celticman's blog

It’s a year of anniversaries. One hundred years since the First World War and thirty years since the miners’ strike. Great Britain, an island nation, built on coal. Remember them, coal miners? Quaint little people that used to black up and work in coal mines. Seems hard to believe they existed. 84 000 of them and they had wives and families. Seventy pits. Arthur Scargill the NUM leader said the government had a hit list. The media proclaimed it...

This is one of the few films that trump the book, in this case Ken Kessey’s, and was a critical and box office success. I’ve seen it a few times and the script and the performances still shine. It’s a simple premise: Randle Patrick (Mac)McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) takes on the world, which is quite a mouthful, but he’s got quite a mouth. He’s inside for the statutory rape of a fifteen-year-old girl and other offenses, none of which he found...

The problem with autobiographical books is the writer appears before the procurator fiscal of memory and cheerfully admits to everything. Oh, that was me. Oh, that was me too. Yep, I was guilty of that. Convenient fictions become facts. Galloway uses old photos to ground her memories. She grew up in postwar Saltcoats a seaside town popular with holidaymakers in 1950s Scotland. Her mother thought it was the menopause, but it was Janice. Her...

Kate Millett wrote The Loony Bin Trip at the rue de Seine between 1982 and 1985. She questioned whether ‘they were right after all. My own mind was too dangerous.’ They are the medical establishment, the pharmaceutical companies, the police, the government, all the outsiders. But what makes it tragic was the collusion of all the insiders too. She follows in the path of R.D Laing Madness comes from the family and Thomas Szasz, madness is...

Away from Her (2006) on BBC iPlayer, written and directed by Sarah Polley, based on the short story by Alice Munro ‘The Bear Came over the Mountain’. As a writing exercise we were once asked to think about adapting a short story into a potential script. I chose a little known Turgnev story as a jumping off point. You could say if it was a currant bun it still had half of a currant in it. Polley keeps most of the currants and most of the bun. She...

Brooklyn’s Finest are, of course, all cops. When I see a film like this I always thing of The Wire, multiple storylines, flawed human, no discernible difference between cops, drug dealers or robbers. They’re all just trying to get by, flawed human beings, making mistakes. I don’t know if thats’ like The Wire , cause I’ve never seen The Wire , only read about it. In the opening shots, for example, the camera tracks through a car window. Sal(...

The picture on the cover of this book is a beautiful young girl, a cygnet, before becoming a swan. Below the author’s name, a gushing endorsement from the Sunday Times : ‘The year’s most talked about novel...extraordinary’. The ordinariness of the extraordinary has become something difficult to live down. Here we have a sixteen-year old adolescent with leukaemia. She knows she is dying and there is nothing anyone can do about it, but in a way...

Putin’s Russia welcomes athletes and spectators to the Sochi Winter Olympics. According to news reports they haven’t enough snow and have to use machines to create the necessary runways and conditions for it to go ahead, making it the most expensive Olympics ever. There will be no protests in Putin’s Russia, as there are in Brazil for that great media bauble called the World Cup. The notion of perestroika and glasnost are from a different...

This the second of three programmes was entitled ‘The War Machine’. All wars, of course, are fought in the name of peace and it would be far better if it were left to machines. This is a great mock-up of 1966 and it’s all over now, but it was a close run thing. Paxman, for example, interviewed two retired trade-unionists in Ferguson’s shipyard in Glasgow. They were old, but they weren’t that old as to have been on strike for higher pay and...

A collection of short stories that won the Man Booker International Prize, which is a surprise, because nobody publishes short stories now, but if you’re Alice Munro you can pretty well do what you like. A good story—whether it’s short or long—makes you think of other stories, perhaps something that happened in childhood. Bad stories are easy to spot. There are no bumps or mounds among the words, no mountains of childhood and you might just as...