"We talk about the view that the soul exists but can’t do so without the body"/"'Is that what you believe?' he asks."

"'Ah well, I don’t, you see. My body is like a Hillman Imp and my soul is driving it. When I die, I park the car and walk the rest of the way. And I’m thinking that heaven is probably pedestrianised, so I can leave it outside.'"

From "Frank Skinner on faith and finally getting married (she said no four times)/The comedian opens up about his alcoholism, the consolation he finds in poetry — and whether he could succeed Melvyn Bragg as In Our Time presenter" (London Times).

There's a new season of "Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast" beginning this week, first episode here. I'm a big fan of that.

Hillman Imp? Apparently some sort of car. 

Oh!

That's Frank's idea of the metaphorical body that contains his soul. 

I'm reminded of the George Harrison song: "I got born into the material world/Getting worn out in the material world/Use my body like a car/Taking me both near and far...."

But George didn't name a particular car. Frank named the Hillman Imp. How about you?

"But she upended expectations once more, surviving and soon returning to a passion project she had been working on..."

"... a spoken-word album of recitations of classic Romantic poems. For one last time, she allowed a glimpse of the other side to inform her art, and the uncompromising tone of her voice: 'I sound more vulnerable,' she told me in an interview at the time, reflecting on her performance of Alfred Tennyson’s 'Lady of Shalott,' 'which is kind of nice, for the Romantics.'"

From "Marianne Faithfull Made an Art of Upending Expectations/The singer, who died on Thursday at 78, spent decades in the spotlight exercising a very specific and subversive power" (NYT).

You can, like me, download the entire album — "She Walks in Beauty" — here, on Spotify.

By the way, my favorite episode of Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast is the one about "Lady of Shalott."

Do you listen to poetry on Spotify? Any recommendations? I was just enjoying "The Best Cigarette" yesterday. Check out "Nostalgia."

X marks the spot.

 Have you ever read this poem by Rita Dove?

 

Here's an excellent podcast about that particular poem, which of course has nothing to do with Elon Musk's renaming Twitter "X"... unless it does. You know, you can always put any 2 things side by side and come up with connections.

"Many poets make us smile; how many poets make us laugh – or, in that curious phrase, 'laugh out loud' (as if there’s any other way of doing it)?"

"Who else uses an essentially conversational idiom to achieve such a variety of emotional effects? Who else takes us, and takes us so often, from sunlit levity to mellifluous gloom? And let it be emphasised that Larkin is never 'depressing.' Achieved art is quite incapable of lowering the spirits. If this were not so, each performance of King Lear would end in a Jonestown."

Wrote Martin Amis, in the introduction to "Philip Larkin Poems: Selected by Martin Amis," which I've been reading lately.

I bought this book after listening to the Larkin episode of "Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast," but that Martin Amis introduction did not spring to mind when I was reading the Martin Amis obituaries this morning, though I was trying to remember what small part of his writings I may have read.

"9 Surprising Moments in the History of Sunglasses."

At Science Museum.

#1 is "Emperor Nero's Emerald":

In his work Natural History, Pliny the Elder described how the Roman Emperor Nero would watch gladiator matches through an emerald. This has been considered by some as a rather opulent, if a bit ambiguous, account of a precursor to sunglasses. Some speculate that this was because Nero was near-sighted or that it was meant to shield the Sun’s glare....

You might think I'm reading this because of my own surprising moment having to do with sunglasses, a few posts down, here. But no, Nero's emerald came up in the "Car Tongs" episode of "The Frank Skinner Show" podcast, which I've been bingeing on lately. 

"William Wordsworth swore by walking, as did Virginia Woolf. So did William Blake."

"Thomas Mann assured us, 'Thoughts come clearly while one walks.' J.K. Rowling observed that there is 'nothing like a nighttime stroll to give you ideas,' while the turn-of-the-20th-century novelist Elizabeth von Arnim concluded that walking 'is the perfect way of moving if you want to see into the life of things.' And ask any deep thinker about the benefits of what Bill Bryson calls the 'tranquil tedium' walking elicits. Jean-Jacques Rousseau admitted, 'There is something about walking that animates and activates my ideas.' Even the resolutely pessimistic Friedrich Nietzsche had to give it up for a good saunter when he allowed, 'All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.'"

From "Whatever the Problem, It’s Probably Solved by Walking" by the writer Andrew McCarthy (NYT).

"If you’re a fan – as I am – of Skinner’s standup, you’ll enjoy tracing how his poetry appreciation now dovetails with, and now diverges from, comedy."

"Transpose on to standup his reading of Gregory Corso’s Man Entering the Sea, which concentrates all of evolution into the spectacle of a bather going for a dip, and you get – bit of a clash, this – Michael McIntyre’s routine about swimming pools. ('It’s all right once you’re in!') That brand of comedy, you might think, can only seem superficial by comparison with poetry. Then you listen to Skinner’s account of what poets do: 'They see an ordinary thing that we all see, and then they illuminate it. They do something with that everyday thing that makes it sacred, if you like.' Remind you of anyone else? Another profession that takes the mundane and fashions it into something intensely, transcendentally alive? Skinner’s podcast is all about the poetry, of course. But you can’t listen without the thought occurring that comedians, himself included, are poets of a sort, too."

Writes Brian Logan, in "From standup to stanzas: Frank Skinner's terrific guide to poetry/The comedian’s new podcast is bursting with enthusiasm for poems. If standup forces him to be funny, here he forces himself to be true" (The Guardian).

The article is from 2020. I dug it up because I've been bingeing on "Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast" for the past week or so.