ABSTRACT
It’s difficult to keep pace with Iain Sinclair. His most recent 450-page book, Dining on Stones, follows the equally hefty London Orbital, which at its close anticipates the soon-to-be published walk in the footsteps of poet John Clare from Essex to Northborough and was itself accompanied by the co-authored illustrated prose and poetry text White Goods. These main-line and supplementary texts have run alongside the publication of selections of poems, the volume titled Verbals of conversations with Kevin Jackson, a co-walker in London Orbital, and two Channel 4 videos, Asylum and London Orbital, made with Chris Petit and other familiar collaborators. All these works appeared between 2002 and 2004, and followed, in what we might think of as a London sequence, a little tug boat of a book Sorry Meniscus, pulling a flotilla of articles on the Millennium Dome, and three other books, including a study of J. G. Ballard’s Crash, all published in 1999. If this is flânerie it’s flânerie on fast forward; Sinclair more roadrunner than urban stroller.
