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In this volume Iain Sinclair sets out to map the vast stretch of urban settlement outside London bounded by the M25. His long journeys - from the Lea Valley to Uxbridge, from Staines to South Mimms - are flanked by the black clouds of smoke from burning carcasses as the foot and mouth panic takes hold. Here he uncovers a history of forgotten villages, suburban utopias and hellish asylums, now transformed into upmarket housing, all the while walking a disappearing landscape, as the countryside is engulfed by commerce.… (plus d'informations)
Paperback. Pub Date: 2003 Pages: 592 Publisher: Penguin A illiant the Voyage of Discovery into the deeply unfashionable fringes of London. 'It is not often that one reads a book and is convinced that it's an instant classic but I 'm sure that London Orbital will be read 50 years from now. This account of his walk around the M25 is on one level a journey into the heart of darkness. that terrain of golf courses. retail parks and industrial estates which is Blair's itain. It's a fascinating snapshot of who we are. lit by Sinclair's vivid prose. and on another level a warning that the mythological England of village greens and cycling aunts has been buried under the rush of a million radial tyres' - JG Ballard. Observer.Contents : Prejudices declare; soothing the seething - up the Lea Valley with Bill Drummond (and the Unabomber); Paradise Gardens - Waltham Abbey to Shenley; Col...
What a discovery. if anybody had told me that a book could make we want to explore the M25, I would have thought they were mad. But this book did. Sinclair, on the surface seems to be cynicism personified, but this book is imbued with an affection and love for the sub-ordinary found in the secret and not-so-secret places surrounding London. Very funny, full of information and insight, a real pleasure to read. ( )
It was kinda fun joining the author and his friends walking around London on the M25 and environs. But there's a lot of digressions and references that a lot of readers might not get or get tired of. The place I'm writing from Edmonton, also has a ring road ( The Anthony Henday) and lot of the issues of the M25 could also be applied here. But generally I think it's magnificent being able to get to places faster and avoid traffic lights. Except during rush hour. I liked the history that the author presents on his walk and the lay of the land he manages to convey. ( )
I started this book 2 weeks ago. Ages ago. It felt like I was the one doing the walking on the M25 around London! And yet, I thoroughly enjoyed Mr. Sinclair's British walkabout. I began with the intention that I was going to understand everything that was going on - I read the first two parts while sitting at the computer and looking at London and the M25 on Google maps, with extra windows open in Safari so I could check up on all the fast-flowing and random references that were being strewn about, but it just became too much. For the last three quarters of the book, I settled for living vicariously through Iain Sinclair's words, using my imagination to picture it, and cheering at the few tidbits of information I caught and waving like one of his dear asylum dwellers at the ones that flew over my head. It really was a fascinating book, but long and wordy and with the unfortunate tendency of putting me to sleep. Now that I'm finished I can say that it was a great experience, but one I'm unlikely to repeat in the future - unless I suddenly move to London or surrounding area and have an itch at hiking around it. Then I'll bring it along for ballast. ( )
... with its incessant detours and constant diversions into the socio-political, architectural, or artistic implications of the terrain, it can hardly be called a travel narrative.
So, what is it?
Somewhere around South Mimms, Sinclair himself dubs the journey a fugue, "transient mental illness. Madness as a voyage." Psychological fugue. Characterized by a loss of awareness of self in combination with a flight from one's home. Sinclair revels in his mad fugue. "You didn't walk to forget, you walked to forget the walk." The payoff lay "in the heightened experience of present-tense actuality." In American: Zen and the Art of Walking around London.
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...for tho' eclipses of thought are to me a living inhumement and equal to the dread throes of suffocation, turning the valley of vision into a fen of scorpions and stripes and agonies, yet I protest, and glory in it for the sake of its evidence, of the strength of spirit that when inspir'd for art I am quite insensible to cold, hunger and bodily fatigue...
Samuel Palmer (letter to George Richmond)
K Hodges (London W8): 'What was your worst moment on TV?' Jeremy Paxman: 'Interviewing a man under the impression that he was a schizophrenic in care in the community when in fact he was an engineer who'd come to talk about the M25.'
'Independent' (29 September 1999)
Dédicace
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For Renchi, and for Kevin Jackson, shadows on the road
Premiers mots
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It started with the Dome, the Millennium Dome. An urge to walk away from the Teflon meteorite on Bugsby's Marshes. A white thing had been dropped in the mud of the Greenwich peninsual. The ripples had to stop somewhere.
Citations
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London sky described:
'This was one of those London days when the light was no light, a grey hood. Trapped inside a gigantic light-bulb' (p9)
'The day is a London ordinary, pylon-punctured cloud base. Grey duvet flopping overhead' (p48)
'Light is troubled, unnatural. The scarlet scream of the furniture warehouse fights with the graded slate-greys of the road, the river and the sky' (60)
'An off-highway day, sky like porridge. My colour shots, Drummond slouching, hands in pockets, are soft: grey road, grey sky.' (108)
'The sky, this morning, is dull and anxious; a dirty scum of cloud into which lamp standards twist their necks, in a feeding frenzy.' (233)
Derniers mots
Notice de désambigüisation
Directeur de publication
Courtes éloges de critiques
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
In this volume Iain Sinclair sets out to map the vast stretch of urban settlement outside London bounded by the M25. His long journeys - from the Lea Valley to Uxbridge, from Staines to South Mimms - are flanked by the black clouds of smoke from burning carcasses as the foot and mouth panic takes hold. Here he uncovers a history of forgotten villages, suburban utopias and hellish asylums, now transformed into upmarket housing, all the while walking a disappearing landscape, as the countryside is engulfed by commerce.
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