. John Harrison for a long time (he’s great on Twitter and has a blog you should definitely be reading), but until recently the only novel of his I’d read had been The Centauri Device, which was a delightful, complex, psychedelic space opera that had clearly been an inspiration for Iain M. Banks, an SF writer I adore. I knew Harrison’s reputation for subverting, and sometimes outright demolishing, genre expectations, and The Centauri Device lived up to those… expectations. Which means he… lived up to my expectations by subverting them? Anyway. More recently I read The Pastel City, which I loved and will be reviewing once I’ve read more of the Viriconium stuff,. I also got gifted a copy of his new memoir Wish I Was Here for Christmas, and I’ve just finished it.

Well, I call it a memoir. It’s billed very clearly as an anti-memoir, which in this case means that while it is autobiographical, it isn’t a strict, linear account of Harrison’s life. All the better for it. It is fragmentary, elliptical, told in snatches, it reflects the complexities of inner life and of attempting to reckon with memory in a way that’s far truer than a straight account. I’m reminded of classes I’ve taken on modernism, where we all argued about whether Virginia Woolf hadn’t actually written far more “realistic” fiction than Dickens.

And Wish I Was Here is fiction, really. At the core of the book is that remove between the version of yourself you are in the present and the version of yourself you were. You are no longer that person, to write about them is to write fiction by definition, albeit fiction informed by your memories, and whatever notes you’ve taken, notes that are also impossibly removed from you, something you’ll be familiar with if you’ve kept notebooks or journals. If you haven’t, read this excellent Joan Didion essay. Like I noted in my review of Chris Porsz’ recent exhibition, there’s something to be said for a consistency of accretion, for shoring fragments against your ruins.

I wanted to put off Wish I Was Here until I’d read more Harrison, but I glanced over a few pages and instantly got sucked into the rhythm and flow of it. He writes with a voice that is knowing, funny, wise, that takes you into his confidence. You want to keep listening. When someone is sharing with you the way Harrison is sharing with you, you don’t want to stop them. And it is funny as hell. I don’t want to spoil any of the jokes or stories but the little routine about the sink rotting in a ditch in the midlands is great, trust me.

You get the feeling he’s determined not to write about himself, but that’s fine. There’s some great nature writing in here, some lovely passages about the magic of owning a cat and the awfulness of losing one. There’s some writing advice I wish I’d heard years ago, and plenty of insight into other writers Harrison admires. There’s some frightening passages about the nature of the discontinuity we’re living through; that you’d say the book is partly a reflection of, if you didn’t know any better.

He shows glimpses of letting you in, laying out the details, explicating the five Ws, but they’re a feint. He draws you in with one hand and then keeps you at a distance with the other, the way he is distanced from his past selves. He details conversations and relationships he’s had but he lets you know he’s fictionalised them. He mentions some famous people he’s known but the anecdotes don’t get much juicer than having been a few tables over from Tim Henman at a restaurant, or bumping into William S. Burroughs at a party. Sonic Life, this ain’t, but that’s the point.

Harrison manages to not talk too much about his childhood or his relationships with his parents until the last few pages. It just doesn’t matter. Far more important to get across the sense of disconnection he’s always felt. In a way I think Wish I Was Here is an exercise in examining just how impossible it is to really know anything about your own life, let alone anyone else’s. In that sense I think it’s kin with Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, and is similarly a masterpiece.

Yeah, I love New Wave SF, and I would have loved a nice long chapter on what it was like to be a part of New Worlds, but Harrison deftly shows us that that would be too reductive, that the work is what’s important, that it’d be impossible, anyway. You should immediately go and read Wish I Was Here. I’ll echo the recommendation that Weighing a Pig Doesn’t Fatten It gave – it’s among the best books I’ve ever read.

Some Thoughts on Thurston Moore’s Sonic Life

I had sent Confusion is Sex and Bad Moon Rising to New Alliance, the Minutemen’s personal imprint at SST, and I had received an encouraging, if cryptic, postcard back from Mike Watt. He mentioned to me, on another occasion, that one of the people overseeing operations at SST had been reluctant to sign bands outside of SST’s local and familial zone and had further said, in a subtle dig at me and the band- “Record collectors shouldn’t be in bands.”

Sonic Life, p.g 313¹

I can trace an awful lot of my musical taste to getting Nirvana’s best-of album for Christmas one year and then getting a copy of Cobain’s journals a few years later. The best-of opens with You Know You’re Right, which begins with a tinkling little plucked behind the bridge figure, and his journals contain list after list after list of bands and records he liked, letters to musicians he was a fan of, plots to get cult bands on the bill opening for Nirvana.

(I can trace a lot of it to Mark Prindle, too, whose record review blog stands as a testament to DIY ethics. Prindle couldn’t stand Sonic Youth though, natch).

SY was one of those bands I came to because I read Cobain’s journals, and I’m thinking about it now because I’ve just finished Sonic Life, which is a declaration about the power of music and more specifically, music fandom. I think Sonic Life could have been a similar blueprint for me if I wasn’t already au-fait with a lot of this stuff; Moore mentions so many bands that I only heard about because Cobain or Prindle championed them, and plenty of other stuff I hadn’t and now want to because, of course, Moore is the hipster’s hipster.

Another thread that connects Sonic Life with Cobain’s journals, in my mind, is the evangelising about punk rock. When I was a kid, punk rock was The Sex Pistols, spiked hair, leather, and that was it. I’d never really thought about it in terms of it giving you the freedom to be yourself, of being autonomous, of not waiting for permission, DIY, starting where you are – until I read those passages in the journals and was converted instantly. A similar light shines off the page when Moore talks about it.

This dynamic would form a defining essence of punk rock, where the intellectual passions of literature and art collided with the street smarts of the working class. It was Richard Hell meeting Johnny Thunders, Malcolm McLaren meeting Steve Jones.

Sonic Life, p.g. 51¹

Again, if I wasn’t already fully converted, I would be now.

Moore spends a lot of time talking about his life as a writer and a poet as well, and it reminds me that I’ve always appreciated that SY were a literate band, incredibly so, by rock and roll standards. I was probably going to discover writers like Philip K. Dick and William Gibson anyway, but SY made them seem achingly cool. It makes sense that this band would spawn a couple of excellent memoirs. Hopefully Lee or Steve write one next.

There is name-dropping, and I can appreciate that someone who already knows that SY toured with Boredoms might be getting tired and eye-rolly, but if I’d never heard of Boredoms then I might be more inclined to go “Hell yeah, let’s check this out!”

[As a side note, I’d envy any kid getting this book for Christmas who is able to listen along, plugging band names into Spotify and YouTube].

I don’t mean to go on about it but I think this aspect is really important. Bands like SY and Nirvana were serious about trying to help their friends break out of the underground as well. Sonic Life is part of the legacy of that. Not to say that Moore talks uncritically about his cool friends – he doesn’t always detail them for reasons you can imagine, but he does highlight moments of tensions, relationships that soured. I’m sure he still gets on really well with Mike Watt, and I’m glad their relationships is in a place where it can stand Moore mentioning the post card I quoted at the top of the page.

I disagree with the sentiment entirely, though I’m sure it was tongue in cheek. Record collectors like Moore and Cobain were fans who lived the dream, and they did their best to make sure the ladder stayed steady under them. Their bands made me want to pick up a guitar, start a band, and be part of the same sonic democracy they were. Of course it never happened for me, but that it happened for them is part of what makes the stories special. And I don’t mean that they achieved great success, because Our Band Could Be Your Life gave me the same feeling.

Don’t come to Sonic Life if you want a serious reckoning, because you won’t get it. Thurston Moore clearly wanted to write a book about a particular and magic moment in time, the music he loves, and the charmed life it enabled him to live. Kim wrote about their marriage’s dissolution a bit in Girl in a Band (which you should read, I reviewed it here) but it isn’t the main focus of the story. Thurston devotes an even smaller amount of Sonic Life to it; his falling in love with Eva, breaking up with Kim, it all takes place over a couple pages.

In fact, the whole thing kinda telescopes. Moore takes a lot of time and includes a lot of detail when it comes to his early life and relationships, his first gigs, how he came to start spending time in New York before moving there to be one of many destitute artists. The pace of this is just right. It is very reminiscent of Just Kids, in the best sense. If I’d lived in that time and place, I’d write a memoir about it too, because apparently every other person living in Manhattan at the time was destined for greatness. The pace of Sonic Life picks up in tandem with the band’s fame until you get to the last third, which is mostly made up of “I went to X and played with Y and it was awesome, then I went to A and played with B and it was radical.” And then the last decade of SY gets waved away, pretty much.

That’s as uncharitable as I’m going to be. I’m going to level with you and say that if I’d met David Bowie, William Burroughs, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, and Neil Young, I’d damn well mention every single one of them in my memoirs, and if anyone told me no, I’d remind them whose life I was writing about. Have you ever read A Moveable Feast? Artist memoirs tend to talk a lot about people those artists admired and worked with, and that’s a good thing (see earlier comments about how I got switched on to punk rock).

SY are my second favourite band but there’s still stuff in here new to me. I knew, for example, that Bob Bert was in and out of the band a bit, but I didn’t realise the extent to which he was almost taken advantage of, being kicked out because they were hoping to go in a different direction then being invited back for a tour because they needed the body. They’ve patched it up now (check out Bob Bert’s Instagram, he’s always cheerleading SY releases), but I was reading those pages like yikes.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Bob Bert (@therealbobbert)

There’s no index! Which is a big shame in what is an otherwise encyclopaedic work about the American underground in the late 20^th century (my bones crumbled to dust typing that). There were a few times I wanted to skip around a bit, seeing what he wrote about Michael Gira a few chapters back, and wasn’t able to easily.

SY are a pretty polarising band so if you’re reading this and have an opinion on them you should know whether you wanna read Sonic Life or not. To me it’s partly a chronicle of a period of time I’m fascinated with, which already has me sold, and then it’s partly a story about punk breaking and the wave of SY reaching it’s peak, which yeah, I’m in. If you’ve read Please Kill Me or Just Kids and enjoyed them, this covers the same stuff but from such a different perspective I can’t help but recommend it.

Thurston Moore was a kid looking at punk rock with wide eyes and then got to go from making scratchy noise with his friends to stardom, never stopping being a fan along the way, and Sonic Life evokes that energy beautifully.

---

¹ Sonic Life, Thurston Moore, 2023, Faber & Faber, ISBN: 978-0-571-37394-9