celticman's blog

Sometime I think about how people’s names suit their jobs. I used to have a writing tutor called Elizabeth Reeder. I probably spelled her name wrong, but it wasn’t her fault. Grosz would understand. He’s distilled over 50 000 hours of psychoanalytical insight into just over 200 pages. I’ve just read it in one gulp and I’m cured. I understand myself better and I understand humanity. The only difference between me and you is I’m better looking and...

The author describes this as ‘A Novel Based On A True Story.’ The true story is The Great Moonshine Conspiracy of 1935. The true story is of the great depression and Prohibition and of dirt poor farmers scrambling to get enough to eat and keep their land. The true story is of the author’s forefathers and their family: Granville Bondurant who on the death of his wife, sons and daughter in the great flu epidemic of 1919 claimed: ‘All the goodness...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/feb/02/inequality-for-all-us-economy... I don't usually review films I've not seen. I don't make the rules. 'Reich calls "the hugh lie". That the free market is good. And government is bad. Government makes the rules...it decides who benefits from those rules and who is harmed. And increasingly that boils down to the rich and poor. This is inequality imposed from the top. 42% of those born in poverty in the US...

This is a story about possession, obsession and the search for perfection. Nina Sayers (played by Natalie Portman) is all of these things and a bit more as well. Her life is ballet and is being relived vicariously through her mother Erica (Barbara Hershey) an ex-ballet dancer. In a telling exchange Nina reminds her that she was 28 when she gave birth to her, so her claims of having to give up ballet…In a prior scene Erica offers her a slice of...

The stories we tell ourselves tell us who we are. ‘I got George Bush elected…it wasn’t strictly legal, so I don’t want to talk about it.’ ‘I don’t want to kiss some old hag.’ David Seigal aged around 74, says of his wife Jackie 43. ‘She’s like another child.’ Jackie: ‘Seven [kids] by birth and one inherited.’ ‘My husband told me he was going to trade me in for two twenty year olds when I got to 40.’ ‘When I grew up I never knew you could have a...

The snooker was on TV and this kept getting put back until the session was finished. And at one point I doubted it ever would. My partner couldn’t stay awake to watch the film. She asked me the next day what it was about, and in a classical Freudian slip, I said , ‘trust’. Trust is the Janus face of doubt. Fling in the fairy dust of a little Catholic faith and, trust me, we have combustion. The best storylines are often reducible to a single...

Glen Campbell is the Doris Day of Country and Western, or indeed American Music. He’s the ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’ who came from a humble background, musically a child prodigy that could make a guitar and most other instruments sing and his voice was good too. He’d the hunky wholesome good looks that spoke of apple pie and living the good life for Jesus. Sure he got lucky. It’s not enough to be talented. Even Doris Day before she was a virgin got...

Sir Trev tell us in voice over that Indiana State Prison is about an hour’s drive from Chicago and had around 1900 inmates. The average sentence is 52 years, so none of the prisoners are in for dropping bubble-wrap in the street. It’s advertised as he meets 12 prisoners on death row, but by my calculations 1900 prisoners are on death row. Tom Harrison is a case in point. He’s already spent 18 years on death row. He killed three people and...

Deceiving and conceiving, what’s the difference? I thought about this as I watched this slow moving chain of destruction, called The War Against Drugs by Nixon, wreaking havoc across America. Ginsberg’s Howl does not do it justice, because there is none, not for poor people. At first viewing this looks about race, the demonization of the non-white population. This was graphically shown, time and again, by a mandatory sentencing policy that even...

I didn’t go out expecting to meet Jimmy Reid, after all he’s been dead for over a year, maybe longer. It was a cold but sunny day and I walked down the canal path into Dalmuir. My mind was on the next thing that I’d write and I’d already decided on a title ‘God Made Me Ugly for a Reason,’ an autobiographical look at my early upbringing. I’d already begun jotting down memories. I went into William Hills to put a football line on. I’m still not...