While your trans-disciplinary problematics (historically) effectively-sublate any (modernity-inscribed) specificities of contemporary (narrative) organisational contiguity, I do think such functional boundaries and their immanent negation sucessfully proliferate the both formal and thematic principles seen in Ballard / Sinclair – activating chronographical ambition, and opening intimate singularities of trans-disciplinary association.

This however results in a seductive melancholia of siteless, non-replicable speculation of their collective symbolic capital, and a formal de-structuring of all such similarly stylistically-magnetised, meta-literary constellations.

While such an emphatic Blakean mapping of these taxonomised (nodal) points of intertextual mediation ontologically deodorize any unmediated commerce re: dialogical-spatial configuration, it also immanently inscribes their ahistorical limitations to a set of technically pre-determined anthropological pivot-spaces – a dominant historical chronotope where irresistible submission to contemporary forms of globalised commodity culture fail in their absolute self-dissolution, mutating into a contemporary dialectic of abstraction and anthropological dislocation..

Shit; it’s 7:07am. I’m knackered and could really do with some organic fruit juice. But I’m out.
Anyhow Laters, Henry Swanson

ps. “The moral validity of a writer’s methods” means the manner in which one treats the important subjects under one’s care – that is, if one has some undeclared andor undiscovered bias; in Sinclair’s case, does he prefer discussing eg. polite, white-skinned middle class historical figurines? (I don’t know since I’ve only skimmed London Orbital, but I might yet dig Rodinsky’s Room.) If so, might this perhaps tip us off to his particular underlying set of (potentially Eurocentrifical) socio-cultural assumptions with which he approaches his material?

More constructively, I think it would be interesting to look at the article in the light of Sinclair’s comments about place and mythology during his discussion with Mike Moorcock and Alan Moore earlier this year, a video of which can be found (in two parts) at http://www.multiverse.org/media/MMLondon1.wmv and http://www.multiverse.org/media/MMLondon2.wmv; (the comments are in the second part, in response to a question from the audience 10 minutes 25 seconds in).

I was particularly struck by Sinclair’s comment about the need to create a mythology in order to avoid getting overwhelmed by other people’s mythologies. That, it seems to me, is similar to the underlying thread that runs through Ballard’s novels of suburbia, and especially “The Unlimited Dream Company” and “Kingdom Come”, that we need to use our imagination or we will be devoured by somebody else’s imagination (all too graphically devoured in UDC!). In a sense, the problematic that Sinclair and Ballard address is the same, but their ways of finding a way out are different … to simplify, Ballard’s starting point is typically to accept the external and then initiate change from the internal. But perhaps it’s moot how much Sinclair’s “creation of mythologies”, if that’s what it is, really differs from Ballard.

I’m not sure what the ‘moral validity’ of a writer’s ‘methods’ might mean either.

As it was, I thought I was Tony Hancock back in his bedsit, trying yet failing to dig Bertie Russel. In the end he gives up and chooses another more managable title; “Ah, that’s more like it – Lady Don’t Fall Backwards” (Into My Swimming Pool.. I’ve Just Had It Drained.)

Some quotes from the above article: “Diminish the singularity” / “Re-asserting a poetics of place only through the textual introjection of that which would historically challenge it” – as they might clasically reply in old London, “-You what, mate?”

I agree with the reviewer on Amazon who said of Sinclair’s London Orbital “This is an extremely verbose piece of writing, very difficult and frustrating to read and on the whole not worth the effort. The constant spurious connections made and onslaught of irrelevant references is simply annoying rather than clever.” (Hmm – sounds like stuff I write..)

Anyhow, the thing is there seem to be few others as proficient in the conceptual arenas Sinclair loves talking about – which is a shame. Personally I distrust his artistic motives and have doubts about the moral validity of his methods. Like, you know that scene in Platoon where the soldiers ask Sheen why he joined the War? He outlines his reasons; the reply is “Sheet.. gotta be rich in the first place to think like that.” This might well apply to both Sinclair’s writing – and Mr. Cunningham’s peice.

Giving postmodernism the really bad name(s) it really deserves,
Henry Swanson