Hawksmoor

[sufi]

1986 was the last year that some author said you could set a story, before the rate of technological change made everything go anachronistic

It's remiss that there's no thread for this seminal work of Londone h*untology - i'm sure everyone here read it and dissed it among these pages already - woops claims he read it and forgot it, but also that he has no time for the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy. Anyway at £1 courtesy of bhf green lanes - i just read it for the first time at last, mostly on the "Weaver line" through the East End

the first central conceit about the churches is lifted squarely from Sinclair - straight along the East London line, and the second conceit - the time shift, has become standard, the women characters are appalling and it feels like chaotic juvenilia or a personal project he lost control of, but it's a Greate Booke now, is it not? or Whye notte?

I suspect it also lifts a fair bit from mighty beloved forgotten pre-internet tomes like the Opies' magificent now obscure time capsule Language & Lore of Schoolchildren https://archive.org/details/lorelanguageofsc0000iona and the wonderful cornucopia Brewers Dictionary of Phrase and Fable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewer's_Dictionary_of_Phrase_and_Fable and no doubt others, more esoteric and arcane

Lots of unresolved dust issues @catalog @catalog @catalog

 

[version]

@andrewmorton3344
7 years ago
"What do you do outside of writing"? "I drink...and that's about it" haha. Top man!

 

[sufi]

proto-dissensus discussion http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/001905.html

 

[Corpsey]

Luka hates ackroyd as I recall

I've never read anything by him

Recently I've been thinking that if I had a time machine that I'd probably just go back to London in 1990 or something, just to see how different it was (while being relatively the same)

Ofc you might go back to Shakespeare's time but that would probably stink of shit and you'd get burned for being a heretic

 

[...]

It seems incredible now, but back in 2001 Ackroyd's London was a major event. It felt like everybody I knew who lived in London had a copy or at least claimed to have read one.

 

[version]

It seems incredible now, but back in 2001 Ackroyd's London was a major event. It felt like everybody I knew who lived in London had a copy or at least claimed to have read one.

800 pages... Christ. If he's anything like Sinclair, I won't be going anywhere near that. I do have Lud Heat though, so maybe I'll give that a read soon. I share Mark's perplexity, mind you. The Sinclair I read just didn't amount to anything.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

Luka hates ackroyd as I recall

I've never read anything by him

Recently I've been thinking that if I had a time machine that I'd probably just go back to London in 1990 or something, just to see how different it was (while being relatively the same)

Ofc you might go back to Shakespeare's time but that would probably stink of shit and you'd get burned for being a heretic

Do you really think the people here would be heretics back then? They would change their line in 5 seconds left and be at the front of the queue for flaming torches.

 

[jenks]

I think Ackroyd gets a lot of retrospective shit. At the time he was popularising stuff that was on the edge - there had been some psychogeography around but mainly marginal like Sinclair (Maureen Duffy and Moorcock also) but he brought it into the Waterstones front table. He also took up less fashionable characters from the past -Dan Leno, Milton, the Lambs, Hawksmoor. Before the novel people thought all churches in London were built by Wren, now people think they were all built by Hawksmoor. He got boring in the end, believing he could write about anything and he couldn’t. The Dickens and London books were great achievements but probably his peak. Nothing much of note afterwards. I think Dan Leno is his best novel.

 

[okzharp]

I agree, Dan Leno is the best.

His book on the Thames is amazing. Also, the audio book, read by Simon Callow, is the best audiobook i've ever listened to.

 

[version]

Good timing on this thread. Blake's birthday yesterday.

 

[jenks]

His Blake was quite groundbreaking at the time. People forget that it’s taken a long time to bring Blake into the centre of the Reading public’s recognition. Very much seen as an outsider on the curriculum. Northrop Frye and Ricks did a lot of the heavy lifting for Ackroyd along the way. Proper Blake scholars sneer at his reading of some of the longer works but he’s a good gateway (insert your own doors of perception gag here)

 

[sufi]

800 pages... Christ. If he's anything like Sinclair, I won't be going anywhere near that. I do have Lud Heat though, so maybe I'll give that a read soon. I share Mark's perplexity, mind you. The Sinclair I read just didn't amount to anything.

Isn't London all cut n paste from olde worlde sources? Like an anthology not a story. & basically unreadable

in fact i seem to have a copy here on the bookshelf, must have been shoplifted

 

[Benny Bunter]

His Blake was quite groundbreaking at the time. People forget that it’s taken a long time to bring Blake into the centre of the Reading public’s recognition. Very much seen as an outsider on the curriculum. Northrop Frye and Ricks did a lot of the heavy lifting for Ackroyd along the way. Proper Blake scholars sneer at his reading of some of the longer works but he’s a good gateway (insert your own doors of perception gag here)

Would love a gateway into Blake's longer works tbh. A couple of years ago I got the collected Blake and sat down and read (and loved) everything apart from the three big ones - Milton, Four Zoas and Jerusalem. There I just hit a brick wall - too dense, too hermetic to penetrate.

Are they really worth the massive effort required or should I just be content with all the rest?

 

[version]

In that clip at the start of the thread he claims Blake's the most significant thinker in all of English history.

 

[Corpsey]

I watched a decent doc on Blake with ackroyd in it a while back

 

[Mr. Tea]

Isn't London all cut n paste from olde worlde sources? Like an anthology not a story. & basically unreadable

in fact i seem to have a copy here on the bookshelf, must have been shoplifted

I can't imagine anyone finding London unreadable unless they have the reasonable excuse of being functionally illiterate.

 

[version]

I do have Lud Heat, maybe I'll give that a read..

40 pages in and he's just rambling. The Egyptology puts me in mind of Melville. I just can't get any purchase on Sinclair's writing. On paper, it feels as though it has all the elements to be great, but it comes out as all noise and no signal. I'm in a similar spot to the one I'm in with Cyclonopedia.

 

[version]

40 pages in and he's just rambling. The Egyptology puts me in mind of Melville. I just can't get any purchase on Sinclair's writing. On paper, it feels as though it has all the elements to be great, but it comes out as all noise and no signal. I'm in a similar spot to the one I'm in with Cyclonopedia.

It's a bit better now. There's a good bit about hayfever.