This “harsh awakening” from “the false freedom of excess” is more than a matter for regret. The last is from December 2018. As if there were not much more of it there. He also recommended Clive James' book Cultural Amnesia. Somewhere Becoming Rain: Collected Writings on Philip Larkin gathers almost five decades of James on Larkin: reviews, essays, apologias, meditations, and two actual homages-in-verse. Do you want the minor-league mystic, sitting on a train somewhere and blinking at the void through his thick-framed specs? Reprinted from “Sentenced to Life: Poems,” by Clive James. Other influences he mentions in the interview are Soft Cell, New Order, Wire, Gang of Four and mid-period Cure. Your death, near now, is of an easy sort. Irony is one recourse, but as Rilke said, there are subjects before which irony becomes small and helpless. It was produced by Austin Jenkins and Joshua Block, formerly of psychedelic-rock Texans White Denim, and Florence and the Machine and Halsey collaborator Charlie Hugall. Public Image Ltd.’s “Poptones”: “Drive to the forest in a Japanese car / The smell of rubber on country tar.” That’s Larkin’s England right there, his tainted everyday sublime. The idea of death left him candidly stunned, blinking in terror; he had nothing useful to say about it. Read all poems of Clive James and infos about Clive James. All tracks are written by Frank Turner, except 1, 3, 7, 10 by Frank Turner & Iain Archer. Larkin’s smallness was important, though; one of the consolations, such as they are, of his poetry has to do with its limpid account of not-big, not-noble thoughts and feelings, its transparency about being opaque. Turner described it thus on a link sent out to fans on 17 March: "This was one of the first tracks we finished in the studio in Texas, and it really pointed the way forward - it's the first song of mine you could get away with playing in a club, I think, and it's about trying to find connections with other people when the lights go out. It’s difficult to write of death without being morbid, and even harder to write of one’s own death without self-pity. He began his career specialising in literary criticism before becoming television critic for The Observer in 1972, where he made his name for his wry, deadpan humour. Promotion for the album includes an interview with NME.[1]. If Updike’s example has rubbed off, so has that of Larkin’s poem “Aubade”, with its terror of extinction (“Not to be here, / Not to be anywhere, / And soon”). And write these poems, which are funeral songsThat have been taught to me by vanished time:Not only to enumerate my wrongsBut to pay homage to the late sublimeThat comes with seeing how the years have broughtA fitting end, if not the one I sought. The mirror holds the ruins of my faceRoughly together, thus reminding meI should have played it straight in every case,Not just when forced to. A television performer as well, James has written and presented numerous studio series and specials, including the series “Fame in the Twentieth Century,” which aired on the BBC and PBS. He has died at 80 in England.. Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame. He never married, and he never really went anywhere. It plunges him in an inferno of guilt: guilt at being distracted from serious pursuits; guilt at spending too much time away from home and family; worst of all, guilt at betraying his wife, Prue Shaw, to whom, as was his version of Dante, this book is dedicated. 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