the blog cannot hear the blogger

This week's literary Dead Pool also includes the rather more heavyweight name of Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe. All I can tell you about him is that his first novel Things Fall Apart is well worth a read - the others (he only wrote five, most of them in the 1960s) may well be too, but that's the only one I've read.

Things Fall Apart also gains extra props from me for taking its title from one of my favourite poems, WB Yeats' The Second Coming. I expect it's highly likely that many other works take their titles from the same poem, since it's so full of rich and portentous phrases, though the only ones I can think of off the top of my head are Joan Didion's 1968 essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and the Joni Mitchell song of the same name from her 1991 album Night Ride Home.

More can be found by Googling selected phrases:

• "centre cannot hold" gives you this photography book and this piece of Star Trek-based fiction;
• "ceremony of innocence" gives you this interactive video game thingy;
• "blank and pitiless as the sun" gives you this song by Australian experimentalists sleepmakeswaves;
• "the widening gyre" gives you a couple of books and an episode from season 3 of the TV series Sons Of Anarchy. There's one called "Turning And Turning" as well, just for good measure.

You get the general idea. Needless to say that's not an original thought and if I'd scrolled down the Wikipedia page a bit I'd have found a much more comprehensive list. I'll get me coat.