Ghost Milk
Recent Adventures Among the Future Ruins of London on the Eve of the Olympics
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
In Ghost Milk, Iain Sinclair, "our greatest guide to London" (The Spectator), chronicles the transformation and disappearance of his beloved East London in the wake of the 2012 Olympics.
The Olympics, the story goes, have transformed London into a gleaming, wholly modern city. East London—Olympic headquarters—is now a jewel, promising unlimited opportunities and better tomorrows. The grime and poverty have been scrubbed away, replaced by huge stadiums and grand public sculptures.
But Sinclair, a longtime resident of East London, tells a very different story about his home: of a neighborhood turned upside down, of stolen history. Cherished parks have vanished; police raids can occur at any time; and high-security exclusion zones—enforced by armed guards and hidden cameras—have steamrolled East London's open streets and public spaces. In preparing for the most public of events, everything has been privatized.
Ghost Milk is both a powerful chronicle of memory and loss, in the tradition of W. G. Sebald and Roberto Bolaño, and a passionate interrogation of our embrace of progress at any cost. In an attempt to understand the changes to his city, Sinclair travels beyond London, walking along the Thames from the North Sea to Oxford, riding buses across northern England, and visiting past and present Olympic sites in Athens and Berlin.
Elegiac, intimate, and audacious, Ghost Milk is a brilliant reflection on a changing urban landscape and Sinclair's most personal book yet. It serves as a call to arms against the politicians and public figures who have so doggedly preached the gospel of the Olympics while erasing the history and character of East London.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The 2012 Olympic Games bulldoze soulful working-class London in this lively if labyrinthine urban travelogue cum cultural jeremiad. Sinclair (Lights Out for the Territory) decries the "manifest horror" of Olympics-instigated stadiums, condos, and malls, the evictions of anarchist squatters and immigrant shopkeepers, the ubiquitous security checkpoints and surveillance cameras, the promotional "CGI visions injected straight into the eyeball" and the "orgies of lachrymose nationalism." (He had readings at municipal libraries canceled for " diss the Olympics.'") It's all the epitome, he complains, of a contemptible civilization of soulless corporate fascism, real estate scams, glitzy spectacles, and elitist privatized spaces that he finds everywhere hiking up the Thames, busing around Liverpool, surveying past Olympic outrages in Berlin and Athens. Sinclair's fragmented narrative whirls through impressionistic observations, snatches of history, film allusions, sketches of literary cronies novelist J.G. Ballard, bard of apocalyptic suburban blandness, is vividly appreciated and personal reminiscences. His critique of Olympic-sized inauthenticity isn't terribly novel, and his stereotypically English landscape intimate, slightly claustrophobic, strewn with cultural referents that Americans won't get may leave Yanks feeling a bit lost. Still, the acerbic panache of Sinclair's prose makes for a lively ramble. Photos.
