The Masques of Iain Sinclair

This past Wednesday evening (daytime here in the States), The William Blake Society hosted a Zoom talk with Iain Sinclair. Sinclair’s new book The Gold Machine: In The Tracks of The Mule Dancers will be released soon and this talk was part of a multi-media….not PR campaign exactly. Or not only that. When Sinclair releases a book,it is always just one part of a constellation of media, and his authorship is always one of a clutch of creators or collaborators, all of whom bear responsibility (if not deserve authorship) for bringing the book into being.

Iain Sinclair, more than any author, was my companion throughout the Covid lockdown. Even more so than the strange fictions of Clarice Lispector, Sinclair kept my mind working while we were stuck at home. Sinclair’s prose renewed for me the sense of what language could do, even if it wasn’t always clear in some of those books just what it was doing. It helped the binge that Sinclair publishes so prolifically, like one of those 19th century novelists who were paid by the column inch. It also helped that he had such strong affinities with some of the modernist writers I am familiar with, especially Pound and Lewis. Though he seems so different from them in so many ways.

Anyway, to use the word “masque” in the title of this post — a form of courtly entertainment that flourished in the 17th cent. — is deliberately provocative. Sinclair, for all his “difficulty” is more about entertaining the masses than the court. But it does register the humor and the satire we see in books like Sorry Meniscus. But it’s a different kind of mask that Sinclair writes about in a piece I just came across today, a mask we’re all much more familiar with these days.

“Exposed By masks” gives a good sense of Sinclair’s prose.

Click the image below for the essay…