It was 1921, and in Margate, the sunniest October on record was gradually transitioning to a cooler November. On a bench in a shelter by the beach, a tired 33-year-old man is trying to do nothing. It wasn't easy for him. By character, he was a worried worker, but his doctor instructed him to do nothing. To that end, his employer, Lloyds Bank, gave him three months of paid leave.
So he does nothing, or almost nothing. He just scribbles passers-by or practices scales with a mandolin. He also wrote the central passage of a poem that went on to become the most influential poem of the century:
"At Margate Beach
i can put
Nothing and nothing connected
Broken nails on dirty hands.
We're low-class people, never expecting
what. "
That October, Eliot came to the Obermar Hotel in Margate with pages of poems he had been working on for several years. He wrote dozens of new lines of verse, reworked old drafts, and left at last a draft of a masterpiece that changed the shape of literature. A month later, he went to Lausanne, Switzerland, for psychotherapy, where he revised the book. But critic Lyndall Gordon said, "Albemarle's draft has a stronger autobiographical feel. It emphasizes the suffering individual, not the culture." Eliot once offered "The Wasteland" Social Criticism" was dismissed. "For me, it's just a relief from the personal and completely inconsequential complaints about life," he says half-jokingly. He believes poetry should be "objective," but the strong emotions in "The Waste Land" are rooted in in his personal life.
Eliot in 1921 was unhappy. He had a promising academic career at Harvard (writing a Ph.D. dissertation), and after a marriage to the daughter of the English painter Vivien Haigh-Wood, which his family saw as a bad one, Against the wishes of his family, he settled in England. He was desperate to convince his family, he wrote in 1919, that "I have not made a mess of my life as they thought." But his father died shortly after he wrote these words, and before that he amended his will to ensure that if Eliot died, the poet's inheritance would not be left to Vivian.
In the summer of 1921, Eliot's brother, sister and his "amazingly energetic" 77-year-old mother all crossed the Atlantic to visit him for the first time since 1915. But the visit, meant to mend family ties, left Elliott exhausted and disappointed. He realized that his mother had not forgiven him. Elliott wrote on October 3: "I feel really unstable. Since my family left, I seem to be falling apart very quickly." By the time Elliott traveled to Margate, he had experienced It's what Vivian calls a "serious breakdown." His doctor strictly instructed him to "don't think about it at all".
The manuscript for The Waste Land is not entirely handwritten, it is mostly typescript. "While writing on the typewriter, I found myself getting rid of all the long sentences," Elliott wrote. Typing made his words "stutter." But in his draft to friend and editor Ezra Pound — republished this month under the name The Waste Land Facsimile — the words about "Margate Beach" are handwritten. In the bundle of documents Elliott sent Pound, he also attached the bill for his hotel in Margate, along with several pages of poetry. The new edition prints the papers in color for the first time, raising questions such as: Why on earth did Pound insist on scribbling notes in green crayons?
Reading the facsimile is like going back to Margate in 1921, where fragments of poetry that Eliot had amassed over the years found new resonance. In his cuts and alterations, we can hear the poet's reflections. "A flurry of reasoning lost clues/gathered strange images, and we walked by." He felt something was wrong. Should "we" be "I"? Should "along" be "alone"? He tried both versions, but the verses didn't end up in The Waste Land.
Should "we" be "I"? At the time, Elliott and Vivian's marriage was unraveling. She was dating his former college mentor, Bertrand Russell; and he was still in love with a woman he stayed in America, Emily Hale. In a letter, Elliott admitted to violating his doctor's instructions: "I was supposed to be alone, but I couldn't bear to start treatment alone in an unfamiliar place, and I've asked my wife to come with me." He was alone in Margate for two weeks before she came. Still, they seem to have had a good time there. "Margate is weird and we don't hate it," Vivian wrote. Another line in Fax that didn't end up being eliminated was: "One person is terrible, and one more person is too dirty."
Let's take a walk with Elliott. As he left the Obermar Hotel in Cliftonville, east of Margate, he could see a bandstand and beyond that was the sea. He can turn right towards the towering white cliffs of Botany Bay, a half-hour walk. (From Fax: "He walked first between the sea and the high cliffs / The wind made him realize his legs were crossed / His arms were crossed on his chest.")
But today he turns left and walks west along the sidewalk to town, where he'll find a place to sit and write a poem that he still intends to call "Police with Different Voices" (He Do the Police in Different Voices). The title as we know it will be mentioned later. He can take the tram, but it only takes 10 minutes to walk, so today, let's assume he does. Perhaps it was a movie poster that caught his eye, and a local movie theater will soon show a film called "A Wasted Life." In Fax, he wrote: "The sweaty rabble in the cinema". (He thought "the rabble" was wrong, so he crossed it out, and tried "thousands" again, and crossed it out too.)
To his left is "Dreamland" - written on the hoarding of a large entertainment hall that opened last year in front of a railway building facing the sea. As he walked, the sun was shining. In 1921, Margate had the lowest annual rainfall on record in the UK. A wasteland is a dry place. "Sweat is dry, feet buried in the sand," Eliot wrote, "a pile of tattered idols, battered by the sun, and dead trees without shade." The pale poet was no sunbather. Luckily, just after "dreamland," a cool shade of grey fell on the bench at the Neyland Rock Shelter. (From facsimile: "Come in the shadow of this gray rock.")
A waste of life, a dream home, a rock shelter. What else flashed through Elliott's mind as he sat and played the mandolin? Maybe a song: after "nothing" and "nothing" rhyme, the word that follows is "la la". Elsewhere, "the whine of a melodious mandolin" is incorporated into poetry. Maybe he thought of other writers—like Pound, or James Joyce. Eliot met Joyce in Paris last year and recently read part of a novel Joyce was writing. Ulysses would be another masterpiece of modernism. (In Pound's words, "It was a great literary age after all.")
In Ulysses, Leopold Bloom is also considering "Margate's hybrid bath and first-rate spa." Bloom is planning a tour for his wife, opera singer Molly: "How's the waterside in England? Brighton, Margate. Quay in the moonlight. Her voice floats out. Those lovely seaside girl." Molly was more interested in cute seaside boys. In her famous, uninterrupted reverie, she describes them: "I could see those fine young men on the rocky side of Margate Beach, standing naked in the sun like gods, and then Jump into the sea with them. Why aren't all men like that."
Eliot wrote in Margate's manuscript: "On Margate Sands/There are many others." Eliot wrote that the poet's mind "is constantly fused with different experiences; the experience of the common man is Chaotic, irregular, fragmented. The latter falling in love, or reading Spinoza, the two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the sound of a typewriter, or with the taste of cooking; in the poet's mind , these experiences always form new wholes.” The achievement of The Waste Land is that it creates a new whole from “a pile of broken images.” In the Margate Beach manuscript, Eliot connects nothingness with nothingness, creating something for the reader to see.
In order to write this article, I wanted to go back to the beginning and see where Elliott walked. So, on a Sunday a few weeks ago, with the cruelest month just around the corner, I got on the train to Margate.
"April was the cruelest month" wasn't always the first line of The Wasteland. In Fax, the poem begins: "First of all, we have some tempters at Tom's house." Sadly, you can't go to Tom's house any more. The Obermar Hotel where Elliott was staying at the time is long gone. But right down the street it's on, there's now a hotel with rooms named after poets (Charles Dickens, William Blake, oddly no TS Eliot) called the "Albion Room" ” (The Albion Rooms).
The owner of the Albion room is Carl Barat. When he wasn't the hotel owner, he was the glamorous duo with Pete Doherty in the rock band The Libertines. Naturally, I wanted to chat with him.
"To be honest, when I first read The Waste Land, it was like Finnegan's Wake," Barratt told me, "I had no idea what was going on. I guess it It's like watching James Bond as a kid. You don't understand the plot, but you're still drawn to the highlights. If you start out thinking April is the cruelest month, then keep going back By this month it's slowly coming together like a new city. Like when you first go to London and don't remember Covent Garden being next to Piccadilly Circus until you no longer That's what it feels like to ride the subway."
Bharat is one of the artists who recently "migrated" to Margate. People are drawn to the "shabby Shoreditch, where anything is possible, an artist's sanctuary" vibe. But the town has actually been attracting artists since ancient times. why is that? "Light," Ballart said, "that's what attracted JMW Turner here. The light here is not like anywhere else I know. I've never seen a bad sunset here."
Margate has seen various booms and busts since the days of Elliott. "It seems to be the kind of place that just breathes: it's up and down in opulence," Bharat said. "It's got a quality of abandonment, but there's also hope...I think it's that kind of spiritual. , where the boundaries are the same.”
As Eliot's notes attest, "The Waste Land" is a poem drawn from pre-Christian mythology and fertility rituals. Eliot had read Fraser's "The Golden Bough" and studied cave paintings at the Fendegum cave in France. If you're looking for pre-Christian spiritual energy beneath Margate, you've got it.
Beneath the soil of Cliftonville, a few minutes drive from Obermal Church, sits Shell Cave. A spooky underground church discovered in 1835, its winding corridors are adorned with four million tiny seashells arranged in heart and spiral patterns. No one knows when it was built or why. Some believe it may be more than 2,000 years old and may have been man-made by the Phoenicians. Its hallways are very cool even on hot days.
Elliott's own hard shell formed his buttoned, Prufrock-esque image—Virginia Woolf called him a "four-piece suit." He’s a bit like the sailor in Fax: “Even on shore, in public bars or on the street, something inhuman, clean and dignified remains.” It’s a way of keeping a distance from the world. Eliot's biographer, Robert Crawford, told me that the characters in his poetry played a similar role: "He was always keen to suggest in his poetry that others were speaking, which to a certain extent It’s a defensive gesture.” Margate’s lines appear in quotation marks, but as often in his poetry, it’s a matter of interpretation where one voice ends and another begins.
Eliot, or his alter ego J Alfred Prufrock, thought: "I should be a pair of rough claws, running on the seabed of a silent ocean." I Stroll into Margate's Crab Museum and stare at a fish tank full of plastic crabs quirky in little 1920s clothes. I bought a crab-shaped fridge magnet and admit that the trip was basically a waste of time. No increase. "The world seems to be in vain - like a Sunday outing."
Eliot believed that "true poetry communicates before it is understood". But for many readers, The Waste Land's intricate allusions and references can be off-putting. "It's a matter of references," sighs Bharat. "It feels a little like members-only." It's a poem that's only a few pages long — read aloud in the shower, and you'll read it before the water cools. — but this is a poem that is hundreds of years old. This is probably what Pound meant when he called it "the longest poem in the English language." It begins with inscriptions in Greek and Latin and ends with a line of text in Sanskrit. Endnotes lead the reader to dozens of sources: Ovid, Baudelaire, Dante, Webster, and Buddhist texts.
You can ignore the notes, says Matthew Hollis, now in Eliot's former position: poetry editor at Faber & Faber. The notes, he told me, were "a kind of mischievous distraction." The poems were written because Eliot's publishers, Boni & Liveright, could not publish a book of only poems. thin book. (This kind of thing still happens in poetry publishing today.)
Hollis said: "I think people sometimes read poetry with a sense of fear that they can't 'understand,' but you don't necessarily listen to a piece of music that has the same problem in that mood. I would encourage people to Listen to 'The Waste Land' as music. Enjoy its rhythm, listen to its sound."
It is a piece of music. Virginia Woolf, after listening to Eliot recite the poem, wrote in her diary, “He sang the poem with rhythm.” Crawford told me that we should think of the poet as a Kind of "Shaman". What matters is the emotional effects of the words, not where they come from. Taking two of the poem's most songlike and puzzling lines, "Weialala leia/Wallala leialala," Crawford said: "In a way, this is Wagner's work, and we can find the source. , and has an apparently concise explanation. But when you hear it, when you read it aloud to yourself, it sounds like the complete opposite of neatness. The poem sounds like someone has a mental breakdown."
On the way back to Margate station, I passed a sign that said "Entertainment NTS". The second E is gone, and the first S barely clings to it. Below is a pile of rusted corrugated metal and tattered punk band posters, layered on top of each other, with illegible writing line by line.
On the way back to Margate station, I passed a sign that said "AMUSEMENTS". The second E is gone, and the first S barely clings to it. Below is a pile of rusted corrugated metal and tattered punk band posters, layered on top of each other, with illegible writing line by line.
This is the real wasteland. I think, and then take a closer look. The posters are so clean, the concerts they advertise are decades old. Sam Mendes is in town shooting his next blockbuster. I'm watching a movie set. Unreal Margate. dreamland.
(This article originally appeared in the British "Daily Telegraph")
So he does nothing, or almost nothing. He just scribbles passers-by or practices scales with a mandolin. He also wrote the central passage of a poem that went on to become the most influential poem of the century:
"At Margate Beach
i can put
Nothing and nothing connected
Broken nails on dirty hands.
We're low-class people, never expecting
what. "
Notes written in green crayon by Ezra Pound in The Wasteland. Image source Faber
In our opinion, "The Waste Land" is a poem about a metropolis, which TS Eliot called an "imaginary city" in all its pretense: "Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, London..." But it is also a A poem about a seaside town in Kent. It's like the finale of the marina: a whirlwind of pop song, drama and jazz, where Mrs. Sosostris - with her bad cold and "wicked cards" - counts tarot for any passing visitor Card. Eliot believes that "art is the sublimation of popular art, not the opposite". In his news coverage, he slammed the "staleness" of middle-class literary circles, but praised the "people's culture" expressed in the cacophony hall, the rhythm of which runs through his poetry. Eliot threw himself into "pop" art, and The Waste Land is one such work.That October, Eliot came to the Obermar Hotel in Margate with pages of poems he had been working on for several years. He wrote dozens of new lines of verse, reworked old drafts, and left at last a draft of a masterpiece that changed the shape of literature. A month later, he went to Lausanne, Switzerland, for psychotherapy, where he revised the book. But critic Lyndall Gordon said, "Albemarle's draft has a stronger autobiographical feel. It emphasizes the suffering individual, not the culture." Eliot once offered "The Wasteland" Social Criticism" was dismissed. "For me, it's just a relief from the personal and completely inconsequential complaints about life," he says half-jokingly. He believes poetry should be "objective," but the strong emotions in "The Waste Land" are rooted in in his personal life.
Eliot in 1921 was unhappy. He had a promising academic career at Harvard (writing a Ph.D. dissertation), and after a marriage to the daughter of the English painter Vivien Haigh-Wood, which his family saw as a bad one, Against the wishes of his family, he settled in England. He was desperate to convince his family, he wrote in 1919, that "I have not made a mess of my life as they thought." But his father died shortly after he wrote these words, and before that he amended his will to ensure that if Eliot died, the poet's inheritance would not be left to Vivian.
In the summer of 1921, Eliot's brother, sister and his "amazingly energetic" 77-year-old mother all crossed the Atlantic to visit him for the first time since 1915. But the visit, meant to mend family ties, left Elliott exhausted and disappointed. He realized that his mother had not forgiven him. Elliott wrote on October 3: "I feel really unstable. Since my family left, I seem to be falling apart very quickly." By the time Elliott traveled to Margate, he had experienced It's what Vivian calls a "serious breakdown." His doctor strictly instructed him to "don't think about it at all".
The manuscript for The Waste Land is not entirely handwritten, it is mostly typescript. "While writing on the typewriter, I found myself getting rid of all the long sentences," Elliott wrote. Typing made his words "stutter." But in his draft to friend and editor Ezra Pound — republished this month under the name The Waste Land Facsimile — the words about "Margate Beach" are handwritten. In the bundle of documents Elliott sent Pound, he also attached the bill for his hotel in Margate, along with several pages of poetry. The new edition prints the papers in color for the first time, raising questions such as: Why on earth did Pound insist on scribbling notes in green crayons?
Reading the facsimile is like going back to Margate in 1921, where fragments of poetry that Eliot had amassed over the years found new resonance. In his cuts and alterations, we can hear the poet's reflections. "A flurry of reasoning lost clues/gathered strange images, and we walked by." He felt something was wrong. Should "we" be "I"? Should "along" be "alone"? He tried both versions, but the verses didn't end up in The Waste Land.
Should "we" be "I"? At the time, Elliott and Vivian's marriage was unraveling. She was dating his former college mentor, Bertrand Russell; and he was still in love with a woman he stayed in America, Emily Hale. In a letter, Elliott admitted to violating his doctor's instructions: "I was supposed to be alone, but I couldn't bear to start treatment alone in an unfamiliar place, and I've asked my wife to come with me." He was alone in Margate for two weeks before she came. Still, they seem to have had a good time there. "Margate is weird and we don't hate it," Vivian wrote. Another line in Fax that didn't end up being eliminated was: "One person is terrible, and one more person is too dirty."
Let's take a walk with Elliott. As he left the Obermar Hotel in Cliftonville, east of Margate, he could see a bandstand and beyond that was the sea. He can turn right towards the towering white cliffs of Botany Bay, a half-hour walk. (From Fax: "He walked first between the sea and the high cliffs / The wind made him realize his legs were crossed / His arms were crossed on his chest.")
But today he turns left and walks west along the sidewalk to town, where he'll find a place to sit and write a poem that he still intends to call "Police with Different Voices" (He Do the Police in Different Voices). The title as we know it will be mentioned later. He can take the tram, but it only takes 10 minutes to walk, so today, let's assume he does. Perhaps it was a movie poster that caught his eye, and a local movie theater will soon show a film called "A Wasted Life." In Fax, he wrote: "The sweaty rabble in the cinema". (He thought "the rabble" was wrong, so he crossed it out, and tried "thousands" again, and crossed it out too.)
To his left is "Dreamland" - written on the hoarding of a large entertainment hall that opened last year in front of a railway building facing the sea. As he walked, the sun was shining. In 1921, Margate had the lowest annual rainfall on record in the UK. A wasteland is a dry place. "Sweat is dry, feet buried in the sand," Eliot wrote, "a pile of tattered idols, battered by the sun, and dead trees without shade." The pale poet was no sunbather. Luckily, just after "dreamland," a cool shade of grey fell on the bench at the Neyland Rock Shelter. (From facsimile: "Come in the shadow of this gray rock.")
A waste of life, a dream home, a rock shelter. What else flashed through Elliott's mind as he sat and played the mandolin? Maybe a song: after "nothing" and "nothing" rhyme, the word that follows is "la la". Elsewhere, "the whine of a melodious mandolin" is incorporated into poetry. Maybe he thought of other writers—like Pound, or James Joyce. Eliot met Joyce in Paris last year and recently read part of a novel Joyce was writing. Ulysses would be another masterpiece of modernism. (In Pound's words, "It was a great literary age after all.")
In Ulysses, Leopold Bloom is also considering "Margate's hybrid bath and first-rate spa." Bloom is planning a tour for his wife, opera singer Molly: "How's the waterside in England? Brighton, Margate. Quay in the moonlight. Her voice floats out. Those lovely seaside girl." Molly was more interested in cute seaside boys. In her famous, uninterrupted reverie, she describes them: "I could see those fine young men on the rocky side of Margate Beach, standing naked in the sun like gods, and then Jump into the sea with them. Why aren't all men like that."
Eliot wrote in Margate's manuscript: "On Margate Sands/There are many others." Eliot wrote that the poet's mind "is constantly fused with different experiences; the experience of the common man is Chaotic, irregular, fragmented. The latter falling in love, or reading Spinoza, the two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the sound of a typewriter, or with the taste of cooking; in the poet's mind , these experiences always form new wholes.” The achievement of The Waste Land is that it creates a new whole from “a pile of broken images.” In the Margate Beach manuscript, Eliot connects nothingness with nothingness, creating something for the reader to see.
Margate Beach by Martin Parr in 1986. Source: British "Daily Telegraph"
In order to write this article, I wanted to go back to the beginning and see where Elliott walked. So, on a Sunday a few weeks ago, with the cruelest month just around the corner, I got on the train to Margate.
"April was the cruelest month" wasn't always the first line of The Wasteland. In Fax, the poem begins: "First of all, we have some tempters at Tom's house." Sadly, you can't go to Tom's house any more. The Obermar Hotel where Elliott was staying at the time is long gone. But right down the street it's on, there's now a hotel with rooms named after poets (Charles Dickens, William Blake, oddly no TS Eliot) called the "Albion Room" ” (The Albion Rooms).
The owner of the Albion room is Carl Barat. When he wasn't the hotel owner, he was the glamorous duo with Pete Doherty in the rock band The Libertines. Naturally, I wanted to chat with him.
"To be honest, when I first read The Waste Land, it was like Finnegan's Wake," Barratt told me, "I had no idea what was going on. I guess it It's like watching James Bond as a kid. You don't understand the plot, but you're still drawn to the highlights. If you start out thinking April is the cruelest month, then keep going back By this month it's slowly coming together like a new city. Like when you first go to London and don't remember Covent Garden being next to Piccadilly Circus until you no longer That's what it feels like to ride the subway."
Bharat is one of the artists who recently "migrated" to Margate. People are drawn to the "shabby Shoreditch, where anything is possible, an artist's sanctuary" vibe. But the town has actually been attracting artists since ancient times. why is that? "Light," Ballart said, "that's what attracted JMW Turner here. The light here is not like anywhere else I know. I've never seen a bad sunset here."
Margate has seen various booms and busts since the days of Elliott. "It seems to be the kind of place that just breathes: it's up and down in opulence," Bharat said. "It's got a quality of abandonment, but there's also hope...I think it's that kind of spiritual. , where the boundaries are the same.”
As Eliot's notes attest, "The Waste Land" is a poem drawn from pre-Christian mythology and fertility rituals. Eliot had read Fraser's "The Golden Bough" and studied cave paintings at the Fendegum cave in France. If you're looking for pre-Christian spiritual energy beneath Margate, you've got it.
Beneath the soil of Cliftonville, a few minutes drive from Obermal Church, sits Shell Cave. A spooky underground church discovered in 1835, its winding corridors are adorned with four million tiny seashells arranged in heart and spiral patterns. No one knows when it was built or why. Some believe it may be more than 2,000 years old and may have been man-made by the Phoenicians. Its hallways are very cool even on hot days.
Elliott's own hard shell formed his buttoned, Prufrock-esque image—Virginia Woolf called him a "four-piece suit." He’s a bit like the sailor in Fax: “Even on shore, in public bars or on the street, something inhuman, clean and dignified remains.” It’s a way of keeping a distance from the world. Eliot's biographer, Robert Crawford, told me that the characters in his poetry played a similar role: "He was always keen to suggest in his poetry that others were speaking, which to a certain extent It’s a defensive gesture.” Margate’s lines appear in quotation marks, but as often in his poetry, it’s a matter of interpretation where one voice ends and another begins.
Elliott People Visual Infographic
Eliot, or his alter ego J Alfred Prufrock, thought: "I should be a pair of rough claws, running on the seabed of a silent ocean." I Stroll into Margate's Crab Museum and stare at a fish tank full of plastic crabs quirky in little 1920s clothes. I bought a crab-shaped fridge magnet and admit that the trip was basically a waste of time. No increase. "The world seems to be in vain - like a Sunday outing."
Eliot believed that "true poetry communicates before it is understood". But for many readers, The Waste Land's intricate allusions and references can be off-putting. "It's a matter of references," sighs Bharat. "It feels a little like members-only." It's a poem that's only a few pages long — read aloud in the shower, and you'll read it before the water cools. — but this is a poem that is hundreds of years old. This is probably what Pound meant when he called it "the longest poem in the English language." It begins with inscriptions in Greek and Latin and ends with a line of text in Sanskrit. Endnotes lead the reader to dozens of sources: Ovid, Baudelaire, Dante, Webster, and Buddhist texts.
You can ignore the notes, says Matthew Hollis, now in Eliot's former position: poetry editor at Faber & Faber. The notes, he told me, were "a kind of mischievous distraction." The poems were written because Eliot's publishers, Boni & Liveright, could not publish a book of only poems. thin book. (This kind of thing still happens in poetry publishing today.)
Hollis said: "I think people sometimes read poetry with a sense of fear that they can't 'understand,' but you don't necessarily listen to a piece of music that has the same problem in that mood. I would encourage people to Listen to 'The Waste Land' as music. Enjoy its rhythm, listen to its sound."
It is a piece of music. Virginia Woolf, after listening to Eliot recite the poem, wrote in her diary, “He sang the poem with rhythm.” Crawford told me that we should think of the poet as a Kind of "Shaman". What matters is the emotional effects of the words, not where they come from. Taking two of the poem's most songlike and puzzling lines, "Weialala leia/Wallala leialala," Crawford said: "In a way, this is Wagner's work, and we can find the source. , and has an apparently concise explanation. But when you hear it, when you read it aloud to yourself, it sounds like the complete opposite of neatness. The poem sounds like someone has a mental breakdown."
On the way back to Margate station, I passed a sign that said "Entertainment NTS". The second E is gone, and the first S barely clings to it. Below is a pile of rusted corrugated metal and tattered punk band posters, layered on top of each other, with illegible writing line by line.
On the way back to Margate station, I passed a sign that said "AMUSEMENTS". The second E is gone, and the first S barely clings to it. Below is a pile of rusted corrugated metal and tattered punk band posters, layered on top of each other, with illegible writing line by line.
This is the real wasteland. I think, and then take a closer look. The posters are so clean, the concerts they advertise are decades old. Sam Mendes is in town shooting his next blockbuster. I'm watching a movie set. Unreal Margate. dreamland.
(This article originally appeared in the British "Daily Telegraph")
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