Virginia Woolf's The Waves with Stable Diffusion 2.0

Virginia Woolf’s writing is not only poetic, but also wonderfully visual. At times her masterly fusion of language and visual imagery transcends mere language to become an alchemy of ideas. Take this example in The Waves when Bernard has a sudden epiphany about time:
 

'And time,' said Bernard, 'lets fall its drop. The drop that has formed on the roof of the soul falls. On the roof of my mind time, forming, lets fall its drop. Last week, as I stood shaving, the drop fell. I, standing with my razor in my hand, became suddenly aware of the merely habitual nature of my action (this is the drop forming) and congratulated my hands, ironically, for keeping at it. Shave, shave, shave, I said. Go on shaving. The drop fell. All through the day's work, at intervals, my mind went to an empty place, saying, "What is lost? What is over?" And "Over and done with," I muttered, "over and done with," solacing myself with words. People noticed the vacuity of my face and the aimlessness of my conversation. The last words of my sentence tailed away. And as I buttoned on my coat to go home I said more dramatically, "I have lost my youth."

'It is curious how, at every crisis, some phrase which does not fit insists upon coming to the rescue--the penalty of living in an old civilization with a notebook. This drop falling has nothing to do with losing my youth. This drop falling is time tapering to a point. Time, which is a sunny pasture covered with a dancing light, time, which is widespread as a field at midday, becomes pendant. Time tapers to a point. As a drop falls from a glass heavy with some sediment, time falls. These are the true cycles, these are the true events. Then as if all the luminosity of the atmosphere were withdrawn I see to the bare bottom. I see what habit covers. - p. 157

The merest of notes has furnished Bernard with this image, enabling him to give voice to the realisation that his youth has passed. By stretching time beyond the “old civilisation” he finds himself in, all the way to geological time, the sense of loss in his own life becomes palpable “as a drop falls from a glass heavy with some sediment”.

The Waves is divided into sections that mark the passing of time. At the beginning of each section a short passage describes the movement of the sun at that time of day, with the first starting just before sunrise. It is written in beautiful, painterly language, and I wondered how a text-to-image AI like Stable Diffusion would fare with this language.

Below is my attempt to create accompanying visuals for the first section using Stable Diffusion 2.0. Some were cherry picked after multiple rounds, while others were generated on the first or second attempt, The exact prompts I used are at the end.

The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. 

 

Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.

 

 

As they neared the shore each bar rose, heaped itself, broke and swept a thin veil of white water across the sand. The wave paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously. 

 

Gradually the dark bar on the horizon became clear as if the sediment in an old wine-bottle had sunk and left the glass green. Behind it, too, the sky cleared as if the white sediment there had sunk, or as if the arm of a woman couched beneath the horizon had raised a lamp and flat bars of white, green and yellow spread across the sky like the blades of a fan. Then she raised her lamp higher and the air seemed to become fibrous and to tear away from the green surface flickering and flaming in red and yellow fibres like the smoky fire that roars from a bonfire. 

 

Gradually the fibres of the burning bonfire were fused into one haze, one incandescence which lifted the weight of the woollen grey sky on top of it and turned it to a million atoms of soft blue. The surface of the sea slowly became transparent and lay rippling and sparkling until the dark stripes were almost rubbed out. Slowly the arm that held the lamp raised it higher and then higher until a broad flame became visible; an arc of fire burnt on the rim of the horizon, and all round it the sea blazed gold.

 

The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down. 

 

The sun sharpened the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a blue finger-print of shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank melody outside.

 

Prompts

1.

As the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky, by John Constable

2.

As the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky.
Monet, Ken Bushe, John Kensett

3.

Before dawn, As they neared the shore each bar rose, heaped itself, broke and swept a thin veil of white water across the sand. The wave paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously.
Monet, Ken Bushe, John Kensett

4.

At sunrise by the sea, the sky cleared as if the white sediment there had sunk, or as if the arm of a woman couched beneath the horizon had raised a lamp and flat bars of white, green and yellow spread across the sky like the blades of a fan. Then she raised her lamp higher.
Byron Pickering, Albert Bierstadt, Turner, Henry Moore

5.

The surface of the sea slowly became transparent and lay rippling and sparkling until the dark stripes were almost rubbed out.
Slowly the arm that held the lamp raised it higher and then higher until a broad flame became visible;
an arc of fire burnt on the rim of the horizon, and all round it the sea blazed gold.
Monet, Byron Pickering, Albert Bierstadt, Turner

6.

At sunrise, the light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another.
One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down.
The sun sharpened the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind.
Edward Hopper, Claude Monet

7.

After sunrise in the garden, the sun sharpened the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a blue finger-print of shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window.
The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial.
Edouard Manet, John Constable, Henry Woods, Henry John Sylvester Stannard

Colab notebooks

Stable Diffusion 2.0 - Woctezuma

Stable Diffusion 2.0 - God of AI

 

The Creative Practice of Being in Nature

Like so many, lockdown and the pandemic has afforded me new reasons to explore my local environment, the City as well as Nature. It is an activity I loved pursuing when I first arrived, but it fell by the wayside as I pursued career goals and life became, well, busy.

Together with my partner - who is often the first to suggest it! - I soon found myself walking and cycling many miles in and around London, and I also started reading enthusiastically on relevant topics. After a trip to Epping, for example, I read poetry by John Clare and imagined him walking around High Beach while slowly regaining his spirits. Indeed, it is possible to walk in his footsteps.

The Romantic poets offer a rich bounty for ramblers and lovers of Nature everywhere. While London is also associated with William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley, I've actually never been to the area of the Lake Poets where the Wordsworths and their ilk spent many years. It probably shouldn't have been, but to me it was a surprise to learn that when they first moved to the area it was still considered a wilderness.

Jack Thurston, referring to Daniel Defoe's travels through the North and Cumbria in the 1720s, puts it thus:

"Fear and loathing was the most common reaction to wild and unruly landscapes in those days. It was not without reason. The condition of roads ranged from terrible to non-existent, and travelling was painfully slow. What's more, the weather could be genuinely life-threatening, as Defoe discovered when he was caught in a snowstorm in the South Pennines in August" (Thurston, Lost Lanes North, p.16).

When the Wordsworths settled there it was no doubt becoming more habitable, but not by much. Their literary legacy is now a part of the establishment, so it is instructive to consider that settling there was in fact a countercultural move, an "act of defiance, a wholehearted rejection of the fashionable, metropolitan way of life". It completely changed my perspective on their practice.

There is no question as to Wordsworth's deep love for Nature and the English countryside. Not only his poetry, but just as importantly, his actions attest to this fact. He is estimated to have walked around 175,000 miles. To put that into perspective, you would have to walk a distance of nine and a half miles every single day for 50 years! It is not hard to imagine William and Dorothy walking silently among the fells, each delighting in or meditating on their surroundings and composing thoughts and words for poetry or diary.

William's dictum that "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity" takes on a unique meaning for writing practice when we consider that this is not recollection in the silent privacy of a room. Wordsworth would have been considering those lines in the open air, while walking!

David Gange mentions the historian G.M. Trevelyan who, not unlike Wordsworth, sought to find an antidote to the "absurdity of the city's speed and steel" in romantic wildness that stimulates the imagination. Of past masters Trevelyan particularly esteemed Thomas Carlyle:

"Carlyle walked large distances, gesticulating his way across the moor as he muttered purple prose. While wandering, he dreamed up vivid portraits of great events, expressed with unique intensity in a style soon christened 'Carlylese'. When walking, his companions wrote, Carlyle became a feature of the landscape: 'a living, not extinct volcano whose lava-torrents of fever-frenzy enveloped all things'" - (Gange, The Frayed Atlantic Edge, p. 148).

Neither Trevelyan nor Carlyle saw history or literature as "a thing to be done at a desk in an urban room without something elemental to ignite the imagination". Writing is merely an extension of walking and meditating, and of being immersed in Nature; or to put it differently, "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings [...] recollected in tranquillity".

In The Frayed Atlantic Edge David Gange explores by kayak many of the coastal areas where communities once thrived on open farming and crofting as well as various local industries. One of the most serious blows to local communities' way of life came in the form of the Education Act of 1872, which eroded local Gaelic identity by forcing Gaelic-speaking children to learn only in English. It had a deeply demoralising effect. Another serious blow came in the form of the infamous Clearances when landlords at first sought "agricultural improvement", enclosing the open farmlands of their tenants, and then helped them emigrate once they fell into poverty. As with Wordsworth, cultural practitioners who came to these fringes to foreground romantic wildness over mechnanising efficiency were considered radical, making countercultural statements against the centralising, hegemonising tendencies of the South and of London.

The city can also be a place of creative immersion and rambling, of course, as exemplified by the flaneur and psychogeographer. In this case Blake or De Quincey would instead be our guide. Peter Ackroyd, in London: The Biography, observes that William Wordsworth links the City in The Prelude to a prison:

Of bondage, from yon City’s walls set free,
A prison where he hath been long immured. 

- (lines 7-8)

Elsewhere he also suggests that Wordsworth "recoiled from an innate and exuberant theatricality" in the city, observed in the cacophony of advertisements and the anarchic spirit of a place like Bartholomew Fair. Ackroyd on the other hand revels in the elemental and devouring properties of the City, which enables its enduring greatness, and he appears to consider Wordsworth constitutionally unsuitable to appreciate it. Be that as it may, Wordsworth has more in common with the city flaneur than at first meets the eye. In Michael: A Pastoral Poem (1800), the poet writes:

If from the public way you turn your steps
Up the tumultuous brook of Greenhead Ghyll,
You will suppose that with an upright path
Your feet must struggle; in such bold ascent
The pastoral mountains front you, face to face.
But, courage! for around that boisterous brook
The mountains have all opened out themselves,
And made a hidden valley of their own.
No habitation can be seen; but they
Who journey thither find themselves alone
With a few sheep, with rocks and stones, and kites
That overhead are sailing in the sky.
It is in truth an utter solitude;
Nor should I have made mention of this Dell
But for one object which you might pass by,
Might see and notice not. Beside the brook
Appears a struggling heap of unhewn stones!
And to that simple object appertains
A story—unenriched with strange events, 

- (lines 1-19)

Is such a chance encounter with a random pile of rocks with its own unique story not the very stuff of psychogeography? Indeed, Wordsworth's oeuvre might even be considered 'psychogeography of the countryside'! Incidentally, although Wordsworth wrote many poems that take local people as their subject, none of those I've read personally highlights the discrepancy between the romantic pastoral and the metropolitan centre as poignantly as Michael.

Whether it's in the City or in Nature, there is something inherently exhilarating about being out in the open air and among the elements. It is an experience that is difficult to reason about clearly from a sofa indoors, and perhaps an experience that is even a little alien to many citydwellers. Cloud cover, the cold and the rain is rarely enticing from the warm comfort of the living room, and we grudgingly weather it with a brolly until we get to the muddy, slippery floors of the nearest tube station.

But once I get on the bike something strange happens. At first it is uncomfortable, and then within minutes I am suddenly used to it: the bite of the cold and the feeling of rain on my face herald the joy and freedom of moving around as I breathe the air. It is hard to explain. Out in the countryside this experience is further amplified. Jack Thurston describes it as follows:

"On a bicycle you travel at the speed of the land. You don't just see and hear the world and the weather change around you but you smell it and feel it. Physical effort heightens the sense and you feel everything with a greater clarity - the wind in your hair, the sun on your back, a drenching by rain or the chill of a crisp winter's day. You feel each incline in your legs, in your lungs, and the swooping descent in your stomach, the sway as you lean the bike this way and that to climb a hill or round a bend. The bicycle is a total immersion machine." (Lost Lanes North, p. 13).

Another poet who gave himself over to living close to Nature and immersing himself in the setting is W.S. Graham. He is a modernist romantic poet whose works were neglected during his own lifetime, but have grown in importance in recent decades. He moved from his native Greenock in Scotland to Ireland, and later to Cornwall, which is where he wrote much of his work. David Gange notes that he was a "passionate but foolish lover of the outdoors whose jaunts to wild places sometimes flirted with catastrophe" (The Frayed Atlantic Edge, p. 317). He lived by the sea, and wrote about the sea. In The Nightfishing, a highly ambitious landmark of a poem, the poet is so thoroughly engaged in the activity of setting out amidst the waves, it is difficult to separate the poet's self from the boat and the haul and the sea, and the very act of writing:

In those words through which I move, leaving a cry
Formed in exact degree and set dead at
The mingling flood, I am put forward on to
Live water, clad in oil, burnt by salt
To life. Here, braced, announced on to the slow
Heaving seaboards, almost I am now too
Lulled. And my watch is blear. The early grey
Air is blowing.

- (stanza 20)

If we consider the close relationship between the mind, the self, the body, and the environment, it should be little wonder that the manner in which we occupy and surround ourselves - what we immerse ourselves in - pervades our souls. To put that in perspective, contrast it with Thomas Berardi's observations regarding the incredible economic and capitalist success of South Korea, as quoted by Slavoj Žižek:

"After coloinzation and wars, after dictatorship and starvation, the South Korean mind, liberated by the burden of the natural body, smoothly entered the digital sphere with a lower degree of cultural resistance than virtually any other populations in the world." (Trouble in Paradise, p.6 - my emphasis)

The mind, untethered by the body, adapts more easily to the homogenising and automating demands of virtual and digital acceleration driving capitalism in the 21st century. By contrast, the physical body, when immersed in the slow-moving physical world is naturally at odds with such a fast-paced, fast-changing world.

Language itself performs a linking and cultivating function. Wordsworth may have loved the countryside he wrote about, but the beauty of his works also invited the public to a part of the country that has today become rather more tamed, not least in order to cater to all the tourists. Here we see the structural dissonance of the relationship between the city and the countryside. It is a tension between the demands of modern civilisation and the rhythms of Nature that are nowhere better expressed than in the symptoms of climate change, which looks likely to be humanity's defining struggle during at least the first half of the 21st century.

A city like London, with its rivers, parks, canals, gardens and woodlands, offers many hybrid environments in which we may tune into the outdoor experience. Not all of us are artists or poets like the Wordsworths or W.S. Graham. Most of us are simply trying to earn our keep. But perhaps by being immersed in Nature we, too, can tap into that exhilarating creativity that they accessed and - who knows - learn to fully live in our bodies and rediscover our tether to Mother Nature.

Finally, here is Grasmere (a fragment) by Dorothy Wordsworth:

Peaceful our valley, fair and green,
And beautiful her cottages,
Each in its nook, its sheltered hold,
Or underneath its tuft of trees.
Many and beautiful they are;
But there is one that I love best,
A lowly shed, in truth, it is,
A brother of the rest.
Yet when I sit on rock or hill,
Down looking on the valley fair,
That Cottage with its clustering trees
Summons my heart; it settles there.
Others there are whose small domain
Of fertile fields and hedgerows green
Might more seduce a wanderer's mind
To wish that there his home had been.
Such wish be his! I blame him not,
My fancies they perchance are wild
--I love that house because it is
The very Mountains' child.
Fields hath it of its own, green fields,
But they are rocky steep and bare;
Their fence is of the mountain stone,
And moss and lichen flourish there.
And when the storm comes from the North
It lingers near that pastoral spot,
And, piping through the mossy walls,
It seems delighted with its lot.
And let it take its own delight;
And let it range the pastures bare;
Until it reach that group of trees,
--It may not enter there!
A green unfading grove it is,
Skirted with many a lesser tree,
Hazel and holly, beech and oak,
A bright and flourishing company.
Precious the shelter of those trees;
They screen the cottage that I love;
The sunshine pierces to the roof,
And the tall pine-trees tower above.
When first I saw that dear abode,
It was a lovely winter's day:
After a night of perilous storm
The west wind ruled with gentle sway;
A day so mild, it might have been
The first day of the gladsome spring;
The robins warbled, and I heard
One solitary throstle sing.
A Stranger, Grasmere, in thy Vale,
All faces then to me unknown,
I left my sole companion-friend
To wander out alone.
Lured by a little winding path,
I quitted soon the public road,
A smooth and tempting path it was,
By sheep and shepherds trod.
Eastward, toward the lofty hills,
This pathway led me on
Until I reached a stately Rock,
With velvet moss o'ergrown.
With russet oak and tufts of fern
Its top was richly garlanded;
Its sides adorned with eglantine
Bedropp'd with hips of glossy red.
There, too, in many a sheltered chink
The foxglove's broad leaves flourished fair,
And silver birch whose purple twigs
Bend to the softest breathing air.
Beneath that Rock my course I stayed,
And, looking to its summit high,
"Thou wear'st," said I, "a splendid garb,
Here winter keeps his revelry.
"Full long a dweller on the Plains,
I griev'd when summer days were gone;
No more I'll grieve; for Winter here
Hath pleasure gardens of his own.
"What need of flowers? The splendid moss
Is gayer than an April mead;
More rich its hues of various green,
Orange, and gold, & glittering red."
--Beside that gay and lovely Rock
There came with merry voice
A foaming streamlet glancing by;
It seemed to say "Rejoice!"
My youthful wishes all fulfill'd,
Wishes matured by thoughtful choice,
I stood an Inmate of this vale
How could I but rejoice?

Some thoughts on Hackney, that Rose-Red Empire

I’ve had Iain Sinclair’s “Hackney, that Rose-Red Empire” on my shelf for a few years now, finally picking it up to read late last year. As you can tell, it took a while. As a Hackney resident myself, I was very excited to delve into it. Yet it didn’t quite live up to its billing for me. In a phrase: too much anecdote, too little history. But I did finish it after all, so that can't be the full story. This blog post is partly an attempt to understand why I feel this way.

Where to start? The best way to describe it, perhaps, is as a sprawling work of psychogeography about a single London borough, Hackney. Conceptually, I appreciate the book’s unsystematic construction. Yes, we are given chapter headings of many Hackney places like Gore Road, Montague Road, Stonebridge Estate, etc. and also of people, Stewart Home, Swanny, and so on. Yet these individual nodes never cohere, nor attempt to cohere, to a clear system. Dalston Lane is very close to Montague Road on a map, but they are several chapters apart in the book. Instead, places are visited by the happenstance of social encounters, or as part of detective work into certain lines of urban and cultural research, the significance of which is often dwelled on but not usually explained very clearly. They manifest as hunches, coincidences and synergies. I’ll return to this “detective” persona shortly.

This freeform experimental and intuitive approach is very much a psychogeographer’s: wandering, drifting, one day in Victoria Park, another in Dalston, and so on, sometimes weaving back over the same territory. In reality, however, it can be frustrating for the reader. I personally know many of the places mentioned, having ventured there myself, and am also quite familiar with psychogeography. Even so, I found the jumps in topic, person, and place a little disconcerting at times. 

Like someone wandering through a city borough without a map, the book's pleasures are often obtained by stumbling upon a topic or place of interest, or making a connection. The problem is, what is interesting to the author isn't always interesting to the reader in the same way. So while this approach makes the book conceptually interesting, it can impede the reader, who is often caught in medias res. 

Another way of starting is perhaps to reference someone else’s reading of it. The Artizan reading group in fact echoed many of my own reflections, and their summary is fitting:

“On the whole, we appeared to have found the thing interesting enough, but it was a different animal to Sinclair’s London Orbital, which the group took on some years ago. That book was a dense local history travelogue with some personal anecdote. This one was more of a collection of personal anecdote with some local history squeezed in. Gonzo stuff.“

Their observations also offer a segue into a topic that I believe is central to the conceit of the “documentary fiction” that is the book, namely the question of the narrator. There are a number of ghosts in the book, and none of them more salient than the author himself. We get many glimpses of his life in the late 60s, 70s and onward - personal anecdotes, descriptions of video, his family, friends, former housemates. 

In particular, the reading group wondered about the character called Kaporal, whether he was real or not: “Kaporal, a seedy-sounding researcher of scandal who hangs himself, we’d bet [he] was pure invention”. 

In fact, my contention would be that Kaporal is Sinclair’s ghostly research twin or alter-ego, a bit like Poe’s William Wilson, who is referenced in the book. He appears to admit as much, without directly saying it, when Oona Grimes answers the author’s knock at her studio, mistaking him for her neighbour:

“‘I thought you were the fellow in the next studio’” (p. 467)

Suddenly, Sinclair becomes “convinced Kaporal had the next unit, the Finsbury Park cold store was his kind of place” (p. 467), and a few paragraphs down the transformation is complete:

“Kaporal’s metal tins, his film archive, had that effect. For his nameplate on his studio door, he used a card of a rucksacked figure tramping down a country road. There was a name: SINCLAIR. And a phone number. Mine. 

‘It’s uncanny,’ Oona said. ‘Kaporal has exactly your look. The drooping shoulders, the weight of the world, managed despair. Even the Masai Barefoot Technology trainers. In the wrong size.” (p. 467-8)

It would explain why Kaporal ostensibly commits suicide: the author - a bit like the director in Fellini's 8½ - sometimes ends up dithering when the various difficulties of writing "the Hackney book" takes its toll. So in this sense Kaporal is transformed into an alterego who "gives up the ghost" during the fraught process of this writing, as if he might be an offering to the writing gods. I mean no disrespect - Kaporal may well be a real person, in which case this is null and void, and I am out of line. But the author himself appears to believe that Kaporal may have faked his own death, which gives further credence to this sleight of hand:

"Impossible to tell if Kaporal was dead, the man with a rope around his neck, trouser cuffs wet with dew, in the churchyard of St. John's, or if this was another instance of the shady researcher's ability to plant false information in the local press (where he has excellent contacts), before absorbing a new identity in a more obscure corner of London" (p. 460)

This is not the only time there is a case of mistaken identity in the book. Quite late on, Sinclair briefly mistakes his own daughter, Farne, for his wife, Anna. It happens just after their grandchild is born, when he glimpses Farne pushing the baby buggy. It is a poignant moment that signals a certain passing of the torch to a new generation, and the potential for history to continue old threads. 

These ghosts take the book to some of its greatest heights. None are more moving, to me, than the references to Margaret Muller, the artist murdered in Victoria Park in 2003 and whose case remains unsolved to this day. She is mentioned quite early on in the book, at which time I had to look her up as I hadn't heard of her before. The thread is continued later when Sinclair interviews Jock McFadyen. Muller was one of his students. McFadyen was deeply affected by her passing.

During the interview, which Sinclair records on a tape, they are walking through Victoria Park. Halfway through “I cut the tape when we passed the pathway where Margaret Muller was attacked, between the rose garden and the children’s adventure playground” (p. 523). This moment of respect marks that which cannot be said, something that can't be recorded. 

Later, on the trail of the Hackney Brook with Robert MacFarlane and Renchi, they come across another ghostly echo:

“the most memorable of Macfarlane’s discoveries came by the path beside the rose garden, as we made for Hackney Wick. He parted a curtain of willow to disclose a white life mask of the murdered Margaret Muller. Staring, through thick foliage, at the fatal spot.” (p. 547).

The theme of Margaret Muller echoes right up until the present, when violence against women are receiving renewed attention after the murder of Sarah Everard, the subsequent vigils, and controversy around the police’s response.

Despite the thread going cold over the years, there are still recent posts on Reddit following up on Muller’s unsolved murder case. It makes the book part of a wider cultural memory that continues to have relevance.

Other people and themes, some recurrent like Jean-Luc Godard and Orson Welles, no longer seem relevant in the same way. Their connection to the borough are rather too tenuous and speculative (to borrow the Artizan reading group’s apt descriptions) to warrant inclusion to the length that they have been. As footnotes they add flavour, but the descriptions don’t elevate them to a relevance they might (or might not) have had 40 years ago. That’s my opinion anyway. That’s not to say that they’re without cultural interest, just that the topics go on for too long. Better yet, they would have benefited from having their significance explained to a contemporary reader. 

At any rate, I’d never heard of Godard’s London documentaries, and quickly set out to watch two of them: Sympathy for the Devil and British Sounds. The Godard documentaries connect, through their left-leaning sympathies, with other characters and groups interviewed and mentioned: Anna Mendelssohn and the Angry Brigade, and Astrid Proll and the Red Army Faction.

Nevertheless, it got me thinking that perhaps the author misjudged some of his subjects' relevance to contemporary audiences. Ok, so Jayne Mansfield once visited Hackney, but there are many other famous people who have passed through Hackney over the years, in more concrete ways. What about them? 

The crux of the problem, I believe, can be traced back to the choice of narrative persona. Even the Guardian review, largely favourable about the book, concedes that “his tough-guy, domineering prose can sometimes get wearing”. In this case, the Guardian writer in fact means that the Hackney book improves on this tendency because “Here, this writer of compelling monologues lets in other voices, and the book is warmer and more powerful as a result”. While it is true that the various interviews are some of the best bits in the book, does it not actually reflect less well on the author’s own prose, considering it makes up the vast majority of the book?

The persona, for me, is something out of hardboiled detective fiction. Full of certainties and stubby sentences.

Here is Sinclair, describing an event at the town hall where he was going to speak:

“Anna joined me at the bar; she had agreed, reluctantly, to take her place at high table, alongside the mayor, the lady mayoress, Hackney notables (notable to themselves) - and the New Labour minister (weather and sport), who had drawn the short straw. Bicycle people in gypsy skirts, hoop earrings, black trainers, yellow tabards, luminescent Alice bands, wheeled their machines up the disabled ramp, into the Grand Assembly Hall.” (p. 323)

This is Philip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep:

“Shaved, dressed and lightly breakfasted I was at the Hall of Justice in less than an hour. I rode up to the seventh floor and went along to the group of small offices used by the D.A.’s men. Ohls’s was no larger than the others, but he had it to himself. There was nothing on his desk but a blotter, a cheap pen set, his hat and one of his feet.” (p. 47) 

Aside from the incidental Hall that both excerpts have in common, both narrators share a fondness for short, abrupt sentence clauses, exhibiting a kind of tough exterior. But whereas Chandler’s prose (and indeed a lot of other hardboiled fiction) shows a protagonist full of earthy confidence, ready to engage, Sinclair’s protagonist is more reticent and complex, a character whose description of specifics (“hoop earrings”, “yellow tabards”) belie the ungraspable wholes they aspire to describe (Hackney).  And therein lies the problem. 

Sinclair clearly realises his dilemma:

“If I wrote a harmless sentence such as ‘everything was zeroing in on the Victory in Vyner Street’, I struck it out, as over-freighted, lazy, and altogether false in its suggestion that my fractured narrative of manipulated facts, poorly recorded and inaccurately transcribed interviews, could achieve resolution” (p. 417)

Overconfidence wouldn’t do. So the narrator, this tough-guy persona, is at best a type of ironic, slightly comic character. A quixotic detective, chasing the windmills of place and history in Hackney. The thing is, there is plenty of history in Hackney he could be telling the reader, yet chooses not to. We are told about Edmond Halley, the Hollow Earth, and a number of related themes around tunnelling and ley lines. Even Globe Town is mentioned. There is a lot of elliptical allusion, but not enough to sink one's teeth into properly. A bit more actual history would have been enormously welcome. Less anecdote. Thank you.

Some of this ironic comedy, the sense of “a man inside his own head” while walking the borough, is notable in mistakes and errors of judgment he makes. One of the earliest, and certainly one of the most memorable, occurs in the first chapter when a youth pelts him with a rotten egg while he’s out walking near London Fields. He thinks, desperately, that he’s been stabbed - until he discovers the remnants of egg shell later. He has the good grace to see humour in it.

Nevertheless, the inclusion of this incident also highlights a notable void in the book. The youth disappears into the Fields Estate, “a warren”. The author is understandably shaken, although thankfully not seriously harmed. He later finds out it is a tactic of car-jackers in the area, and is sympathetic to their plight. Earlier, he even describes muggings as “a toll on the privilege of living here” (p. 10). 

These sentiments are admirable, but the void is that in nearly 600 pages of book the reader becomes none the wiser about the lives of the real people who might be involved in these activities in the borough. Their voices are not directly included in the narrative. Not even a single interview.

This is probably an unfair criticism, because there are so many other people he talks to, people of a forgotten Hackney, an act which is a service to posterity. Yet the truth is that anyone coming to Hackney can’t help but to be struck by all the estates that dominate the skyline. What of these lives and places? It cannot be called a definitive book about Hackney without the psychogeography and perspectives that those places hold.

Perhaps, at that time (mid to late noughties), it was still viewed as too dangerous to contemplate engaging with the estates as a serious option. Or perhaps it was considered and rejected.  There is indeed a part early in the book when Rob Petit questions people living on the Holly Street Estate, via a questionnaire. We also learn a bit about the history and reputation of this notorious estate, demolished in the 90s. It is one of the few places in the book where readers get an insight into this world, and it is most welcome. I certainly learned something and was able to follow it up with my own researches. Nevertheless, there is so much more left unsaid and on the whole it seems like a missed opportunity.

I would like to finish my argument against the author’s choice of narrator with one of rather too many instances where the tendency towards tough-guy terse certainty crosses a line by assuming too much. In the chapter on Victoria Park, the author observes:

“A darkman, stripped to the waist, was running through his martial arts routine on the bandstand. Harming invisibles with spiteful kicks. Rain-clouds massed.” (p. 337)

The description here is not an unfamiliar sight in the borough, at least not these days. In my local park there are regular martial arts practitioners, Capoeira as well as Wing Chun, practicing outdoors as a result of the pandemic lockdown. The bit that is strange is the description of the kicks being “spiteful”. Spiteful to whom? And are they really spiteful, or is that his projection / interpretation? It may even be true, but we have no way of knowing. It strikes me as telling, rather than showing. 

But the problem goes further. If we include the fact it is presumably a black man (a “darkman”) the description leaves a strange taste, considering the author has included almost no black voices in the book. That is quite a large demographic to exclude: 

“The 2011 Census estimates that around 40% of the population come from black and minority ethnic groups with the largest group (approximately 20%) being black or black British.” - Hackney Gov

I’m sure the author meant no real offence. Rather, it seems to follow from the narrative persona's spikiness and compulsive projection of certainties (elsewhere called "hard-earned prejudices") onto what he observes around him. As I contend elsewhere, this is in direct contrast to the (lack of) graspableness of the larger topic of Hackney, something the author is only too clearly keenly aware of. In spite of his apparent reserve, I don't doubt his interest in other people, including lives lived in the margins, as his interest in people living in Hackney Wick and the Lower Lea Valley for example evidences. But the effect here, cumulative after a while, is a bit bothersome.

Someone in the Artizan reading group thought Sinclair might be “one of the grumpiest old men in print”. Reading that made me laugh, as in my own mind I had definitely been thinking of him as a bit of a curmudgeon. Nevertheless, I would suggest that it once more follows from the chosen narrative persona. The prose actually improves considerably - in my view - around the time of the Will Self excursion, more than two thirds into the book. The strict persona is abandoned, and the prose flows more naturally. There just seems to be a bit more purpose to the writing.

It is also interesting to compare Sinclair's narrative style to Peter Ackroyd’s. Ackroyd is what I would call a myth maker. In his book “London: The Biography” London is this vast beast that consumes everyone who enters it. London is more than the sum of its parts, more than any of the many, many influential people who have passed through it. You are never left in any doubt about that. Instead of getting lost in the fractals, Ackroyd speaks in broad themes, drawing you in with juicy factoids. Not all of the details hold up to scrutiny, but they always help to illustrate the particular topic he has in mind. He's a kind of cultural salesman, amplifying his message. He ensures that the big picture is kept in front of the reader at all times. That is a considerable achievement, even if it traverses the thinnest of lines between truth and myth. 

It is almost the opposite of Sinclair’s fractured approach that almost wilfully eschews bold themes and a grand narrative. Sinclair's Hackney is almost an abstraction, a place definable only by its outline on a map - if at all. But isn't that a cop-out? The difference is instructive, because Hackney certainly hasn’t always had the benefit of being centre stage to London’s great dramas. But then there are lost opportunities here too: what of people like Mary Wollstonecraft, someone whose influence and legacy as a founding feminist thinker is global and profound? What of the social housing experiments? Clearly the latter is one of the unmistakeable postwar features of a bombed out East London, and Hackney in particular; more so if one includes its relation to the long history of social housing in the East End.

To be fair, I don’t envy Sinclair the making of the book. He was clearly operating under a lot of constraints, not least of which would have been restrictions about what he could include from his interviews with various people. 

The interviews are some of the best bits, without a doubt, but all the namedropping gets a bit tedious. Someone at Penguin should have curbed these tendencies. More history, less anecdote. Thank you.

Lest my critique puts anyone off reading the book completely, I should point out that there are many good reasons to read the book. Sinclair's musings on artists and writers connected to the borough can be idiosyncratic, but it is also sometimes of genuine significance. One of his great achievements is to pull certain characters out of relative obscurity and back into the light. Names that have remained with me include Anna Mendelssohn, Alexander Baron, David Widgery, Sheila Rowbotham, and Roland Camberton. Out of these, the story of Roland Camberton is probably my favourite. Without giving too much away, Sinclair does real detective work to uncover more about this mysterious author who was almost lost to posterity. Camberton's "Rain on the Pavements" is now on my reading list. 

Another is his reminder of developments in the borough that were built on dodgy dealings and scant regard for local cultural significance. The loss of the Four Aces Club (later Club Labyrinth) is such a case, something I knew nothing about.

These stories, scattered though they are, make the book worth the effort, and is the reason I did not give up in spite of its more dissuasive features. It's been a valuable guide and full of local relevance. And the last line is worth a mention: it is superb. 

But I had to work for these pleasures, and that may not be everyone’s cup of tea.