celticman's blog

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001gf5s/my-old-school ‘The subject of this film does not want to show his face.’ But we’re shown it anyway, in animation, in media coverage of the aftermath of the event. Seventeen-year-old Brandon Lee enrolled in Bearsden Academy in 1993. He wanted to become a doctor. You get a lot of doctors in Bearsden and dentists and their middle-and-upper-middle class ilk. Brandon Lee’s father was apparently a doctor...

https://tinyurl.com/4a46jtek On page 5 of the foreword, author Mark Burrows tells the reader, ‘the following is a work of fiction’, and whatever Kafka was thinking, people don’t turn into pigeons, but Tories are still cunts. Realism begins with truth. He might not have used those exact words. I might be factional with his realities. Anger at the fuck-you world we’re forced to live in. Shit trickles down doctrines of Tory policy makers, you...

Envy | Kathryn Chetkovich | Granta Magazine I came to read this in a roundabout way. A recommendation from a writer I hadn’t read. She’s posted on Betsy Lerner’s blog. I hadn’t heard of her either. Betsy was Lucy Grealy’s literary agent. I greatly admired her autobiography. Betsy’s literary agent to Patti Smith, whose recent publication Book of Days , which I haven’t read, obviously went straight in at number one in The New York Times Bestseller...

Betty by Tiffany McDaneil is my novel of the year. Yeh, I know it was published in 2020 and this is 2022, nearly 2023, but I’ve always been a bit behind. I’ll try and explain why I think it’s pretty much perfect. I had to check Betty wasn’t real. This wasn’t autobiography. Listen to the first line. It’s an encapsulation of the whole book. ‘A girl comes of age against the knife.’ A coming-of-age story, but we all know they are ten a penny. Who...

Spoiler, I only watched about a half-hour of this. That old joke, it felt longer. Kate Winslet is an international star and has been a well-known face since she was in Titanic , 27 years ago, with that other guy (I wonder what happened to him?) Leonardo DiCaprio has refused to age. Seventeen-year-old Freya, played by Mia Threapleton, is Kate Winslet’s real daughter. In my day, your da got you a job in the shipyards. Kate got her daughter a...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001fyzd/im-an-alcoholic-inside-recovery Alcoholics Anonymous is 75 years old. The first meeting was advertised in The Financial Times (other newspapers wouldn’t allow such advertisements) and held in The Dorchester Hotel in 1947. Around 5000 meetings take place every day in the South East of England. Deepfake technology allows some of these alcoholics to tell their stories. I’m already familiar with them. I...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001fhl5/surge I watch lots of films. I guess it’s a way of turning off my mind. A passive acquiescence. But I found Surge , claustrophobic. The plots of most stories are quite simple. Make it hard for the protagonist. And I’m not going to go into that thing of there only being seven basic types. Joseph (Ben Whishaw of This is Going to Hurt ) has a shitty job. He works in security at a London airport. He...

I usually pick up these wee books from the library every year. Anybody that has written anything knows the feeling of triumph at being published. They are published by Scottish Book Trust. And they’re free. The paradox of free stuff is snob value. If it’s free, it must be shite. Almost thirty stories and poems in five sections—Community legends, Making it home, Origin Stories, Finding my place and Tales to treasure—and not one dud. Most stories...

Sam Knight reminds the reader, I’m not just making this up. I believe him. I love this kind of wacky stuff and read it in one go. But when Knight tells the reader what psychiatrist John Barker was thinking about when he was flying into New York in the mid-sixties, he’s writing fiction. It’s the kind of world Stephen King writes about and asks questions like how can we know what we do not know? In one of King’s novels, the protagonist sets out to...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001d3jv/the-ice-cream-wars-series-1-episode-1 https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001d3lb/the-ice-cream-wars-series-1-episode-2 Start with the big stuff. Headlines that grab your attention—and demand something needs to be done. The murders of six members of the Doyle family in April 1984, which included a baby and fourteen-year-old boy in Bankend Street in the north-east of Glasgow, elicits that guttural...