Kodak Mantra Diaries and Other Smoke Signals
Iain Sinclair
233 pp
ISBN: 978-0-9964218-4-3
Price: 24.95 American
November 2016
About Kodak Mantra Diaries and Other Smoke Signals
“Light-shavings and word-residues from a time that cannot conceivably have happened, in The Kodak Mantra Diaries Iain Sinclair has retrieved a luminous double-exposure of Allen Ginsberg and 1960s London that is beautifully haunted by prohibited or otherwise abandoned possibilities. Found footage from a parallel world history, this is the snapshot of a mislaid civilization with its fugitive ideas and atmospheres intact. An extraordinary and transporting document.”
—Alan Moore, magickal bon vivant and author of literally everything.
For two weeks in 1967, London’s Roundhouse hosted The Congress on the Dialectics for the Demystification of Violence, a counterculture happening showcasing R.D. Laing, Gregory Bateson, Emmett Grogan, Stokely Carmichael and Herbert Marcuse. The event’s acknowledged star was Allen Ginsberg.
As he pronounced to radical England, Ginsberg was followed by a young filmmaker with a commission from West German television to produce a documentary on the poet. That filmmaker’s name was Iain Sinclair.
Four years later, Sinclair gathered his notes and photographs of the experience and published Kodak Mantra Diaries on his own Albion Village Press. Wrestling with his brush with the poet and 1960s radical politics, Sinclair produced an astonishing prose debut, setting the template for his later works of non-fiction.
We Heard You Like Books is pleased to present the first hardcover edition of this little seen classic, accompanied by new texts which track Sinclair's continuing fascination with the survivors of the Beat Generation, and record random encounters in the years that followed his initial engagement.
Sinclair on working with Ginsberg
About Iain Sinclair
Iain Sinclair is a writer and filmmaker based in East London. His books include the novels Downriver (1991) and Radon Daughters (1994), and the speculative documentaries Lights out for the Territory (1997), London Orbital (2002) and Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire (2009). He is working on an endgame sequence, The Last London.
