Some holiday snaps

The misery of having a parent who's a putative travel writer

An unexpected top-of-the-crag moment above Hebden Bridge

The pub which my family used to run in Cambridge

Ontroerend Goed: Internal

Seeing as the secret's out, here's some thoughts, originally written in May 2010, about being immersed in Belgian theatre company Ontroerend Goed's piece 'Internal' as part of Mayfest in Bristol.

I’ve felt angry, exhilarated, depressed, delirious, panicked, betrayed, exploited, joyous and I haven’t been able to talk or think about much else for more than a week. If you were one of the people who went to Belgian theatre company Ontroerend Goed’s ‘Internal’ during Mayfest, you’ll probably know what I mean. If you didn’t, here’s what happened...
The ‘show’ (that’s not quite the word but it’ll have to do) only lasted 25 minutes and was for an audience of five. The gist of it was that, via an intense and nerve-wracking line-up, each of the actors paired off with a member of the audience and took their ‘partner’ to a candlelit booth. I was chosen by a very attractive woman called Maria. She poured me a shot of vodka and we talked. I confidently told her that I’ve been with the same partner for 25 years. We discussed the importance of friendship. I said something about being a writer and interested in what other people have to say. It seemed hilariously funny that my favourite town in the world was the birthplace of Vlad the Impaler. As a finale, she asked me to close my eyes and take her on an imaginary journey. We ‘went’ to a lake in Slovenia. It seemed innocent enough, even the bit where I conceded that we were touching and “maybe” we were kissing (but not in that way, pervs).
Shortly after, everyone emerged from their respective booths and all ten of us sat in a circle. Actors talked about their partners. The speed date became group therapy. Maria said some very flattering things about me and described our ‘journey’ to Slovenia, ramping up the kissing bit and adding in a sunset. Other encounters hadn’t been so successful, it seemed: one actor confessed to feeling that he’d not been able to “get through” to his partner while in another of the booths there’d been no conversation at all. Someone (an actor) noticed that Maria and I were sitting in identical poses. Another actor asked his partner if she’d “hold” him. She refused, on the entirely reasonable grounds that she’d only just met him and hardly knew him. At some point, the actress from the silent pair, stood up and bared her breasts. “Is this what you wanted to see?” she asked. “No,” said her partner, looking terrified.
After that, I felt faintly relieved. Compared with what happened to the others, my conversation with Maria seemed entirely normal and sane. Then the two of us became the focus of attention. I was asked (by another actor) if I thought that we’d “clicked”. I said “Yes”. Why wouldn’t I? Maria and I had got on. We’d had a chat, shared a laugh, made a toast to friendship. “Prove it!” said the other actor, quite aggressively. I looked blank. How on earth do you do that? Before I could think, Maria had opened her arms and she was kissing me. Warmly. On the lips. Suddenly, I was emotional jelly: euphoric as a 17-year-old who’s just copped off with the best-looking girl in school. Then Maria very matter-of-factly announced to everyone that I’d been with my partner for 25 years. Ouch. Somehow this metaphorical slap across the chops didn’t stop me giving her my address. She wanted, she said, to write me a letter.
And that was it. Or so it seemed. Outside, the audience chatted. We all agreed that it had been a slightly unusual experience and everybody was too polite to mention that I’d just shown myself to be a narcissistic slut by kissing a stranger who’d been nice to me. I went home, joked about having been “seduced by an attractive Belgian” and wrote up my review for Venue. Job done.
Only then the aftershocks started. Not for nothing is the show called ‘Internal’: it doesn’t happen in a theatre, it happens in your head. No matter how often you remind yourself that it really was “just a performance” and that, in my case, Maria was a ‘persona’ who was simply doling out flattery, you can’t escape the niggling thought that, maybe, just maybe, there was the glimmer of something real going on (not sexual, I hasten to add: the kiss, after all, was out of kilter with the rest of our conversation) - or the knowledge that, after 20-odd years of marriage, you’ve got the moral fibre of a pot plant. Hence the need to talk about it, especially with people who’ve been through the same encounter (not everyone got a kiss, it transpires; some got an abrupt and seriously cold cold shoulder), and to read everything about ‘Internal’ on the web, from glowing reviews to excoriating rants about Ontroerend Goed unethically ‘betraying’ their audience.
Even now I’m not sure what I think. On the one hand, I’m exhilarated by the emotions it’s sparked off (“I’ve never seen you so animated about anything - you’re usually so bloody cynical,” said one mate while I bored him to tears with yet another attempt at interpreting what had happened) and I’m impressed by the degree of risk the actors exposed themselves to (there are, let’s not forget, plenty of predatory stalkers out there, as they apparently discovered when they ran the show in Edinburgh). On the other, I’m depressed at discovering the extent of my own gullible cupidity and sporadically angry that some manipulative actors lured me so easily into a tender trap to make what seems to have been a some kind of point about identity theory or sexual politics (men can’t deal with it when they’re not in control maybe).
Either way, I’ve certainly never had this kind of fall-out from a piece of theatre before and while a lot of other art makes big claims about being challenging and life-changing (on the press release at least), none of it has come close to seriously fucking with my head. ‘Internal’ definitely did that, and while it’s obvious that it all hinged on some subtle and not-so-subtle psychological trickery (body language-echoing poses and the like), it’s still niggling away, a worm in my sub-conscious. When, exactly, did everything turn weird and manipulative? How did I let myself become an emotional adolescent? Why the fuck can’t I stop thinking about it?
The answer to that last one at least does now seem fairly obvious: it’s because this play still doesn’t have an ending. Act One was the conversation in the booth; Act Two was the group therapy session. Act Three so far has been all those slightly excruciating moments of frustration, exhilaration, sadness and anxiety, the long conversations with friends and my wife, and, erm, a letter from Maria.
To be honest, I wasn’t expecting that. It arrived, handwritten, a couple of days ago but doesn’t really clear much up. Its friendly tone seems to be ‘real’ but it’s presumably still part of the ‘show’. For a while it simply puzzled me. Now, though, I realise that as well as being a kind of thank-you note, it’s also an inspired gesture. With a return address scribbled on the back of the envelope, it’s my invitation to write the final scene. Curiously, after reducing me to grade-A twatishness, Ontroerend Goed have handed me the baton. Perhaps that’s why when someone asked me if I regretted getting myself embroiled in this (let’s not forget it) performance, I said: “No, no, not at all. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.” Now all I’ve got to do is work out what to say to bring Act Three to a close.

This piece was originally published in Venue magazine, May 2010, www.venue.co.uk

Two New Poems

Making things up

Out of this slicing gale, as we might call it,
blowing in from imaginary wastelands,
ruffled snow and ice patches accumulate
beside disputed parking spaces.
Words have brought me so far –
and then the weather conditions –
I’m almost at a loss for things to say.

In this warmth, then, uncertain reticence
amongst those who would be merely
speaking their minds. What do I know
of ordinary heroism? The late shift?
Awkward emotional tectonics?
I am only ever looking on
at the clarity of arrival.


Above the Calder

For L. S. Kimberley

The world, it seems, will not have much truck with poets.
Inadvertently taking a path up the crag above Hebden Bridge,
our triangulation points were the Brontës in Haworth,
Ted Hughes in Mytholmroyd and Sylvia Plath in Hepstonstall.

‘The sluttiest sheep in England’ posed for photographs
and there was something on the air which tasted like words.
The whole sky opened up like a chorus: church spires,
industrial behemoths, the impervious valley below.

We were lost amongst blackthorns crowding the ridge
until hen harriers’ fleeting screeches on granite
drew us back to our right of way through pylons,
phone aerials and nestled gardens of the village.

Beyond the remains of a church, across the lane,
the graveyard prickled with crosses, weeds and epitaphs.
Finally, this was hers. And yet here,
while wind scoured hard at what we thought to say,

even here, her own lines were waiting to escape
from silence into meaning. They persist,
and in persisting enter the brimming flow
into which, not far downstream, we’ll cast our own.


Both these poems were written for Imagine Fromeside, a two-day event at a Bristol clinic which also saw the launch of 'Selected Poems' by L S Kimberley, a Trinidadian-born poet published by Stepping Out and Dreamweavers who is currently one of the clinic's residents.

Seven years after the Gulf

There are words we would rather skirt around.
Every day the sky becomes an excuse,
or appears to consist of an arrangement
of ducks on sloping cobbles,
that thing you talked of last night.

There was nothing to be said, for example,
which might not offend at this table.
We were only hypothesising, weren’t we,
about a society of amputation,
the whole bloody foreign situation?

At the turn of the road – rage
between drivers who, moments ago,
had never encountered each other.
From here, from this angle,
the phrase ‘Everything is wrong’
behaves like a cliché, precisely.
It contains a would-be full stop
and an effortless change of gear:
the bottle reached for from the mat
and fingerprints on the neck
just above the label.

So say it, go on: beyond those willows,
how easy it might have been
to dissolve whatever was happening elsewhere
in the drawn-out fade of a sunset.

Tom Phillips 2010

Continuing the Gjirokastra theme

The poem below, 'In The Citadel', refers to one of the odder remnants of the Cold War: a 'captured' USAAF Lockheed jet fighter which is still on display in the citadel of the southern Albanian city of Gjirokastra. There's a picture of it here (not taken by me). There are various conflicting stories about how it got there - these range from it having been shot down by either the Albanian air force or anti-aircraft fire (which would have been difficult, seeing as Albania had no ground-based air defences at the time) to it having landed at Tirana airport following a navigational error by the pilot.
What does seem to be certain is that, in December 1957, the pilot, Howard J Curran, strayed into Albanian airspace twice. According to the American version of the story, he was taking the Lockheed T-33 from Chateauroux airbase in France to Naples in Italy when, thanks to a combination of bad weather and instrument failure, he arrived over Albania by mistake. Running out of fuel, he searched for a nearby airfield and spotted what was, in fact, the as-yet incomplete Tirana International Airport. Once on the ground, he was promptly arrested and taken away for interrogation. In yet another version of the story, his arrival was greeted by a chain-gang cheering political prisoners who were working on the airport's new runway at the time and assumed that the plane heralded a full-scale American invasion of the country and therefore the end of Enver Hoxha's totalitarian regime.
Several accounts of this 'incident' claim that what became of Curran is 'unknown' (the implication being that, rather like Michael Caine in the film version of The Ipcress File, he was held prisoner by the Albanians and brainwashed) but his release and return to the USA via Yugoslavia was reported in Life magazine in January 1958 (see here). His aeroplane, meanwhile, was kept by the Albanians - on the pretext that it had lost a tyre on landing and they couldn't replace it - and taken to Gjirokastra citadel to become part of Hoxha's 'trophy cabinet' of captured military equipment (a selection of Italian howitzers and a tank from the Second World War - all of which are also still on display in the citadel).
Whether Curran really had made some grievous errors or not is a matter of debate. Tirana is a long way from Naples, Curran himself was an extremely experienced pilot - a Second World War and Korean War 'flying ace' - and, of course, America wouldn't have been keen to admit that it was flying reconnaissance missions over Albania at the time. That said, the coasts of Albania and western Italy follow nearly parallel bearings, and if he was flying without instruments, Curran might well have mistaken the one for the other.
Either way, the Lockheed remains at Gjirokastra (although most of its moveable parts had been removed by the time I saw it in 2006), an unlikely memorial to the Cold War.
Howard Curran himself died in August last year and his obituary, including a short version of the Albanian 'interlude', is posted here.
One reason for posting this and the poem below is that Gjirokastra was also the birthplace of Albanian writer Ismail Kadare (see post re: his recent Lerici Pea Prize). Kadare's most famous novel, The General of the Dead Army, was inspired by a statue of 'Mother Albania' in the Military Museum inside Gjirokastra citadel (it shows Albania sending both the Nazis and the Italians packing, their arms weighed down by skulls), while one of his most lyrical, Chronicle in Stone, offers a child's eye view of the city during the Second World War - and, as a results, gives an illuminating insight into the follies and horrors of war in general.
Gjirokastra was also the birthplace of Enver Hoxha, and although the plinth where a gigantic statue of the 'heroic leader' once tood now lies empty and looks, from the citadel walls, like a redundant heliport, the house where he was born has been turned into an 'ethnic museum'. The Kadare family house, meanwhile, has yet to be 'museum-ified', possibly because, as the Albanian who took me to Gjirokastra phlegmatically observed, "we won't know what we think of him until he dies".

In the Citadel

Above so much traditional stone housing
squatting into the mountainside,
the football stadium and a hexagonal blank
like a heliport (the emptied plinth
of a statue which surveyed far more
than it would ever command),
we are stepping over shed fuel tanks
to photograph the captured plane.

Downed in the Cold War,
by whatever means, it sits now
on a lawn on the edge of a rampart,
its turbine an empty mouth,
its stripped-out cockpit open.
We take turns to stand
with kids on the wing
while tourists from elsewhere
count medieval cannon.

Not far west of Gjirokaster
lies Hamara, Saranda, the Adriatic,
beyond that the Mediterranean,
and, beyond that, the Atlantic.
Sometime in the 1950s,
a Lockheed strayed off course.

Driving down white marbled streets
where celebratory excuses are enough
for men who shouldered state relics
all the way up to the citadel,
we’re turning out onto the plain,
disputed territory not that long ago,
where old simplicities ended.

News re: Albania

Albanian writer Ismail Kadare has won this year's Lerici Pea Poetry prize. This may come as something to a surprise to readers in Britain since, here, he's only really known for novels such as The Successor (which won the Booker Man International Prize), The Siege, The General of the Dead Army, The Ghost Rider etc.
Kadare, however, has published a series of poetry collections in Albanian, including several career-spanning 'selecteds'. Some of these have been translated into French as part of an ongoing translation of his collected works (and, given the origin of this latest prize, some have also presumably been rendered in Italian) but the only samples I can find translated into English are a good but modest group on Robert Elsie's site. These and some very rudimentary readings of his poetry in Albanian suggest that, unsurprisingly, this strand of his work demonstrates similar qualities to his prose - clarity, precision, allusiveness, versatility - and to the poetry of other European late-modernists.
More than anything, perhaps, the awarding of this prize is a reminder that, even though a dozen of his novels have been translated into English, these only represent a tiny proportion of Kadare's work (his novels, poetry, essays etc occupy two whole bookcases in the International Bookshop in Tirana); that the proportion of Albanian literature in general which has been translated into English is even smaller (although again Elsie's site has a good selection, as well as details of other Albanian translations which have been published); and that even when an individual writer or an entire literary culture appears to be well-represented in translation, the translated works rarely represent more than the very tip of the proverbial iceberg.
The other question which this award raises relates to Kadare's prospects as a putative Nobel laureate. His name has been 'connected' with the Nobel Prize on several occasions but the truth is he remains a controversial figure, both in Albania and South Eastern Europe as a whole, largely because of his ambiguous departure from Albania to live in Paris immediately after the end of communism and because of his perspective on Kosovo. You can get a flavour of the controversy at the LRB's website from this letter and my response, originally published three years ago.