winged victory

There has been a gap in my residency here at Shoreham airport while I finished editing my forthcoming book with Bloomsbury. Now, I am happy to say, I am back at the coal-face researching my next book which concerns all things flying – and I’m very happy to be back here.

Recent researches include reading about author Victor Yeates who wrote a book called Winged Victory, a semi-autobiographical novel about flying as a Sopwith Camel pilot during WW1. Here is a useful review of the book which I have just got hold of on Amazon for £2.

I am looking specifically for information – diaries, letters, photographs, memoirs – of pilots who were part of the Royal Flying Corps in 1918 and who undertook their training at Shoreham airport. If you have any information PLEASE do get in touch.

Here is a Sopwith Camel:

 

Card sent by G. Hale A.C.2. Class 32 R.N.A.S.

from the Crystal Palace 20th September 1917

The Cody Man-Lifter

Thank you so much to everyone who came along the Iain Sinclair event with Chris Petit and Nicholas Royle. It was a very inspiring day.

Jacob’s poetry workshop at the airport

Some comments from the children from Swiss Gardens Primary School in Shoreham after attending Jacob Sam-La Rose’s brilliant poetry session:

I really enjoyed it and I  think I’m going to do more poetry in the future. Jacob Sam-La Rose is a really good poet and he’s a really nice person and I’d like to meet him again and this was a great learning experience.

It was really good because we go to work outside seeing the planes while we were describing them and we put a long poem together as a group.

I liked all of it I would do it a hundred times more it was so fun Jacob is so good at teaching poetry he makes it funny (which is very important).

I really enjoyed all of it but my favourite bit was writing poems at the ned and I would do this workshop again. Finally I will always remember Jacob til the day I die.

rumpetys

Today I’ve been reading about the Shorthorns, known by the marvellous name of the “rumpety”, flown in Shoreham in 1915.

no vanishing point

‘Landsape was not the antithesis but the ally of abstraction, especially when seen from a cockpit. This was the conciliatory message of Piper’s contribution to Axis 8 in late 1937, an article called ‘Prehistory from the Air’. Piper had been studying the aerial photographs taken by his archaeologist friend O.G.S. Crawford, and marvelling at the new version of England they reveale. He had not seen it for himself, and in fact he would never go up in a plane. But as he looked at Crawford’s pictures, Poper could see that they heralded a whole new kind of art. Big hills were now flat shapes. There was no vanishing point, and no horizon. Immediately grasping the significance of these new vantage points, Piper constructed a whole history of painting in terms of the horizon line.  The Renaissance painter recorded his view from one position, with a stable horizon before him; the rules of perspective were established and kept the world in order. But with the advent of aerial photography, Piper argued, there is no longer a right way up, a foreground and a distance. Gravity does not exert its homeward pull. There are no axes around which to organize things and the visible world is let loose to fill the field of vision.’

Talking about John Piper, in Romantic Moderns, by Alexandra Harris

the boy aviators

I’m currently searching for instances of flying in children’s literature. I’m looking for quotes to put on the postcards that will be given out at the children’s poetry event later in March. This is a bit American, but it’s useful. It’s from here:

“Perhaps some of the earliest instances of bonafide airplanes in children’s books appeared in series books. The Boy Aviators, by Captain Wilbur Lawton, and Aeroplane Boys, by Ashton Lamar, both appeared in 1910. These series featured pairs of boys in planes similar to the Wright Flyer. Surprising for the times, the series Girl Aviators, by Margaret Burnham, began the following year. The first book intended for children that gave an account of the Wright brothers may have been The Light Bringers, by Mary Wade, in 1914. It features, along with the Wrights, other notables who, by making “a vastly different world to-day from that of a century ago…have won for themselves the name of Light-Bringers.” This charming volume ends its biography of the Wrights with the speculation that aeroplanes, as weapons of terrible destruction, will someday bring an end to all war.

As a young boy, Charles Lindberg read the story of World War I ace Tam o’ the Scoots, which inspired him to become a fighter pilot. Possibly the earliest children’s book telling his famous story was The Lone Scout of the Sky: The Story of Charles A. Lindbergh, by James E. West, 1927, which included instructions for making a model of the Spirit of St. Louis. Children’s interest in aviation was further encouraged in 1928 by the publication of Books on Aeronautics: A Bibliography of Books Likely to be of Use in Elementary and Secondary Schools, by Roland H. Spaulding. Consisting almost entirely of nonfiction, this annotated list included autobiographies of aviators and World War I aces, model airplane guides, information on gliders and zeppelins, and textbooks on air navigation and the economics of air transportation.

In the 1930s, numerous informational books appeared with illustrations and photographs of the various kinds of aircraft, the history of aircraft, how to fly, and how the world looks from the air. At least two books about Amelia Earhart were published. This decade also marked the very first appearance of Dick and Jane in Dick & Jane’s Our Big Book, which included a scene where the family watches an airplane. Several aviation characters, such as Flying Jenny and Steve Canyon, and space flight heroes such as Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon appeared in the comic strips before moving on to big little books and comic books.

In the 1940s, children’s books followed developments in military aviation and featured many stories about World War II pilots. At the same time there was no lack of aviation-themed books for younger children, for we see Airplane Andy, by Sanford Tousey, and, possibly the first book to teach young children their ABCs through aviation, The New Alphabet of Aviation, by Edward Shenton.”

Iain Sinclair workshop at Shoreham Airport

Hello,

If you have emailed me directly about the Iain Sinclair event (mostly people connected to the Chichester MA in Creative Writing) then you are booked in, please pay on arrival at the Reception at Shoreham Airport and make sure you arrive promptly to start at 1.30! Thanks.

Saturday 16th April 2011 1.30pm – 5.30pm

PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY AND A SENSE OF PLACE WITH IAIN SINCLAIR

Join us for a creative writing workshop using Shoreham Airport as a point of inspiration. Bring a notebook, camera and your imagination and join us on a Guy Debord-inspired walk around the airport, looking at how the archives, history and architecture of the airport have their own stories to tell.

Fee: £14.50 (free to people affiliated to the airport). BOOKING ESSENTIAL AS PLACES ARE LIMITED – call 01273 467375 or email reception@shorehamairport.co.uk to book a place

An Iain Sinclair biography here.

More information on Iain Sinclair from here:

Psychogeography is the hidden landscape of atmospheres, histories, actions and characters which charge environments.

The term originally harks back to Thomas De Quincey’s dreamy, druggy treks of the nineteenth century and Walter Benjamin’s excursions around the Paris streets of the 1920s, fusing Jewish messianism, Kabbalism, Marxism and visionary Surrealism.

But after Internationale Situationiste #1 1957, the term evolves again, indicating the study of the effects of geographical settings on mood and behaviour.

Today, the expression is possibly most readily associated with Iain Sinclair’s synoptic urban drifts; the divining of the unconscious cultural contours of places: “By the time I was using [the word], it was more like ‘psychotic geographer’ more of a raging bull journey against the energies of the city of creating a walk that would allow you to enter into a fiction.”

Sinclair’s work is a dense, fused poeticized prose often inspired by walks and free-associated treks around the underside of London, most especially the expansice wilds of the East End and its Essex deltas. Cafes often figure in his novels, and the Alpino in Islington’s Chapel Market N1 has long been one of his stop-offs on regular walks up the Regent Canal.

Those new to Sinclair’s work should start with his collection of essays Lights Out For The Territory. Then move on to his co-written account of the mystery of Whitechapel legend David Rodinsky – Rodinsky’s Room – and his vanishing from a hidden East End Synagogue. On no account miss Sinclair’s early novel Whitechappel Scarlet Tracings or his exorcizing of modern City meltdown, Downriver.

psychogeography and a sense of place with Iain Sinclair