“Iain Sinclair’s classic early text, Lud Heat, explores mysterious cartographic connections between the six Hawksmoor churches in London. In a unique fusion of prose and poetry, Sinclair invokes the mythic realm of King Lud, who according to legend was one of the founders of London, as well as the notion of psychic ‘heat’ as an enigmatic energy contained in many of its places. The book’s many different voices, including the incantatory whispers of Blake and Pound, combine in an amalgamated shamanic sense that somehow works to transcend time. The transmogrifying intonations and rhythms slowly incorporate new signs, symbols and sigils into the poem that further work on the senses. This was the work that set the ‘psychogeographical’ tone for much of Sinclair’s mature work, as well as inspiring novels like Hawksmoor and Gloriana from his peers Peter Ackroyd and Michael Moorcock, and Alan Moore’s From Hell.”
“In 1841 the poet John Clare fled an asylum in Epping Forest and walked eighty miles to his home in Northborough. He was searching for his lost love, Mary Joyce – a woman three years dead …In 2000 Iain Sinclair set out to recreate Clare’s walk away from madness. He wanted to understand his bond with the poet and escape the gravity of his London obsessions. Accompanied on this journey by his wife Anna (who shares a connection with Clare), the artist Brian Catling and magus Alan Moore – as well as a host of literary ghosts, both visionary and romantic – Sinclair’s quest for Clare becomes an investigation into madness, sanity and the nature of the poet’s muse.”
“Dining on Stones is Iain Sinclair’s sharp, edgy mystery of London and its environs Andrew Norton, poet, visionary and hack, is handed a mysterious package that sees him quit London and head out along the A13 on an as yet undefined quest. Holing up in a roadside hotel, unable to make sense of his search, he is haunted by ghosts: of the dead and the not-so dead; demanding wives and ex-wives; East End gangsters; even competing versions of himself. Shifting from Hackney to Hastings and all places in-between, while dissecting a man’s fractured psyche piece by piece, Dining on Stones is a puzzle and a quest – for both writer and reader.”
A fictional account of a walking tour through England’s East Anglia, Sebald’s home for more than twenty years, The Rings of Saturn explores Britain’s pastoral and imperial past. Its ten strange and beautiful chapters, with their curious archive of photographs, consider dreams and reality. As the narrator walks, a company of ghosts keeps him company – Thomas Browne, Swinburne, Chateaubriand, Joseph Conrad, Borges – conductors between the past and present. The narrator meets lonely eccentrics inhabiting tumble-down mansions, and hears of the furious coastal battles of two world wars. He tells of far-off China and the introduction of the silk industry to Norwich. He walks to the now forsaken harbor where Conrad first set foot on English soil and visits the site of the once-great city of Dunwich, now sunk in the sea, where schools of herring swim. As the narrator catalogs the transmigration of whole worlds, the reader is mesmerized by change and oblivion, survival and memories. Blending fiction and history, Sebald’s art is as strange and beautiful as the rings of Saturn, created from fragments of shattered moons.”–Publisher’s description
“I walked recently through the North York Moors national park and along the Yorkshire coast, reaching Scarborough, and climbed towards its castle high on a clifftop, and to the grave of Anne Brontë, who died aged 29 and is buried in a churchyard beneath the castle. By the sea she so loved, it was easy to see and feel how the landscape of the north so powerfully shaped the literature and lives of the Brontës. This evocative book encourages people to engage with the places that proved so inspirational. As I walk, Anne’s haunting last words to her sister Charlotte echo through my mind: “Take courage.”
“I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading: it vexes me to choose another guide,” Emily Brontë declared. This trailblazing spirit led her to forge a unique path through literature. Here, she becomes a posthumous guide to Michael Stewart as he follows in her footsteps – along with the footsteps of her sisters, brother Branwell and father Patrick – in a series of vividly chronicled walks that explore the geographical and emotional terrain of their writing. Stewart travels through the north of England, across moors and meadows, up mountains and through cities and villages and along coastal paths. He also voyages into the inner lives of the Brontës, showing how external place shaped their internal landscapes, how the wild fuelled their imagination.
He begins his walks in the Brontë birthplace, Thornton, in west Yorkshire, where Patrick spent his “happiest days” before the untimely death of his wife Maria and two eldest daughters. He also follows part of the Pennine Way to the ruin of Top Withens, thought to have inspired Emily’s farmhouse location of Wuthering Heights. He captures how for Emily “the moors were a place of awe and fascination. It was a land that was alive with a terrible destructive beauty.” These engaging present-tense walks include an excellent account of recreating the walk that Mr Earnshaw took in 1771 when he travelled from Wuthering Heights to Liverpool – Stewart ventures via Littleborough and Manchester with his dog Wolfie, and has some hair-raising wild camping experiences.
“It is a walking book, but it is also a social and literary history of the North,” Stewart writes. Along the way, he perceptively excavates the past, exploring how it was in the north that the Industrial Revolution took off, “thanks to a combination of soft water, steep hills and cheap labour”. As well as fascinating historical context, he paints a vivid portrait of the present day, too, as he walks through landscapes both bleak and beautiful, equally adept at capturing the gloom of an industrial estate and “a brilliant blue and golden orange kingfisher”, which makes him think of a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem. He compellingly conjures the force of the winds, the earthy smell of peat bogs, the haunting call of the curlew, the sound of skylarks.
“The idea of being authors was as natural to us as walking,” Charlotte said. Woven through his Brontës journey, Stewart also explores how he developed a love of literature and became an author himself with the sisters at the heart of his books. He recalls how his fascination with the novel Wuthering Heights began when Kate Bush’s single reached No 1 in the pop charts in 1978. His mother was reading the novel while studying an English literature O-level at night school, having left school at 15. “She told me what the story was about. She told me about how, one summer night, after three days of travel on foot, Mr Earnshaw brought a dark-skinned orphan back from the streets of Liverpool to his farm in Yorkshire. She told me about how his daughter Cathy spat at the boy and his son Hindley booted him.”
Stewart borrowed the book from the local library and read it on the bus journey to work in a factory in Manchester. In adulthood he moved to live in Thornfield, the Brontë birthplace, and wrote a novel, Ill Will: The Untold Story of Heathcliff, during his research spending hours walking the moors. He also devised the Brontë Stones project for which Bush wrote a poem dedicated to Emily, left in the landscape.
“I close my eyes and see the landscape in my mind,”Stewart writes. The book is a terrific tribute to the Brontës – and to the landscapes that shaped their literature. It also beautifully shows how landscape grows in the imagination and lays bare the “invisible” world of the heart and mind, and how the places we inhabit shape the people we become. It will send the reader back to Bush’s glorious “Wuthering Heights” and to the Brontës’ brilliant books, and will inspire us to roam the wily, windy wildernesses captured so hauntingly in their work.”
Silent gravel in the driveway, deafening clock in the hall, everything whispers anxiously. A back is turned to hide its increasing anxiety, compulsive shrugs walk away. In the distance doors exploded from their origin, nothing is being asked or explained. A serene velocity at the mirrors edge hovers in the silver of the ground. The ghostly sublime of a chair hovers in the background then I realised it never went away because it was never there in the first place. A wispy ballad suddenly bursts, brilliantly unique and uniquely brilliant. Lugubriously strings swayed, a power cable fell down, every act efficient as part of its attempt to keep itself alive. The controlled frenzy of the climax seemed all the more potent for its restraint. Compression of ground prevents working within deeper structures where we dance the rain.
[Oscillating sensations]
An illusion that converts one material into the signifier for another along dislocated points of reference. This is the trap, an anterior document, a document created to sustain an image, an image contained in a scene, a scene without a referent. The wall urges you to remember your compulsion to forget, a psychic event reveals an excess of meaning, a riddle whose clues and secrets are hidden, suppressed by namelessness. This absent content is a fragment that shines like gold. There is no sound we can run to in this prototype theatre, we can only act out to the sides. Blind rage mixes with helter skelter theories and confessional interludes. Appetite runs while reason runs behind, at times this is immensely affecting….beware rollercoaster effects.
A living creature seeks to fill an empty refuge where one shining quality lends lustre to another or hides some glaring defect; the act of perception is an act of consumption in which we hazard nothing. Symptoms manifested in the smashing of windows, the rehearsal of a ventriloquist act in adjoining rooms constructing an emotional temperature… I have tried to inflect my icon with a blank magic.
“Will I ever be parallel with myself? Can I ever be parallel with myself? I will never be parallel with myself. Do I need to be parallel with myself? I need to be parallel with myself. How important is it that I am parallel with myself? How do I know when I am in parallel with myself? Does it feel good when I am in parallel with myself? Am I complete when I am in parallel with myself? Is this it, when I’m in parallel with myself? When I’m in parallel with myself do I stay in parallel with myself forever? Does the history of myself become parallel with the history of the object kept? What is this hinge or bridge that one builds to become the self that is now?
What is occurring in this falling [in], to-geth-er, a p a r t, away?
What is this hinge or bridge that one builds to become the self that is now? Does the history of myself become parallel with the history of the object kept? When I’m in parallel with myself do I stay in parallel with myself forever? Is this it, when I’m in parallel with myself? Am I complete when I am in parallel with myself? Does it feel good when I am in parallel with myself? How do I know when I am in parallel with myself? How important is it that I am parallel with myself? I need to be parallel with myself. Do I need to parallel with myself? I will never be parallel with myself. Can I ever be parallel with myself? Will I ever be parallel with myself? Am I in parallel with myself right here, right now in this space with you?”
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