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juliansummerhayes · 6 months ago

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Daily diary: Thursday, 16 May 2024

KEEPING THE STAR

Keep this star for when you lose the world, when grief and desire become a blurred door that floats away across a plain room without books or kisses. Look to what grows dark beyond the walls, that in night which holds the blue sky singing in its black embrace. It's all spun around a necessary star, star of prisons. Keep it: It has the power to burst from dull thoughts, breathe in airless colors, and roll back the filth of our neglect. Let it pour through the chimney hole patched with tin! Unloved objects-- empty jars, faces in clippings, balls of hair spurned by the brush-- all the children of failure will step forward in its blinding wind, sons and daughters of that before which there is no trivial being.

It’s 05:22 as I type the above words – I am big fan of Thomas R. Smith’s work. I have a cup of coffee waiting to be poured; and the sun is just beginning its ascent across the blue/black sky.

Such is the start of my day.

Why do I do it?

What?

Get up so early?

A habit I suppose; and it’s one that’s been with me for as long as my ragged and dishevelled memory can remember. I know why. Because I feel I’d be wasting my life otherwise. Odd, eh? Very odd. But there it is. It’ll be with me, or so I expect, until the bitter end.

As of today, well, I’ll do a bit more tidying up of my office and I need to check over my camping gear. I’ll tidy up the house – there’s not much to do – and, as I did yesterday afternoon, I’ll go for a walk. I’m thinking of heading out towards the South West Coast Path or at least close to the sea. I don’t want to drive very far but it would be good to breathe in the sea air and feel the waves beneath my feet.

After today, I’ve got Friday left before I start at my new in-house job. I can’t say that I’m approaching it with any relish especially because I was hoping that my wife and I might have left behind, even if temporarily, our “work” to go on a pilgrimage around the British Isles. Sometimes, these things are not meant to be. Still, I should be grateful for small mercies and if it means I’ve got to spin plates for a few more months then so be it. I mean, what else will I do with myself?

I’ll also read Tim Lilburn’s wonderful book “Living In The World…”. The writing is on another level, and it’s making me want to read Plato which he references a few times in the book. After I finish his book, I’m hoping that “Vale Royal” arrives. This is the book by Aidan Andrew Dun that I shared a while back via a talk that he gave on the book. If you didn’t see that then below is what is said on Aidan’s website about the book:

VALE ROYAL

The valley of the lost Fleet River in Kings Cross is surrounded by the old hills of London, the high places. Vale Royal is a geographical vessel, a symbolic container of the quiet mind, a perfect place to realise the vision of oneness. In the poem Vale Royal the cosmic lifecycle of the Sunchild, the Mighty Youth, born with a vision and dying an early death, reflects the exiled life and redemption of the artist. Chatterton and Blake play his role in the work’s two movements.

Vale Royal moves with the ease and clarity of a fresh spring over ancient stones, making its myths casual even colloquial – an impressive achievement.

Derek Walcott

He has an extraordinary sense of the past. He’s one of those people, along with Blake and Chatterton and others, who are like a divining rod for history.

Peter Ackroyd

So, all in all, a nice quiet day.

If there’s a postscript to today’s diary it’s the fact that Eddie and Alf are now with daughter #3 which makes the house very quiet. But I will do my obligatory walks around South Brent if only to see if I can capture the light with a few photos which has been my way for a very long time.

Take care one and all.

Blessings,

Julian

#diary #julian summerhayes #devon #south west coast path #thomas r smith #aidan andrew dun #vale royal

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tartantombraider · 6 years ago

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Lighting out for the Territory- X Marks the Spot!

Today marks the twenty third anniversary of the first meeting of two key London authors, Iain Sinclair and Aidan Andrew Dun, in the churchyard of St. Pancras Old Church in North London. The meeting is recounted in some detail in Chapter Four of Sinclair's account of his perambulations in and around the Capital and its suburbs, 'Lights Out for the Territory', published by Granta Books back in 1997. The meeting, which was intended to set the stage for another event, Mike Goldmark's 'Return of the Reforgotten', a major poetry event which was to take place in October of that year at the Royal Albert Hall, was to occur just two days after the thirty first anniversary of the International Poetry Incarnation; another similar event that had likewise taken place at the Royal Albert Hall on the 11th June 1965.

Much of Sinclair's work treads a very fine line between fact and fiction. Indeed, as the writer, broadcaster and critic Peter Ackroyd points out in his review of 'Lights Out for the Territory', Sinclair 'has an unnerving habit of turning his friends and acquaintances into fictional characters'. In view of this it should perhaps come as no surprise that, on 30th May, less than a three weeks before the first anniversary of the Grenfell Tower Fire, a long term associate and collaborator of Sinclair's, in the person of Andrew O'Hagan, published a lengthy series of essays on the tragedy, which in many ways is itself little more than a work of fiction.

The publication of O'Hagan's response to the blaze and its effects on the community in which it took place coincided with a highly publicized Radio 4 interview, which has since been uploaded to the controversial 'Guido Fawkes' website. In the days that followed, after it had been discovered that liberties had been taken with some of the material that had been provided by members of the community who had suffered as a result of the conflagration, a lengthy response appeared on the Grenfell Action Group blog under the heading 'O'Hagan and his Ivory Tower'.

The same day a mainstream media exclusive appeared on the Talk Radio website, under the heading 'London Review of Books used quotes without consent in Grenfell article, interviewee claims'. The article had been written in response to a complaint about the article which had been submitted to the London Review of Books by one Melanie Coles, which was subsequently published online by Noha Maher, whose brother had perished in the Grenfell Tower fire. The following day, the 6th June 2018, the New Statesman followed suit with an article headed Andrew O’Hagan’s Grenfell essay attacks “the narrative” – but creates a flawed one of its own'. In spite of the surprise and consternation of all those involved, however, those of us who are familiar with the London Review of Books and its work realized a long time ago that this is standard practice for the LRB and many of its contributors, most notably, Iain Sinclair.

Although I myself am not named anywhere in Iain Sinclair's 'Lights Out for the Territory', I have good reason to believe that I am the self same individual to whom paragraph three on page 157 of the Granta paperback edition of the work directly refers. Like some of the real people who contributed to O'Hagan's work, what I have said and what I have done appears to have been 'fictionalized' in Sinclair's account of how Aidan Andrew Dun's equally fictional and largely pseudo-historical 'epic' poem 'Vale Royal', a work that would later be reviewed by Sinclair in the London Review of Books, came to be published in the first place.

The claim, for example, that Peter Ackroyd, had been sent the poem not long after it had arrived with Goldmark publishing by Sinclair himself, perhaps as early as 1988, is put to flight by this short missive from the author of 'Hawksmoor', written to the present writer not long after a chance meeting in a Richmond bookshop in 1990, which is embedded below. The text reads 'Thank you for sending me the typescript of the poem 'Vale Royal'. I find the subject interesting because I once wrote a novel about the stranger aspects of the London churches, and because I am now working on a biography of W. Blake. I really have no influence with publishers, and so your friend must excuse me in that direction. In the next few days I shall return the typescript under separate cover- as I presume you will want it back'. Beneath the previously transcribed message, in the same blue black ink, as the browser of this blog will clearly see, is the signature of Peter Ackroyd.

The day before the response to O'Hagan's article appeared on the Grenfell Action Group blog, another lengthy piece entitled 'Sympathy for the Council: Some comments on Andrew O'Hagan's Grenfell Tower article' appeared on the libcom.org website. The article, which is currently displayed on a website which describes itself as 'a resource for all people who wish to fight to improve their lives, their communities and their working conditions' seems suggestive of O'Hagan's apparent sympathy for the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Whatever the truth as regards the latter, the paper trail actually appears to lead somewhere altogether even more sinister. And, like the demoniacal aspects of both Sinclair and Ackroyd's fiction, the landscape is as much a part of the story as the characters in Aidan Andrew Dun's pseudo-historical poem. More about this in a future post.

#aidan andrew dun #peter ackroyd #iain sinclair #lights out for the territory #vale royal

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