London's Last Days

In his ‘Notes on Literature’, Adorno says that ‘The task of every title is paradoxical’. Why Ghost Milk?
One of the reasons for the title is precisely to provoke the question, why this title? You can’t have too descriptive a title or too bland a title. A title should be mysterious enough to interest me for a few days; otherwise it means it is not the right one. There isn’t a specific meaning to this title, in the book I keep going back to it to try and justify this initial paradox. I think it has to do with creating a strange membrane between memory and the world, that impervious zone – material and immaterial – that is like the milk of a ghost, if such a thing could exist. The two elements push one another, sometimes the title refers to the pollution coming off a site and creating those strange clouds that make up the sunsets in Los Angeles or Beijing, some other times it indicates voices of ghosts that become dominant.
I took a walk towards the river, to Wapping, once I had finished the book and in King Edwards Park I found an obelisk – a war memorial of some sort. The commemorative plaque had been dug out, so that the monument looked like the memory of nothing. Just before stepping away I noticed that below the missing message someone had graffitied ‘Milk’ and someone else had added ‘Ghost’. Somehow this was the confirmation that the title was already inscribed into the landscape.

Your book explores at length the Grand Projects. At some point one of the characters in Athens refers to the buildings of the 2004 Olympic Games as ruins ‘that have always been nothing else than ruins’. I have the impression that structures like the ones that punctuate the landscape of East London aspire to be ruins. Their absolute novelty is a cry for decay…
Yes, perhaps because Greece is a culture of ruins, there was a shared acceptance among the people I talked to that these buildings would never be of any use. The fact that they were to become white elephants, sculptures to their own absurdity, was taken for granted. There is always room in a catalogue of ruins.
As to the Olympic village in East London, I am not sure whether the concept of ruins still holds. These 'new ruins' don't have the monumentality demanded by the original philosophy of ruins - in the way for instance someone like Albert Speer understood them. They can't be ruins, they hover on the edge of the virtual and never quite leave the computer screen. They creep, slightly embarrassed, into the landscape, knowing that they are never going to work. They can be demolished even before they have been built. They serve only the creation of a mindset of perpetual work and re-building that triggers new speculations and generates income for the developers. There is never a finished product. It isn't even architecture, they are post-architectural, computer-generated doodles. We have left the age of ruins and entered that of the ghosts. This is ghost milk architecture. There is no human intervention, no memory. These buildings emerge from an amnesiac state, they don't even trash the memory of what was there before, because there is no memory to start with. In this configuration the human dwellings then become parasitical to malls and supermarkets. Places like Westfield - the Australian re-colonization, the revenge of the convicts - are nothing, quite literally. They simply make inside and outside interchangeable. Fake trees outside and real trees inside, you never know quite where you are. The flâneur, if such a figure can still exist, nowadays has no access to the street. The situation is both paradoxical and self-defeating.

There are pages in Celine’s Journey to the End of Night where the he describes Vigny-sur-Seine in the process of being engulfed by Paris, by the urban environment. Do you think an opposite process is happening in London, the urban is being colonized by the suburb? A certain urban freedom is vanishing?
It is interesting that in London the life of the center - mainly shopping and entertainment - for instance has been moved to the extremity. Westfield delimits London to the west (Shepherd's Bush) and the East (Stratford). The center is left then to the ultra-rich who have their own enclaves in Mayfair, where the wife of the Prime Minister sells her little knick-knacks. The economic imperative turns the city inside out. The areas that were once dead industrial land, where you would put the foulest industries, become the center of consumerism or make space for big stadiums.
In the case of the Olympic Stadium in London you witness another strange phenomenon, now more and more prominent in times of economic recession: a capitalistic enterprise, West Ham Football Club, that is propped up by public money, Newham council. The public - in this case one of the poorest councils in London - finances the private.
Coming back to your question about urban freedom, I think there is something very true in this and it has old roots. The urban element can always be perceived as the hub of conspiracy. For instance with the conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, the urban authority was seen as a disobedient and revolutionary entity. More and more powers were then moved to the suburbs to the point where the suburban consciousness becomes the ruling one. This process was then finessed by New Labour's obsession with presentation and showbusiness. New Labour's idea is that you can create conurbations like you create a brand, regardless of the lack of organic reasons to inhabit a place. Think about the Millennium Dome or the Thames Gateway.
Suburban philosophy has an impulse to cleanse those low-life areas, which normally are the most interesting, the ones that provide the cultural milieu for a city's vitality, its literature. Think of Döblin's Alexanderplatz or Baron's Hackney, to mention just two.

Your work often looks like the explosion of an archive; it shifts between biographical recollections, literary references, and cinematographic confessions. As any archive though, your books serve both an exegetic function and require a new exegetic effort. As if your literature needed facts, but from the assumption that one can never relinquish literature to facts?
Yes, the starting point of my work is often the reinvention of the quest, the search, the voyage. In earlier works I was setting up an exploration territory interrupted by a poetic seizure or drama. The impulse was quite gothic, recognizing a city of dark energies and unresolved conspiracies. The city becomes a sort of lost library. Now more and more I break down previous texts and let them reconfigure around me, at the same time pushing some physical journey through.
One should also add that culturally the moment for conventional literary novels is not allowed anymore, mainstream novels are either based on historical pastiche or thin-blooded satires, which don’t interest me. My idea is to move sideways and do what seems to be a documented account inspired by travel literature. However I am never really looking only for that. Of course I am interested in the research, in tapping the archive, but under this, I look for characters, for the absurdity of situations, for a particular way of re-adapting and re-inventing the myth of the city. The model is no doubt William Blake, the idea that you take specifics from geography and incidences of life and you push them through into a theology of your own invention, made up from many different broken religions, thousands of libraries, film memories, archives. All these elements assemble into a stew that sets and re-sets its form to keep up the pace of what’s happening outside.
The constant return of certain figures depends on the fact that most of the things and people you write about can’t be shaken off. They become constant presences, they are with you. You have to interrogate them over and over again. Thomas De Quincey’s insistence on the hallucinatory nature of the city, the labyrinth that traps you, the compulsion to write, the endless overlapping, reemerges in Ghost Milk again. The sources of my writing often become characters. In Ghost Milk for instance Ballard’s sickness becomes the sickness of the city. Alfred Döblin opens the landscape of Berlin at the times of the 1936 Olympics, like Wenders’ angel. Roberto Bolaño provides the association of poetry and conspiracy at the moment of the occupation of the University during another edition of the Olympic Games, Mexico City 1968. He will most likely appear also in the new book I am working on. His mythologies – like the Nazi Literature in Americas – are extraordinary, punctuated as they are by all these ‘lost boys’, neglected, marginal, almost imperceptible writers.

Going back to the beginning, your book starts with Bronco&Bullfrog. Could you choose 5 films that someone should see to develop a mythology of East London?
Sparrows Cant’ Sing
Bronco and Bullfrog
It Always Rains on Sunday
Long Good Friday
I hired a contract killer
Performance
The Last of England
Together

What are you reading at the moment?
I have just finished two books by Walter Abish, How German is it and Eclipse Fever

What have you watched recently?
Antonioni. In particular a film he shot in London in the 50’s called I Vinti. A lot of the research for that film can be seen at work in Blow Up.