Iain Sinclair: The Last London
The LRB Podcast
London Review of Books
4.4 • 581 Ratings
🗓️ 29 March 2017
⏱️ 50 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. You can unlock the entire LRB archive for free for 24 hours by visiting lrb.co.uk forward slash open. |
| 0:11.2 | So, the last London. No, sorry, I got that wrong. It should be so, the last London, because the inflection should be there at the end. |
| 0:24.4 | I'm trying to teach myself the language of this last city, which every sentence begins with a so. |
| 0:31.6 | It's as if you've dropped in on a dialogue as if the conversation is still running. |
| 0:36.9 | Somehow you've got in on it and you have to keep it going. |
| 0:40.3 | So has changed its nature a lot. When my children were teenagers, so was so. |
| 0:47.3 | Now it has these dots before and after and it's a kind of a conversational flourish that lets you know that nothing has any |
| 0:56.5 | real meaning. We're losing the ground of London and what London is, and maybe we'll travel across |
| 1:04.3 | and find out as we go on. I mean, it was a good preparation coming in here. So preparation, really, |
| 1:10.0 | tonight for what the world may become. |
| 1:13.0 | Passing through security was like trying to get somewhere near America. And as you came through |
| 1:18.7 | that tent, I noticed there was an advert on the wall for one of the upcoming BM shows. And at the |
| 1:26.2 | bottom, it had sponsored by Jack Ryan, and I thought he was played by |
| 1:30.9 | Harrison Ford, and I thought that came with a kind of slightly sinister overtone, but it let us |
| 1:36.9 | know the city we're in, which this is a multiple city, city of many shifts and changes, very |
| 1:43.8 | hard to hold on to. |
| 1:46.2 | And that so is now so gestural. |
| 1:49.9 | It's like the equivalent of an Aussie sportsperson when they talk to always starts |
| 1:54.3 | a sentence with look, look mate. |
| 1:57.8 | It's like a challenge and a defence all in one. |
| 2:02.9 | And it's the equivalent of the Trump poke, you know, the thumb that's trying to pierce a donut. And so you're in the world now where |
| 2:11.9 | this man, the king Ubu of the internet is out there haunting us. |
... |
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