Andrew Kötting's The Whalebone Box (2020)

 

 And I thought Edith Walks was crazy. The Whalebone box itself goes back a long way in human time, in fact thirty years. It was then that sculptor Steve Dilworth in Tarbert, Harris – interested in once living objects, shamanism and other things – gave the box to Iain Sinclair, who promised to return it. Sinclair now thinks it's time. It is made from the bone of a washed-up whale and is said to contain a metal box filled with sea water. That's why – although we're not told this in the film – we sometimes see a different box here, in cardboard: Sinclair says he's an old man and the box is heavy; Kötting agrees and says it's like a car battery and you can only carry one of those so far.

So there we are, and the journey back to Harris begins, Kötting and Sinclair going with their 'muse' Eden Kötting, the director's daughter who has a genetic disorder and whose words are given subtitles: this film is in part from her dreams. Obviously there are many literary quotations, such as by Basil Bunting, whose grave in the Quaker cemetery in Briggflatts, Cumbria is visited on the way, and there's mention of T. S. Eliot's walking tour with Ezra Pound.

And of course there are songs, such as the disturbingly shrill 'Murdered Mermaid's Song' by MacGillivray, or the French rap band Quai des Brumes singing 'Julien et Mathias'. This latter may seem surprising, but then Kötting and Eden live part of the time in the French Pyrenees, and a digression in the film is a visit to the ruins of a castle in the times of the Cathars on Mont Ségur, which Sinclair considers crucial. This still doesn't give anything like an idea of the strangeness of the film, but how's this for a quotation from Sinclair, who of course is preoccupied by the relativity of time:

'You just find a right place to go and that's always a site within this forest. There might be a rock over there that would allow you access to the time of your great-grandfather, to the moment in the garden. There might be a waterfall over there which allows you through to the time of your mother's childhood. There are places you go to access time, the ghosts come into the forest and at that point linear time begins.'

No matter how much I stare at the words above I still think: 'This is hippie crap!' Very weird film, quite fascinating, but Sinclair's words, often admittedly fascinating too, sometimes just seem to clog it up.

Iain Sinclair: Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (2011)

Iain Sinclair's Ghost Milk is dedicated 'In memory of the huts of the Manor Garden Allotments', the 4.5 acre area of land in Hackney Wick bequeathed in perpetuity to the East End in 1900 by Major Arthur Villiers.* The allotments were destroyed in 2007 in order to allow construction of the London Olympics Park. Understandably, this is a very angry book. Sinclair writes of the sheer destruction that the Olympics vanity project, 'with a beat-the-clock impatience unrivalled in London since the beginnings of the railway age', has wrought: historic communities count for nothing when the only thing of importance is the world waiting agog for the pistol shot of the starter to herald a fleeting moment of glory.

Ghost Milk is a little like Sinclair's previous book Hackney, that Rose-Red Empire with its memories of decades past, its interviews, its peregrinations and its digressions, only the interviews are fewer, it is more global and includes several world grand projects beyond London, and its digressiveness is much vaster. And understandably, its anger is harsher as a result of the mindless destruction of communities human and non-human, the real fear of toxic waste contamination, and the whole equally mindless New Labour-created Olympics fiasco handed over (I express my own disgust here) as a torch to an identical, and above all identically clueless and destructive, political party.

Oh, and the meaning of the title? The expression 'Ghost milk' can cover a multitude of secular sins, but I like Sinclair's example of The Rolling Stones as a tribute band of itself performing at O2, which is of course the ghost milk of that other grand project, the Millennium Dome. Ghost milk is multi-layered.

*Another (albeit ironic) dedication, though, is made in the last sentence of the book (before the Acknowledgements) to 'Mayor Jules Pipe, a constant inspiration, as he remakes the borough of Hackney as a model surrealist wonderland'. It was Pipe who barred Sinclair from the original invitation he'd received to talk about his book Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire at Stoke Newington Library. I don't think the mayor smokes the right pipe.

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Iain Sinclair: Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

Rodinsky's Room and 19 Princelet Street, Spitalfields, London

19 Princelet Street was built in 1714 and was the home of the French Huguenot Ogier family, who developed a very successful silk weaving concern.

In 1839 there was a synagogue on these premises, and now this Grade II* listed building is the Museum of Immigration and Diversity.

David Rodinsky (1925–69), a reclusive Jew who understood a number of languages and whose papers reveal a knowledge of cabbalism, lived above the synagogue for many years until his death in a psychiatric hospital in 1969, although this was not discovered until some time after his room – left suddenly, a little like Dennis Severs' imaginary family left their rooms in Folgate Street (see link below) – was unlocked in 1980.

The book Rodinsky's Room (1999) is written by Rachel Lichtenstein (whose Polish grandparents came to the East End in the 1930s) and Iain Sinclair (who wrote an early article on Rodinsky's room) in alternating chapters, although most is written by Lichtenstein, who slowly uncovers the mystery of Rodinsky at the same time as she discovers her own past.

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Dennis Severs' House (6-minute video)

Iain Sinclair: Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report (2009)

Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire is a book that is mainly concerned with the last forty years in the borough of Hackney, London, this being the time Iain Sinclair has lived in Albion Drive, Haggeston. He records (though not chronologically) the often hidden or forgotten history of Hackney, particularly celebrating its eccentrics and its alternative lifestylers at the same time – in a wider and a quieter context – as he sets his sights on corruption at high as well as lower levels within (and by extension without) the borough. It is chaotic and digressive, but highly readable. Sinclair describes the book as 'built around absence, holes in the narrative, faked resolution'.

Many of the pages of this 'documentary fiction' are taken up with interviews Sinclair has had with people who live or have lived in the borough. These include: Chris Petit, with whom Sinclair has worked on films; Stewart Home, ranting; Home's friend Mark Pawson talking about his experiences renting a room at the Mole Man's house in Mortimer Street; Swanny the drug-taking doctor; Will Self on a Hackney hike with him; Marina Warner on Jean-Luc Godard's Sympathy for the Devil; Sheila Rowbotham partly on Godard's Brish Sounds, but mainly about living in Hackney around that time; the late David Widgery's wife Juliet Ash on Hackney in the past; and Ken Worpole (of Dockers and Detectives fame), who makes the (for me at least) astonishing revelation that Simon Blumenfeld wasn't Jewish.

At one point the narrator asks 'did those feet?', but no, there's no evidence of William Blake (who is obviously lurking – probably both consciously and unconsciously – in the name of Sinclair's Albion Drive) walking upon Hackney's land, although Blake's friend and devotee, wood engraver Edward Calvert (1799–1883), lived in the future borough and was buried in Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington – although Sinclair failed to find the grave.

A number of times, in passing, there's mention of the insufferable Tony Blair, sometimes mentioned with his almost equally insufferable wife: I appreciated Sinclair's accurate description of Blair's 'gerbil grin that doesn't synchronize with panic in fearful eyes', and was amused to learn that Denis Healey had equated his 'personal charisma' with 'bullshit'. And often, there's comment on the horror that Sinclair, in an interview, described as 'apocalytically catastrophic', and that Will Self contemptuously describes here as New Labour's 'New Jerusalem': the Olympic Games, the government 'vanity project' that has been so destructive of a large area around Hackney Wick and Stratford.

On a lighter note, it's refreshing to find a number of obscure books mentioned, by no means all of which I was already aware, but after a little Googling these look very promising and I include them here as much as an aide-mémoire as anything else: H. Kaner's self-published People of the Twilight (1946), R. C. Hutchinson's Elephant and Castle (1945), Roland Camberton's Rain on the Pavements (1951), Alexander Baron's The Lowlife (1963), Nigel Fountain's Days Like these (1985), and Derek Raymond's How the Dead Live (1986).

At 580 pages, Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire is very long, but doesn't feel it: exhilaratingly digressive, it is a joy to read.

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Iain Sinclair: Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project

Roland Camberton: Scamp (1950; repr. 2010)

A short time ago I wrote a few words about the recent (re-)publication of Roland Camberton's Scamp, which I've just read, and which I think deserves a comment of more than a few words.

Scamp was a novel with a contemporary story when it was first published in 1950, but today, with its rat-infested Bloomsbury hovels, its journalists with whisky flasks at the hip, its greasy spoon cafés, its politically incorrect talk, its war rationing hangover, its national service, its unwanted pregnancies, and its omnipresent fags and newspapers, it seems to belong to a very distant England indeed. It is a world where Bernard Shaw, James Agate and Cyril Connolly are figures of great importance.

If there'd ever been an English dream, this would be the flipside of it, a society of virtually unemployable losers, many of whom only half-heartedly try to make it as writers, have sex without emotional commitment, and whose idea of social networking is meeting for hours in the pub or the café to philosophize and talk of unrealizable dreams, often scrounging or conning at the same time. Although far less menacing — in fact decidedly cartoonish —the characters aren't so far removed from those of Patrick Hamilton , and the title Scamp indicates an essentially childlike as opposed to sinister nature, although this is in fact a kind of maguffin, being the title of a magazine that's never published.

John Minton's cover is revealing, and Iain Sinclair (in his Introduction 'Man in a Macintosh: Roland Camberton, The Great Invisible in English Fiction') certainly believes that the man depicted is a representation of Camberton (born Henry Cohen). This man is the only clearly drawn human, but focussed to the right of the drawing, behind an unnamed pub. It is perhaps early evening, and in the background are sketchy figures walking together. The man, though (maybe late twenties or early thirties, balding with stubbly chin), is alone and either deep in thought or unhappy. He has a sheaf of papers or a wad of magazines under his arm, and surely the main point here is the weight given to the background: the eye is drawn to the main detail of the man under the pub, who is disappearing bottom right, his head full of what he's leaving: the pub, the people, the streets, the noise, the conversation, the whole fantasy world. Leaving mentally or physically, or perhaps both?

Ivan Ginsberg, the 30-year-old main character in Scamp, is an under-published ex-short story writer who wants to be a literary magazine editor, his only problems being that he has to find the money, contributors and printer to do so. Like many of the other characters, he hasn't grown up, although he begins to do so at the end.

Roland Camberton's Disappearing Act

Roland Camberton (1921-65)  was born in Manchester, England as Henry Cohen, and was educated in Hackney, London. He published two novels: Scamp (1950), which is set in grim Soho and Bloomsbury of the 1940s, and Rain on the Pavements (1951), set in Jewish Hackney in the 1930s. After that he disappeared without apparent trace, but Iain Sinclair has spent 30 years discovering what became of him, and one of his findings involves Camberton  meeting William Burroughs once.

New London Editions, an imprint of Five Leaves Publishing, re-published both books last summer, and Scamp includes an Introduction by Sinclair. Both editions use the original illustrations by John Minton.

The story of Sinclair's search - published in the Guardian 30 August 2008 - is here.