The Stone Platoon

How else to look at this fountain
with adjacent memorial statues?
Drizzle’s left droplets finding paths
through embossed verdigris,
such-and-such a name who fell.
I’m not close enough to make more
of others’ particular loss
in whichever battle or campaign.
The stone platoon endures
inclement weather, helmeted,
bayonets fixed at the clear air.

Remembrance Sunday every year
we'd stand with such indifference.
Dragooned Boy Scouts in the breeze
which furled around a cenotaph.
We’d put up with it, out of respect –
although, eventually, out of respect,
we’d be prone to goose bumps,
unkind laughter and knocked knees.

Here now though are historians:
three men at the foot of a lion.
What it might have meant at one time
flashes out into the sun-split sky.
Corporate call-centre managers
clinch photographs of those
who, in memoriam there, did
the best they could have done.

More obscure moments in the life of a home counties teenager

Thanks, then, to YouTube, here are some more links which might help to explain what has gone before...

http://www.youtube.com/watch#!v=_q3TiwBBDmc&feature=related Orange Juice from the days when it was possible to make videos involving both dansette-style record players and the hammer & sickle

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYzfeOBNuIU Possibly the only pop song ever written about post-structuralism - Scritti Politti are in love with Jacques Derrida

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPS2u0MH7_s Slightly disturbing interpretation possibly by Japanese film-makers and definitely unofficial video to go with the Violent Femmes's 'Add It Up'. This one's a slightly (but not much) less disturbing version: http://www.youtube.com/watch#!v=xmo6qyhdav8&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wqKZkIQkBE Arguably the reason the hideous distortion afforded the word 'indie' by the likes of Franz Ferdinand and Snow Patrol is such a thorn in the side of anyone born before about 1985. And Roddy Frame in his finest form.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9H9pB4kf58 God knows where they filmed this but it's definitely a snippet of one of punk's most underrated bands in full flow

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5tlWeIh4WU Magazine sing 'Model Worker' in Los Angeles. No irony required. "I need a holiday, I've not been well..."

Poem: War and Concrete

War and concrete

Stories, cupolas bulge in these fields
we're passing through: these infamous
bunkers ranked across strategic slopes
refuse to let history disperse.
Stubborn, they endure at roadsides,
in vineyards, gardens, the city’s asphalt brink.
Goats graze along their silted mouths
and, garishly painted, one would draw
in clients for a rash and hasty tattoo.

Just when you think you’ve forgotten
the landscape’s overlaid again
with a grid of war and concrete
giants might use for stepping stones.
Too solid ruins outdo grey crags
where beech woods sheltered partisans.
Sunk shafts and gun-slits mark
a whole world gone. Count fifty
and you’ve barely even started.

It took an old Chinese tank to drag
one clear of sodden sand at Vlora,
and 800 Euros to dismantle it.
Elsewhere, too, you might have read
of how, to turn a dictator’s scheme
into this geometric, defensive terrain,
the architect became the first test case,
emerging from the shelled prototype,
deafened, unspeakably loyal, triumphant.

This be the book

Whatever your interest, whether it be French beaches, critical theory or military history, architecture, anthropology or poetry, you should probably spend at least one rain-drenched day sitting in a layby reading Paul Virilio's Bunker Archaeology - almost certainly the finest book about WW2 bunkers ever written and possibly one of the best books about war, culture and concrete as well.

Quotation: Hugh of St Victor

"The person who finds his homeland sweet is a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign place."
From Hugh of St Victor's 'Didascalicon', a philosophical text from the 12th century - and a favourite quotation of Edward Said.

Poem: Commuters

Commuters

Cormorants each morning
awkwardly assume position
on this tongue of pile and lathes.
Marching past, we seem to share
a momentary recognition
of their surprise, their shrug
at our rhythmic passage
across the bridge. They hang
from imaginary coat hangers,
wings out, beaks up, eyes bright.
They are unoiled, unsleeked.
The man in front breaks step.
He stops to look. These cormorants
is how he might possibly put it.
Already, perhaps, that’s reading
too much into it. From one end
of the long straight harbour
the sunlight is all reflection
to the other. It’s spring.
The cormorants gorge on fish.
One day soon they’ll go
and no one will stop to look
for another season.

Tom Phillips

On literature festivals

I might well be reading too much into this but at the last literature festival I went to I got a serious ticking off. “Excuse me! You can’t stand there! You’re in the way of celebrities!”
Alas, between me and the shelves of books that I wanted to look at there was Harry Hill’s glistening head, 200 punters clutching his ‘Ulysses’-rivalling tome ‘Harry Hill’s TV Burp’ and an irate assistant from a certain high street bookshop that’s put numerous independents out of business and now only sells what an HQ marketing twonk decides will shift units from the 3-4-2 tables. My crime, it seems, was wanting to buy some books: my mistake was that ‘literature’ might involve something a tad more interesting than Cherie Blair’s excruciating confessional.
To be honest, it’s partly my fault. In the 80s, when I was a student and a university could still make front-page news if one of its junior lecturers got outed as a structuralist (i.e. they wore a leather jacket, used words like ‘deconstruction’ and quoted French people), ‘literature’ meant something quite specific: it was books by dead white men that took more than 20 minutes to read. Nobody went into bookshops unless they had to and the library was the last redoubt of the scoundrel (who usually wore an Oxfam corduroy jacket). This was clearly wrong, and so anyone with more than half a brain cell or something other than a career in management consultancy in mind started badgering English departments from Inverness to Brighton to let students write essays about books by people who were alive, weren’t necessarily white and were quite often female. It all seemed terribly right-on and a much-needed blow for cultural democracy.
What nobody counted on, of course, was that, thanks to this campaign for what lefties used to call ‘pluralism’, the girth of this newly democratic idea of ‘literature’ would slowly and steadily expand to the point at which you could shove anything at all inside its saggy waistband. That TV tie-ins (mostly produced by white middle-class folk) would shoulder-charges books that are actually worth reading off the bookshop shelves; that so-called literature festivals would become nothing but junkets for momentary celebrities and journalists stapling together their daily spew into 80,000-word miscellanies; and that, were it not for Amazon, it would be almost impossible to buy anything book-shaped that wasn’t written by Michael Palin, JK Rowling or Gordon Ramsay.
And the reason for this descent into scarcely comprehensible prose and books with more pictures (or recipes or downhome philosophy) than sense? Well, not some kind of universal dumbing down certainly. Rather it’s due to the discovery by corporate booksellers, probably in the early 90s, that the stuff they were accustomed to flog as trash in ‘dump bins’ (say, whatever happened to the 99p dump bin?) could be relocated to tables, branded ‘bestsellers’ and sold for £19.99 a time - with a considerably bigger profit. As in eastern Europe, the coming of democracy turned out to be an open invitation for unchecked capitalism to fuck things up. Like an old East Berliner suffering from ostalgie, you can’t help but walk through a bookshop or a literature festival now without feeling that something essential’s been lost.
So what to do? Well, one suggestion I’d make (other than only buying books from charity shops and the internet on the strength of what your mates have told you) is to go to literature festivals and ask every line-up of so-called ‘authors’ (the Hills and Blairs and Ramsays of this world) some rudimentary technical questions - the kind of thing that even GCSE classes in creative writing dismiss before they start churning out their duplicate Carver short stories - and see how they get on. What, for example, is Harry Hill’s relationship with his narratorial voice? And how has Cherie Blair approached the problem of self-authentication inherent in post-modernist life-writing? The telling thing, of course, is that these semi-literate dorks will try to answer your questions. The genuine writers will simply tell you to sling your hook.

This was originally published in Venue magazine, February 2010