Wednesday, January 15, 2003

posted 7:40 AM
RETURN OF THE REFORGOTTEN

That’s a phrase that pops up in the work of Iain Sinclair, my favorite writer of the past decade or so. I think it was originally the title of a poetry series at the Royal Albert Hall. I have no idea what it means but I like it a lot, and felt like seeing it again this morning.

I owe Iain Sinclair an apology. His publisher sent his last novel, LANDOR’S TOWER, for comment (a blurb, in the trade). I started reading it, and couldn’t stop. I think I read it for four months straight: forward, backward, then chapters in random order -- then, finally, individual pages randomly. Hobbs Baranov, the defrocked NSA mathematician in PATTERN RECOGNITION, is related to that experience in some way. But LANDOR’S TOWER was so intensely peculiar (in all of the best ways) that I never got around to writing the blurb. It's like that, sometimes.

I was in John Clute’s living room, one morning, toward the start of a book tour, looking out at Camden High Street, when Clute pointed to a passing figure on the pavement opposite, and said that that was Iain Sinclair, the poet and bookseller. Clute took down a slim volume titled LUD HEAT. I read the first two pages, broke into a sweat, and immediately went up the street to Compendium and bought my own copy.

There’ s a new Iain Sinclair novel, but I’m going to hold off for the pleasure of reading it in England, in April, on the UK tour (no dates yet). You don’t need to be in England to read Sinclair, but it does crank the intensity in interesting ways. Genuis loci.

READYMADES

Someone used this wonderfully apt expression in asking about the “industrial” candy described toward the end of ALL TOMORROW’S PARTIES: did I make it up, or did I find it somewhere and import it into the text? I found it, or rather a description of something very like it, I think in GIANT ROBOT, one of my favorite magazines. It’s a Japanese candy, of course. I looked for it in Tokyo last year, but couldn’t find it. Fashions in candy change very quickly, in Japan.

Fashions in Japan… I gave my daughter the latest issue of GOTHIC & LOLITA BIBLE for Christmas. Until you’ve had a leaf through that, you have no idea where cognitive dissonance can take you.

FAVORITE MAGAZINE?

GIANT ROBOT is wonderful, but the one magazine I still buy with keen and absolute regularity, and read almost immediately, literally cover to cover, is FORTEAN TIMES. Nothing like it.

Another, very different sort of British magazine I’m starting to like a lot is TATE, the magazines of the Tate Modern. Art magazines generally give me hives, but TATE, recently under new editorship, has become the exception. I recently published an essay there on those eerie little spheres of exquisitely polished mud that Japanese pre-schoolers generate.

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