Saturday, February 07, 2004
There's an interesting entry from rodcorp that I came across in my London Blogger reading (in which I just noticed that Creepy Lesbo's favourite person is registered as living just up the road from me. She doesn't support her local libraries though, for shame! :)) about (loosely) cities and stories.
What Italo Calvino considers the drawback about writing stories about Paris so setting them in New York instead I consider the boon when I write stories set in London. Wondering about how much we have to write to bring London to life, or whether by existing in it we already make the city alive for some certain value. Certainly when I bring myself to read Iain Sinclair's poncy psychogeographical perigrinations (wonderfully sent up in Issue 2 of Smoke if you can still find a copy) of London I wonder that, if we take the literary life of London as a form of consciousness whether this is the scratchings of the organism displaying self-awareness and investigating itself, as opposed to all the irrational daydreams that make up the rest of it's mind. Are the Samuel Pepys diaries part of the leviathan's memory?
What Italo Calvino considers the drawback about writing stories about Paris so setting them in New York instead I consider the boon when I write stories set in London. Wondering about how much we have to write to bring London to life, or whether by existing in it we already make the city alive for some certain value. Certainly when I bring myself to read Iain Sinclair's poncy psychogeographical perigrinations (wonderfully sent up in Issue 2 of Smoke if you can still find a copy) of London I wonder that, if we take the literary life of London as a form of consciousness whether this is the scratchings of the organism displaying self-awareness and investigating itself, as opposed to all the irrational daydreams that make up the rest of it's mind. Are the Samuel Pepys diaries part of the leviathan's memory?
