John Clare photo auctioned [UK]:
Psychogeography: a beginner's guide:
HE lived and died in poverty, but John Clare's poetic appreciation of the Peterborough countryside made him a legend.and
Like many artists and literary giants, Clare did not live to enjoy his fame, and he would be amazed to discover just how valued he is today.
Indeed, he would have been staggered that someone would splash out £3,600 – a fortune in his day – for the only known photograph of him. [...]
Bonham's could not reveal who had bought it – but the city-based John Clare Society said it had declined to take part in the bidding, as it could not raise enough funds to pay the asking price. [...]
Psychogeography: a beginner's guide:
In Edge of the Orison, Sinclair has left London altogether, striking up into the “extruded suburbia” of the M11 Corridor. His inspiration, and psychogeographic predecessor, is the poet John Clare. In 1841, Clare escaped from the High Beach Asylum in Epping Forest and, over a three-and-a-half-day “hallucinatory voyage”, walked the 120 miles north-west to his home county of Northamptonshire. Shortly after arrival, he was recommitted to a local asylum, where he remained until his death in 1864. Sinclair follows Clare’s route (the pun of “syn-Clare” is implicit throughout this pun-riddled book) and uses the counterpoint of the earlier journey to meditate on, among other things, the politics of land use, doppelgängers, genealogy and the future of the English countryside. In Sinclair’s visionary account, Clare’s tilt into madness – induced by the landscape changes which the Enclosure Acts wrought – becomes a parable for the fall of rural England, and the psychic maladies suffered throughout contemporary Britain.
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on Friday, October 07, 2005 at 3:09 PM.
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