The Coat in Question 
Iain Sinclair
- All the Devils Are Here by David Seabrook
‘Yet the dream he describes is a traveller’s nightmare: Englishness lost, identity cancelled, fatal infection,’ David Seabrook writes of Thomas De Quincey. Of himself, the dole-queue De Quincey, making a high-velocity, long-term progress through the Isle of Thanet. More speed, less haste: Seabrook is a master of the throwaway put-down, a speculator in tachist topography. The short haul, down the Medway from Rochester to Chatham, represents ‘a basic shift from retro to necro’. In Ramsgate ‘light bulbs swing unclothed.’ And the blue-plaqued yawn of Middle Street, Deal is ‘where escapism ends up’. Seabrook’s special subject is the ‘areal’, as proposed by the geographer Carl Sauer (a great favourite of that poet of place Charles Olson). Sauer, like Seabrook, deals in awkward particulars, grit under the eyelid.
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From the LRB letters page: [ 17 April 2003 ] Keith Flett.
Iain Sinclair’s anthology London: City of Disappearances appeared last year. Hackney: That Rose-Red Empire, a documentary fiction, will come out in 2009.
Other articles by this contributor:
Museums of Melancholy · Silence on the Euston Road
Hopi Mean Time · Jim Sallis
The Olympics Scam · The Razing of East London
All change. This train is cancelled · Iain Sinclair tries to get to the Dome
In Hackney · Steve Dilworth
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