celticman's blog

I admit to googling Michael Cannon to see if I knew him. He comes from the West of Scotland and has had a wide variety of jobs (snap), wasn’t very good at school (snap), has written a couple of novels (well I’ve kinda) and they’ve been published. Snap out of it. I don’t know the lucky bastard, but I have read his book. What attracted me to Articles of Faith wasn’t the author but the subject. The narrative setting in my hometown Clydebank, a...

Shirley Jackson, The Lottery and Other Stories , is published by Penguin Classics. That can mean the book is quite old. It does seem to be, with the stories I’ve read so far being set in post-Second World War America, or it could mean a guarantee of quality. An imprint that says - this is really good. The book is in five sections, with short stories in each section. I’ve finished section one and started on section two. My feeling was of...

Coal miners lives were nasty, brutish and short - that was only in the good years. In his preface Zola tells his reader that all authors are liars, but there is something like the truth between these pages that still holds true. Zola shows how the Company makes profit from wage slavery of men, women and children. The Maheu family, for example, live in Village 240, Block 2, house Number 16. The Company owns the houses they live in. It allows a...

I’ve been thinking of writing a book about poverty, and the cancerous growth of agencies as middlemen that add nothing but misery, leaving the rest of us to deal with the hidden costs. It’s too big a subject. You start getting lost in minutiae. What does it mean in a changing world, for example, to be working class? What does it mean to be poor? These are relative concepts. I once asked my former best mate Liam what the girl he got off with the...

Every day is All Fools Day when you’re just being yourself. Same beginning. Then two trillion -or more- cells later, we come apart. In between we acquire a repertoire of habits. Vincent Deary’s ‘How we are’, the first in his trilogy of How to Live, picks apart what makes us ourselves. In essence, a person and their reality, make up their personality. That’s me speaking, not Deary (and what a wonderful name for a pseudo-philosopher). I was...

It’s National Poetry day so I thought I’d look at Edward Hirsch’s (2014) Gabriel: A Poem . I’m not qualified to write about poetry. I’m not qualified to write about grief. Edward Hirsch is qualified on both counts. He wrote A Poet’s Glossary and How to Read a Poem both of which I intend to buy. Poetry is a foreign country and I’d like to learn the language. I might even attempt a few of the mangled phrases that novices use and, with a lot of...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p025zl7d/the-secret-life-of-books-5... I’m a big fan of Jane Eyre and that Charlotte Bronte, well, she’s well hot too. We all know the story of little orphan Jane Eyre all alone in the world. She’s a plain girl with a fiery temper. In the opening pages she bests her bully of a cousin, John, and tells her Aunt Reed, who is her guardian, what’s what, which isn’t a winning combination. Only beautiful girls are...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01sd320/sex-drugs-rock-roll Sex - yes, I’ve tried it, but the latest research finds our parents did it more and enjoyed it more. I don’t find that hard to take. Drugs- not really. Rock & Roll - not my cup of tea. I guess I’m not fitted for this biop of singer Ian Dury played by Andy Serkis. Well, let us pop to near the end. Mr Dury returned to talk to the other spazzies (his world and his word, not mine...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04jmx7l/marvellous Marvellous really was marvellous. Writer Peter Bowker mines magic and Toby Jones performance playing Neil Baldwin was not outdone by the appearance of the real-life, but older, Neil Baldwin. If you’ve not seen it, give yourself a treat and watch - and listen. There’s some natty hymns. Neil’s mum was a committed Christian. It gave her life meaning. Her son Neil took it a stage further. Ask...

Derren Brown burst onto the scene by shooting himself in the head. It’s difficult to top that, but if he told his audience (including me) that birds fly upside down at night, you would have to take him seriously enough to open the curtains and look outside. You wouldn’t see anything, because it was too dark. He would explain that what he was saying wasn’t true, tell you how he did it and then birds would fly upside down. Derren Brown is a god of...