Quotes from Iain Sinclair

The poet he was escorting into Wales was a Horus-headed dud of some personal magnetism. The hair was feathered gell, the nose hooked. He stared at me and he didn't. His eyes belonged to a magician; one bored into you, right through the lens into the depths of the vitreous humor—while the other popped and wobbled in the style of Ben Turpin. He folded in on himself, profile sharp as an axe. A labrys. This man would have no problem seeing around a corner.

drunk enough on earth's liquors to relish the prospect of the knife.

Men of the cloth live in this monologue, it is their due: nobody talks back to a pulpit.

For a poet the world is always static in the sense that you're a mass observer and you can't afford to care whether people are busy or not. You're a witness.

That made sense of gabby meetings: salient points isolated from the gush of acoustic froth. This paper belonged on a clipboard, not being defaced by dud literature. --Iain Sinclair

I looked at this first sheet, words scribbled confidently on a lined pad. My attempt at making contact the spirit of Llandor. Disaster. I couldn't do the language or locate the period. The pad of paper, with its grey-mauve rules, was all wrong. It was intended for meaningful work, figures, calculations, notes.

I was gazing back in the direction of Wales, watching the Prudence clone, when I noticed a couple of drunks lurching in my direction. Night people who live in service stations. The insufficiently deceased.

One thing I had learnt, the last person you should ask for a solution is the author. If he knew where he was going, he'd stop dead in his tracks.

Mossy had trouble breathing. He was not convinced the rewards repaid the effort. He took breath in, but after that let it fend for itself.

Geography is destiny. – James Ellroy

MIDSUMMER: the shortest night. The year on its side. Joblard is to marry. To make that act, that avowal: St Bartholomew-the-Great. The Chemical Wedding, sponsus and sponsa, merging in song, twisting around the columns of that stone forest; celebrated here in the blending of russian stout, nigredo, with dry blackthorn cider. The risks crowd us, cackle; magpies at the window.

With plenty of practice, we have learnt how to make a ritual of grief, even for those we have never met and know little about.