Lit-Bits

...Mr Pot Noodle will have the final say...
...If you say the word intention you are immediately murdered...
...A typical piece of anthropomorphism...
...It's one of the pleasures of being a woman...
...It's nicely balanced with slag and snacks...
...I'm from the North. I'm allowed to say these things...
...If you were better-looking you would be more popular...
...I'll see your poetry and raise you some end-lines...
...I think Goebbels said a great artist must be a fanatic and a cynic...
...On the simplest level, adverts are very loud...
...Watching Come Dine with Me is my philosophy...
...Saddam Hussein promised The Mother of all Battles. That inspired The Slag of all Snacks...
...David Cameron watches Esure adverts...
...Honour, dignity, self-sacrifice are what the banking industry is all about...
...Ploughman's lunch was coined by advertising executives. Now I feel debased...
...Advertising takes language and ruins it...
...Poetry makes me angry...
...The number of people who complain about adverts is minimal. You have to be fairly mental...
...Slag is the fifth most offensive swearword...
...The Guiness Book of Records' most complained about advert of all time...
...I read Larkin and Beteman at school. Well, this is something to kick against... ...
...For me, that had very little imagination and bad imagination....
...The pun of 'heavy light' was worthy of some form of execution...
...The novel and the cookbook hit the imagination in slightly different ways...
...What does football stand for?...
...I was wondering about the relationship between cookery books and autobiography...
...Football and literature are semi-autonomous worlds within the world of our life...
...If you read Dickens, the food is rather wonderful...
...The novel and the cookbook hit the imagination in slightly different ways...
...How long have I been a Tottenham fan? 30 years. That’s longer than I’ve been reading Modernism...
...Beckenbauer was standing on the sideline and Barry Davies said, 'Clearly a man with a knowledge of Milton'...
...That’s the tiny tragedy of a great meal. It passes....
...In architecture, you have to make the building legible from the outside...
...In football, certain players become characters...
...It’s like a vocal version of Burberry....
...a form of horse-cleaning product....
...Can we talk about Andrew Motion?...
...I went to William Faulkner’s house in Mississippi. The telephone was surrounded by scribblings on the wall....
...Think of it as a series of adverts with little bursts of Shakespeare interspersed....
...As you were talking about Sister Act 2, I immediately thought of Ben Jonson....
...Where does this idea come from, that the artist should be separated from commerce?...
...Did Derrida ever write about football?...
...…which is a misunderstanding of the word “witty”....
...Adverts come at us all the time....
...The inspiration for that was Saddam Hussein....
...It’s like a debased and emasculated version of Keats’ “To Autumn”...
...These ideas about honour, dignity and self-sacrifice … are exactly what the banking industry is all about....
...It sounds kind of like Larkin put through a food blender....

Jonathan Beckman

Jonathan Beckman is a Senior Editor at the Literary Review, and organiser of the Review’s annual, and infamous, Bad Sex Awards.

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