Penniless Islington poets

[alexsarll]

I note that there was again a new moon on Monday, but what with the torrential rain, I completely missed it. Sorry, Duran Duran.

Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire by Iain Sinclair
Sinclair's latest psychogeographical report comes from his home borough, and as such is uncharacteristically personal. The tour of forgotten streets, secret histories and local characters one expects from him is present and correct, but there's also more about family and home, the children growing up as the area falls prey to the twin scourges of decay and corrupt, mismanaged 'regeneration'. The Olympics are a particular bugbear here, shoddily totalitarian and insensitive, their site's blue fence symbolic of the erasure of history, community, Hackney, benefitting only politicians and "investors prepared to mortgage a city's future on the demolition and ransacking of a mythical past". One contributor to this "fractured narrative of manipulated facts, poorly recorded and inaccurately transcribed interviews" warns that "careers have been destroyed by writing about Hackney" but this impassioned and uncharacteristically accessible work, which sacrifices none of his poetic verve, deserves to take Sinclair to a wider audience.
And what are the odds on reading two books in a row where a minor character is trying a Pierre Menard-style rewrite of works by Joseph Conrad?

Got stuck into some free DVDs from the old regime last night. I'm sure I caught some as a child, but only on Monday night did I sit down to watch Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes. Everyone says the performance is pretty much definitive, and I'm not going to argue - cadaverous, inhuman, brilliant - but here's what intrigues me: having messed up and thought Casebook was the first series, I started there, with 'The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax' in which Holmes has a bit of an off day. More of an off day, in fact, than in the original story, and it gets to him more. The first episode of the first series was in fact 'A Scandal in Bohemia'. Now, simply because of the name and the brevity this was the first of the original stories which I read, but it is deeply unusual in that Holmes has a seriously off day. ITV was, in those days, still capable of producing decent dramas, but is this a precursor of the nasty tendency now to need to 'humanise' your leads right from the start? Which is not just an ITV thing - consider how the very first House saw him break his resolution never to speak to the patients (one reason I abandoned that show so promptly - others include hypochondria, and Hugh Laurie's accent).
Nonetheless, considerably truer to Doyle's writings than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, which I also attempted, where a bunch of Australians and Yanks plus one token bumbling Brit get trapped on a plateau with dinosaurs who really make you realise how far CGI has come in the past decade, plus all manner of other nonsense - the first episode has lascivious Roman-style lizardmen who would have been right at home in Edgar Rice Burroughs or Robert E Howard, but are really not Doyle's kind of thing. Passably entertaining nonsense which is itself demonstrably superior to the sappy, try-hard gloop that is Kyle XY, one of the worst SF series of which I have ever had the misfortune to see five minutes. And to put that into context, I managed a whole episode of Merlin. If anyone wants the first season DVD of Kyle XY, it's yours, though I will judge you for that.

Theory: anyone who has seen or indeed owned a lava lamp would be significantly less disturbed by the bubbling chaos of Azathoth, Nyogha and their ilk than people of Lovecraft's generation.

Comments

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Well, he did dismiss Tubewalks, and if I hadn't already been an enthusiast when that happened, it could well have put me off making the attempt. The Hackney thing being the case, this is probably the best place to start, so maybe it was good that you waited!