Lit Bits
’Intelligent and irreverent....cancel all social engagements and run a hot bath’. The Observer’s pick of Best Literary Podcasts. Listen to meandering bookish chat: litbitspod.podbean.com
Episodes
In which Lit Bits (Adam ‘Lit’ Smyth and James ‘Bits’ Kidd) are joined by film critic and author James Mottram to discuss several matters pertaining to literature and film. We three grapple with, among other things, the strange discourse of The Empire Strikes Back —the life and opinions of Thomas Hanks Esq—the many difficulties involved when translating prose to the cinema—the peculiarities of reading a book while attending the cine...
In which Lit Bits (Adam ‘Lit’ Smyth and James ‘Bits’ Kidd) forget old acquaintance in a Soho doorway as a December deluge rains on their parade to make their new year resolutions. More exercise, less saturated fat, and a diet of Jeffrey Archer, EL James and Jon Bon Jovi’s epic poem about a strip club.
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For the sake of auld lang syne. Whatever that means.
Walk this way. Talk this way. As Run DMC once said before taking their annual Boxing Day ramble to the pub. Adam 'Lit' Smyth and James 'Bits' Kidd follow suit and do their talking while they’re walking – and vice versa – tumbling out of the French House in Soho, recorder in hand.----more----
With the heaven’s opening, and the pubs closing, our intrepid pair retire ‘neath the shady bow of...
In which Adam 'Lit' Smyth and James 'Bit' Kidd don the party hats, parp those funny trumpets and let it all hang out. Or very nearly. This is Lit Bits' way of asking: how do novels, plays and poems celebrate good times (come on).
Is humanity way too down with ambiva...
With Black Friday burning a hole in his tracksuit, James ‘Bits’ Kidd heads for a shopping mall in Poughkeepsie, upstate New York, to blow the entire Lit Bits expense account on a five-speed neck massager.----more----
As well as flashing the cash, James wonders about at least some of the following. Why are there no clocks in malls? Why are there so many guns in malls? What is a five-speed ...
In which Lit Bits (Adam 'Lit' Smyth and a train-delayed—but eventually present—James 'Bits' Kidd) are joined by poet Liane Strauss to discuss mistakes, slips, wanderings, and things not quite going to plan. A dash of Shakespeare; a shot of Keats; a half-pint tumbler of Wallace Stevens; and a generous lacing of Phil “Errare” Larkin.----more----
Like knights errant, but in Harris tweed.
Lian...
Lit Bits (Adam ‘Lit’ Smyth and James ‘Bit’ Kidd) ascends to a hidden portal in the London Library and finds not Thetans, but a creepily broken desk. Is this where recalcitrant members go to die? ----more----
Is this what happens if you write in pen in the margin of page 423 of that Lord Byron biography? Is this what happens if you make stains on the red carpet of the reading room?
Adam and...
In which Lit Bits (Adam ‘Lit’ Smyth and James ‘Bits’ Kidd) – never afraid to tackle the big issues – dons its metaphysical (and metaphorical) wig, takes a deep breath, and plunges into TRUTH in films and books. Joined by historical whizzes Alex von Tunzelmann and Hallie Rubenhold, the pod wrestles with JFK; Margaret Thatcher; Christian Bale; John Keats; The French Revolution; T.S. Eliot; Shakespeare; a couple of llamas; and dear, d...
It’s chocks away as Lit Bits (Adam ‘Lit’ Smyth and James ‘Bits’ Kidd) are joined, for five high-altitude minutes, by Alex von Tunzelmann and Hallie Rubenhold, to talk planes and books. Just what do you read during a flight? Why is airplane food so terrible? Why does every movie seem to star Seth Rogan?
And who exactly is Seth Rogan?????
Reading, writing, doomed ambition and all manner of zipless unmentionables.----more----
Lit Bits (Adam ‘Lit’ Smyth and James ‘Bits’ Kidd) pop down the boozer for a quick 0.5. Beginning a seemingly inexhaustible fascination with recording nonsense in boozers, our intrepid pod duo battle their way out of the The Lord John Russell to chat about James Joyce and Geoffrey Chaucer. In the process, they struggle to describe Ulysses’ multi-vocal pub conversations, and scratch their heads about just how many whiskeys Dylan Thom...
In which Lit Bits (Adam ‘Lit’ Smyth and James ‘Bits’ Kidd) are just raising their socks after another exhausting 45 minutes of sitting on a chair and talking nonsense when they ambush themselves with another poem: this time A Study of Reading Habits by Hull’s very own holding midfielder Philip Larkin.
‘Get stew. Books are a code of laps.’ Or something very like it. ----more----
In which Lit Bits (Adam ‘Lit’ Smyth and James ‘Bits’ Kidd) are just putting their feet up after another exhausting 45 minutes of sitting on a chair and talking nonsense when they are ambushed by Dinah Roe armed with a copy of W.H. Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’. How will they fare in this on-the-spot close reading? It’s literary criticism, in the nude. Those of a sensitive literary critical disposition might want to look away…now.
...In which Lit Bits (Adam 'Lit' Smyth and James 'Bits' Kidd) stroll to the bottom of the garden to nose around the woodshed. Sheds! Innocent abodes for gardening equipment? Laboratories of literary invention?----more----
Don’t close the door. Or perhaps do close it.
Art! In which Lit Bits (Adam ‘Lit’ Smyth and James ‘Bits’ Kidd) are joined by Dinah Roe and, freshly saddled, bound off in pursuit of enlightenment on the verbal and the visual. We begin with some chatter about the Pre-Raphaelite painters who also designed books and even wrote some poems to go inside them. ----more----
We ask our usual quota of big questions. Are poems like paintings? Are ...
Greetings from the future, pod listeners. Admire our foil suits and chrome helmets. Our touch-screen soap dispensers. Stand well back as James 'Bit' Kidd plugs in, turns on and downloads a hi-tech second mini-pod on literature and computers. John Keats meets Radiohead. Or should that be the other way around? Or should that be the other way around?----more----
Fitter, happ...
Hail! A mini Lit Bits in which—for half of ten minutes—Adam 'Lit' Smyth reflects on what Shakespeare would have made of computer-simulated voice software.----more----
Bring your inky cloak and enjoy.
In which Lit Bits (Adam ‘Lit’ Smyth and James ‘Bits’ Kidd) are joined by man of song Paul Myerscough. After ducking beneath Usher’s Climax, the podsters tap their feet to a merry farrago of (among others) Paul Morley—Kylie Minogue—Christopher Ricks—Ulysses—Bob Dylan—Keats—Shakespeare—and perhaps the greatest of them all, Andrew Ridgeley.
Hear the worst cover of Run DMC - ever (now that’s w...
In which Lit Bits (Adam ‘Lit’ Smyth and James ‘Bits’ Kidd) are joined by Steve Rose Esq., Guardian film critic and man of buildings. Some 40 minutes of musings on books and buildings —the links and differences— not excluding with some matters concerning to: impossible buildings, the language of architecture and literature, the relationship between reading a book and walking a city, the lusty symbolism of the brick, and how to enter...
In which Lit Bits (Adam ‘Lit’ Smyth and James ‘Bits’ Kidd) are joined by advertising wiz, comedy writer, and all-round chap-about-town Jonathan Thake. Our trusty podders saddle their steeds and engage in a veritable canter through the vast wild fields of literature and advertising. Among other oddities they encounter on their questing voyage are: Ben Jonson, Pot Noodle, American Psycho, Heineken, and Andrew Motion. Profit and delig...
In which Lit Bits (Adam ‘Lit’ Smyth and James ‘Bits’ Kidd) are joined by Polly Russell. After the introduction to the work—or bill of fare to the feast—containing as much of the background as is necessary or proper to acquaint the listener with in the beginning of this ‘podcast’—discussion turned to such topics as: who reads cookbooks for fun? TV chefs: for or againt? Poems about plums? And how many servants is ideal for the upkeep...
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