Last weekend we went to Ocean Shores. A dismal place, but not the most dismal in Washington. I know that because we drove through Aberdeen, home of the late Kurt Cobain, to get there. We passed one family unloading a ratty couch from a pickup, then a block later another group loading another couch onto a truck. Reminded me of Kipling Road

a typical East End Street, people were in and out of each other's houses with each other's property all day.

Ocean Shores, a place one might feel in the heartland, if it wasn't on a sandy spit, battered by Pacific storms. The supermarket had cheerful photos of the locals serving in the war, so we knew we were in the red part of the country. In the blue bits of the country the local PBS or NPR affiliates' websites would instead display similar photos in their sombre tributes for the fallen relatives of their domestics. The storms and rain were OK by me as I had come prepared with Iain Sinclair's Downriver and Stewart Home's Come Before Christ and Murder Love--which never, incidentally, mentions Christ. They're both part of the growing corpus of works about esoteric London; along with Michael Moorcock's Mother London, Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor, and Alan Moore's From Hell. A mutually supportive group, in whose works knowledge bleeds in knowingness. You must know your Ripper mythology, Templar/Masonic conspiracies, and the politics behind the anarchist groups in Conrad's Secret Agent before you can begin to appreciate the analogies, allusions and random synchronicities in these works. They are so tight, beyond sharing similar subjects, that Home's book actually refers to a passage in Sinclair's,

Penessa woke from her trance and I led her from the fort to the World's End, where I ordered whisky on the rocks for both of us. The pub was a queer sort of place, and I felt less than than welcome, sitting by a window well away from the locals who huddled at the bar. I remember a book dealer once telling me about some mighty strange goings on in Tilbury.

Sinclair, ex-bookdealer, describes the locals at the World's End in Tilbury.

The dockers were rigid, severe; breathless. One of them mimed danger, by fingering a kiss curl; while the other excited a detumescent bicep.

Sinclair's the more poetic of the lot and you read him and his pals for the many strange goings on in the area. Stewart Home, in his contribution to this coterie, writes a pulp genre, and, though a bit repetitive--and charmless to the knowingnessless who won't enjoy all the references dropped through out--by and large succeeded in entertaining me. Quite unlike another novel I took along, Erica Jong's Sappho's Leap, which intends to be erudite and poetically about the poet in the title, but is instead full of purple prosaic cack.  ¶ 9:20 PM