The Coat in Question 

Iain Sinclair

‘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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