From Bard to Verse

Thoughts on literature (mostly) from Centrist Dad who thinks the world would be better if more people read proper books.

[From Bard to Verse @Bard_To_Verse]

He announced with a flourish: “And the winning team is… Cheese and Crackers.”
Apparently they had come first a few times before. Evidently a clever bunch. 3/3

[From Bard to Verse @Bard_To_Verse]

@SP1nightonly
Hi Steve,
I hope you don’t mind me messaging you but thought you might find this vaguely amusing.
My wife and I are on a trip up North to her hometown, Clitheroe.
We decided to do a pub quiz last night, and had our usual argument about what team name to use. 1/

[From Bard to Verse @Bard_To_Verse]

I suggested “Cheese and Crackers” in tribute to our favourite Inside Number 9 episode… but she rejected it outright, saying no-one in the pub would get it. So we went for something else.
Anyway, it came to the point where the quizmaster revealed the results. 2/

[From Bard to Verse @Bard_To_Verse]

Anyway it’s a brilliant book, my favourite of hers that I’ve read. RIP

[From Bard to Verse @Bard_To_Verse]

Mantel is also brilliant on relations between women - she (implicitly) asks the question, why wouldn’t all women be lesbians given how emotionally defunct men are? And the answer is more complicated than biology, but not for everyone.

[From Bard to Verse @Bard_To_Verse]

But it’s also about the huge, wide, rich emotional landscape that is barely accessible to men. We can glimpse it on the edge of our vision but it’s alien to us and just doesn’t really correspond to how we talk to each other.

[From Bard to Verse @Bard_To_Verse]

Am halfway through Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black - and am genuinely devastated that I will never be able to tell her how good I think it is. Although, given it’s all about mediums, perhaps I can…

[From Bard to Verse @Bard_To_Verse]

But her women are so incredibly acute, it’s painful. And Beyond Black is (for me) really about the pains and advantages of being a woman. It’s in some ways horribly sad, about the sadness that seeps through generations, from the dead into the living.

[From Bard to Verse @Bard_To_Verse]

I admired rather than loved Wolf Hall. I wasn’t quite sure what my reservation was, but now I wonder if it’s that her male characters (including, maybe especially, Thomas Cromwell) aren’t quite right.

[From Bard to Verse @Bard_To_Verse]

It’s given me some genuine tingle moments - like reading a book as a teenager, the sorts of feelings you tend not to get as a middle-aged adult. She captures the London-orbiting Home Counties brilliantly, capturing the M25’s aspirational deadnesses.

[From Bard to Verse @Bard_To_Verse]

Told my 10-year-old son it was bedtime. He replies, “You have no authority here.” #jackieweaver

[From Bard to Verse @Bard_To_Verse]

Am doing the washing up listening to one of Geoffrey Hill’s lectures as Oxford professor of poetry - and am about to return to Pericles (whose non-Shakespearean bits are much worse than I remembered). Combined with family and carols, this is not far off my perfect Xmas Eve

[From Bard to Verse @Bard_To_Verse]

I found it very refreshing - a literary novel that’s a jog rather than a slog.

[From Bard to Verse @Bard_To_Verse]

Ali Smith’s Autumn is the first book I’ve read in a while that I just *inhaled*. I’m a pretty slow reader these days - I don’t have much spare time to myself, so I try to choose really good books and savour every word.

[From Bard to Verse @Bard_To_Verse]

Autumn is a very good book, but it’s also written quite journalistically - you can tell it was drafted quickly around a couple of key ideas (and I suspect augmented with things seen on TV along the way) and not too heavily revised, and so it zips along.

[From Bard to Verse @Bard_To_Verse]

Haven’t used my Kindle in a while. My son asked me what it was. Putting it in his terms, I described it as “a rubbish iPad”.

[From Bard to Verse @Bard_To_Verse]

#NP6Music @freshnet is tonight playing the best selection of tunes I’ve heard on the radio for about 20 years. Bragg, Radiohead, Kate Bush, Nick Drake, Sebastien Tellier... all songs that break your heart but heal your soul.

[From Bard to Verse @Bard_To_Verse]

Book pitch: the relationship between Coleridge’s lifelong stomach troubles and his often tormented poetry. Working title: Kubla Khazi

[From Bard to Verse @Bard_To_Verse]

There is no division at all. The N is not exactly the same but it’s not that different. The election had a lot more to do with Corbyn than it did with immigration.

[From Bard to Verse @Bard_To_Verse]

The main thing I noticed tonight was that friendship groups in London and the SE are truly multicultural now. I can’t speak for the rest of the country, but people from different ethnic groups are very very comfortable with each other around London.