Ep. 1 Lit Bits on Football (pilot episode with Joe Brooker)

Lit Bits

The Pilot episode. In which Lit Bits (Adam ‘Lit’ Smyth and James ‘Bits’ Kidd) are joined by the scholar's scholar, the pundit's pundit and runner-up in the East Basingstoke John Lydon lookalike contest (two years running), Professor Joe Brooker. The big team asks the big questions. How is football like literature, and vice versa? What are the canonical soccer texts? Do writers make good footballers, and indeed vice versa? Did Derrida write about football (and vice versa)? And why is 'Peter Crouch is an oxymoron' the greatest poem ever chanted?

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• What is Lit Bits? Listen here...

Containing a portion of time somewhat longer than a demi-heure—and composed of many rules, and some examples—by which the twin arts of pen and boot may be aligned—and other prudential inducements to comparison. Which inaugurates Lit Bits, with an instance of wit, which—we hope—will not appear unnatural. The authors crave the forbearance of the listener (or ‘podder’) that this being a pilot pod, the sound is (in the words of the demotic) ‘somewhat patchy.’

Joe Brooker teaches English literature at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he works on modern and contemporary literature and culture. He has written on the work of James Joyce and Flann O’Brien, and his latest books are Literature of the 1980s: After the Watershed (Edinburgh University Press, 2010) and Jonathan Lethem and the galaxy of writing (2019).

A pod of three thirds.

Listen to more Lit Bits here.