The Book Club
More A-level bangers from The Book Club. I’ve just published an essay here about Brave New World, among other things.
The Lit Path
As well as convening the unforgettable ‘After Amis’ event earlier this month, ‘one-man Goalhanger’ Jack Aldane continues to release episodes of his new series, The Lit Path. In this episode Philip Hensher talks about Dickens’s Bleak House.
The London Review Bookshop Podcast
Leo Robson discusses a new novella called The Smiths with its author, Michael Bracewell. I ordered the book from Blackwell’s and was delighted to be sent a signed copy. The paean to the Smiths’ first single, ‘Hand in Glove’, is thrilling: Morrissey’s was ‘the voice of English romanticism: the idiom of crooning and swooning, Wordsworth and Windermere, sunsets and shepherds, transposed to embrace negation.’ Bracewell’s narrator later compares Morrissey’s art to something Christopher Neve said of the Cumbrian painter Sheila Fell: ‘All are risked in one indivisible image of great beauty as if from the first idea she knew what she was doing.’ And, getting to the heart of the matter,
So I fell in love with The Smiths,’ I said. ‘I think a lot of people brought their unwanted love to The Smiths.’
And a final note. I was so impressed that everyone, even the audience, got through this without a single portentous nudge-nudge comment about Morrissey. I was on the edge of my seat by the end.
The LRB Podcast
On the subject of Wordsworth and Windermere, this summer the LRB has been putting out a strand called ‘Travel with Close Readings’. In this episode, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss Books IX and X of Wordsworth’s Prelude. Book X is the one in which Wordsworth recounts his meaning crisis:
Thus I fared, Dragging all passions, notions, shapes of faith Like culprits to the bar, suspiciously Calling the mind to establish in plain day Her titles and her honours, now believing, Now disbelieving, endlessly perplex’d With impulse, motive, right and wrong, the ground Of moral obligation, what the rule And what the sanction, till, demanding proof And seeking it in every thing, I lost All feeling of conviction, and in fine Sick, wearied out with contrarieties, Yielded up moral questions in despair[.] (X. 888–900)
Until next month.