Ballardian

In this Guardian review of a recent V&A talk, the reviewer mentions Ballard’s tribute to Iain Sinclair and Will Self in Miracles:

Towards the end of his new memoir, Miracles of Life, JG Ballard singles out two literary soulmates: Iain Sinclair, “the Odysseus of the M25″; and Will Self, “a remarkable writer, almost seven feet in height with a tall man’s constant surprise at the mundane world far below him”. So it was right and proper that Ballard was himself name-checked more than once when Sinclair and Self met at the V&A to discuss psychogeography.

I suppose there is a superficial point of convergence with the writing of these three — Self with his interest in bizarre sex and distended suburbia, Sinclair with his haunted urban archaeology, both circumnavigating the M25 of literature back to Ballard — while the influence of Ballard’s outsider status and perspective on both is undeniable.

But to bring Sinclair and Self together to talk about psychogeography seems bizarre. I wonder what mystical forces aligned for this to happen? Consider what Sinclair had to say in Tim Chapman’s interview with him:

TC: Psychogeography is quite a buzzword now; Will Self’s got his column in the Independent…

IS: Which to me has absolutely no connection whatsoever to whatever psychogeography was originally, or in its second incarnation. It was something very specific in Paris in the 50s and 60s — the Lettrists and Situationists had this politicised conceptual movement called Psychogeography. Then it was reinvented into London with people like Stewart Home and the London Psychogeographical Association, who mixed those ideas with ideas of ley lines and Earth mysteries and cobbled it together as a provocation, and I took it on from that point. Now it’s just become this brand name for more or less anything that’s vaguely to do with walking or vaguely to do with the city. It’s a new form of tourism.

TC: Is there any mileage left in it?

IS: No, I don’t think so, other than if someone can brand it and promote it, which they are doing. Once these little pocket books appear with an easy readers’ guide which can take you back to Ballard or de Quincey or Debord or wherever you want to go, it’s a route map where everything’s laid out for you. It’s very strange. I’m not quite sure why that happened.

And this from Sinclair, in an interview over at Classic Cafes:

Psychogeography is a talismanic term that Sinclair understands to have been cannibalised from French situationism. [Sinclair says:] “For me, it’s a way of psychoanalysing the psychosis of the place in which I happen to live. I’m just exploiting it because I think it’s a canny way to write about London. Now it’s become the name of a column by Will Self, in which he seems to walk the South Downs with a pipe, which has got absolutely nothing to do with psychogeography. There’s this awful sense that you’ve created a monster.”

Being stranded in Oz, I wasn’t there, so I wonder if the V&A talk thrashed this out? Doubt it; I’m sure the Guardian review would have noted it. So, a missed opportunity on Iain’s part?

Perhaps the publication of Miracles brought them together…as the review says, the talk saw both Sinclair and Self pay tribute to Ballard in the end:

Sinclair, the godfather of modern psychogeographers, talked of the method’s early practitioners — De Quincey, Baudelaire, the situationists — as well as his own reverence for outsider figures, from Blake to Ballard…

Before long the conversation got back to ley lines, shopping centres and Ballard, hailed by Self as “the purest psychogeographer of us all”.

Well, that’s all very well and good, but I’m going to leave the last word to JGB, lifted from my own interview with him:

SS: There’s a recent book that has co-opted you into the psychogeographical literary movement.

JGB: I’ve seen that book. It doesn’t apply to me. No, that’s Iain Sinclair’s terrain.