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Thread: Prospect - Clive James signs off.. (Read 3758 times) |
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Kevin Cryan
MV Fellow
I love Midnight Voices!
Posts: 1144
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Prospect - Clive James signs off..
« : 20.07.19 at 19:25 » |
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The Great Barrier Reef, bird-spotting and an opera about Boris Johnson—Clive James signs off
The legendary critic writes his final column
by Clive James / July 18, 2019 /
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Onward
At which point it might be time to say goodbye. A few days ago, I finished the manuscript of a book called The Fire of Joy. The book is a display case for those poems which, in the course of my longish life, have got under my skin. The emphasis is on poems that you can say aloud: can’t help saying aloud, indeed. When I started the book I couldn’t see anything, a handicap brilliantly qualifying me to write about Milton. Now that the book is done, I can get on with my money-making plan to write an opera about Boris Johnson. Called simply Boris Badenough, it will be anchored by a bass-baritone of Chaliapin-like authority whose chief challenge will be to deliver his share of the Altercation Duet, a passionate vocal exchange between himself and Anna Netrebko. There’s that to do; there’s my last book of memoirs to write; there’s 15 excellent volumes of Nevil Shute to read again; and I’m not getting any younger.
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read on
Kevin Cryan
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https://peteatkin.com/forum?board=Words&action=display&num=1563647102&start=0#0  |
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Kevin Cryan
MV Fellow
I love Midnight Voices!
Posts: 1144
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Re: Prospect - Clive James signs off..
« Reply #1: 09.08.19 at 19:28 » |
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Well, not completely......
The Floral Clock
A new poem by Clive James.
Quote:The winter bowed out through a luke-warm week
And now the deal is sealed with this spring snow,
Cold only in the way fluff cloaked the creek
In that Kentucky canyon years ago:
A lavish swansdown stole, but there below
Melt-water burbled while guitars rang clean
As banjos, sugar-sweet or fighting mean.
It must be thirty years since I was there,
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read on
Kevin Cryan
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https://peteatkin.com/forum?board=Words&action=display&num=1563647102&start=1#1 |
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Kevin Cryan
MV Fellow
I love Midnight Voices!
Posts: 1144
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Re: Prospect - Clive James signs off..
« Reply #2: 15.11.19 at 14:52 » |
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Clive James’s Late Reading: From spotted dick to the bittersweet joy of the morbid joke
November 13, 2019
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Midnight voices
The West Wing Weekly podcast is a great success, I hear. The spontaneous West Wing seminars that can happen over breakfast on my garden terrace leave it far behind. Only this morning we were all busy remembering not just the physical action but the actual words of an encounter between Donna Moss and Josh Lyman, with Donna looking wildly lovely and Josh being a bit of a dork as usual. The time stream is like a jet stream: you would like to get into it and be carried along. For any writer, it’s the only immortality that matters: to become one of the midnight voices, the echoes of always.
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read on
Kevin Cryan
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https://peteatkin.com/forum?board=Words&action=display&num=1563647102&start=2#2 |
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