Hybridity and the third space, baby

[alexsarll]

Over the past week I have spent time among some strange tribes - the rats and bats and strange throat-clearing old folk of the Richmond riverside, the rollerbladers and riders of Hyde Park, even the little lost sliver of Central Europe that is Mayfair (it even has the slightly substandard police - though there's maybe a hint of India to it as well; I've never seen a library with so many Wodehouse books, not even my own). And this combined with an article from the previous weekend about the death/rebirth of travel writing and set me thinking, has anyone ever done a London travel book? By which I mean, one where writers from one part of London write pieces about other areas as the foreign lands they so clearly are. It seems like an Iain Sinclair kind of project, but I think I've read all his London prose and I don't recall anything quite like this. Arthur Machen's London Adventure has something of the spirit I mean, but as one would expect from a man of a more imperial age, his project was much more centred - he spoke of "the London known to Londoners" and the lands beyond, whereas I think more in terms of separate but equal principalities under London's aegis.

There was something about the light - and later, the quality of the darkness - on Saturday night. So walking to The Melting Ice Caps/Soft Close-Ups/Soft Ice Caps (no Melting Close-Ups this time) show at Gloomy (played to a rightly rapturous crowd, some of whom I don't even know personally), I didn't necessarily want any music in my ears. Except that I had the chorus of 'We Are Golden' by Mika stuck in my head and I sure as blazes needed something to shift that, because even as someone who rather liked (most of) his first album, I find the new stuff irksomely hollow.

Comments

[ultraruby.livejournal.com]

We (by which i mean some folk we know that like London and writing) should totally write that travel book. I reckon it'd make an excellent collaborative project.

[ruudboy.livejournal.com]

One of the most interesting things to me is how little actual Londoners know about bits of it that aren't their bit. If I'm somewhere else with ny native North London friends, I pretty much end up being their tour guide, and similarly I've a friend from Hounslow who was completely lost when she founde herself in North London with me once.

[juggzy.livejournal.com]

writers from one part of London write pieces about other areas as the foreign lands they so clearly are.

This is clearly destined to be an LJ project

[augstone.livejournal.com]

that is a very good idea. surely it must exist. but then again most things that 'surely must exist' usually don't.

i'm anxious to read some more uncle fred.

i think the melting close-ups was a thing that may never be repeated as if i'm there it now makes sense for me to play with him on our songs.

[euphoricstimuli.livejournal.com]

That sounds a really good idea.
Living south of the river for the first time has certainly been interesting. In many ways its still the same, but in others it feels like a different city.
It would be a great book, and I don't know of one like it.

As far as We are Golden goes, try singing Heaven is a place on Earth by Belinda Carlisle over the top of it.