celticman's blog

Oscar Wilde: ‘Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has ever read history, is a man’s original value.’ A writer’s job is to remember. The better the writer, the better we remember. I’d a day out at The Golden Friendship Club on Saturday. Jim McLaren performed two miracles—and perhaps there’ll be a play about that one day—buying the old Masonic Club and finding the money to renovate it. If he wants to hang a picture of his mum, Agnes, and...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00156cw/storyville-tango-with-putin?page=1 Memory is always being subverted. Tango with Putin begins with the Muscovite fairy-tale princess and her pink car looking for a prince. Natasha and Sasha…and they lived happily ever after in their castle. James Cameron (reporting on the North Vietnamese): ‘They whispered that I was their dupe, but what they really meant was I was not their dupe.’ The princess wants...

Storyville, Final Account, BBC 4, BBC iPlayer, Director Luke Holland https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0013vf3/storyville-final-account The simplest path is that of force. The crooked path is that of rhetoric and ideology. I ask myself a question here: Could I have done this. Could I have massacred men, women and children? My sympathy is not with the Nazis, but the victims of Neo-Nazism. My answer is Yes. Like 99% of other Germans I’d have...

Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist, author and critic of Vladimir Putin was murdered in her apartment in central Moscow 7 th October 2006. Ryszard Kapuscinski. Imperium : ‘All dictators, regardless of epoch or country have one common trail: they know everything, are experts on everything.’ Chechnya: A Dirty War 4 th November 1999. ‘You probably think I’m writing this to stir your pity. My fellow citizens have indeed proved a heard-hearted...

Ryszard Kapuscinski was born in 1932 and grew up in the Polesie region on Poland (today Belorussia). Pinsk was liberated by Soviet troops in 1939. From what wasn’t clear. He learned the Cyrillic Russian alphabet as school from a single copy of Stalin’s Studies in Leninism, watched arbitrary mass deportations to Siberia and starved with his family. He remained liberated for most of his adult life and witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989...

Colson Whitehead (2019) The Nickel Boys. Simone Weil: ‘The Present is something that binds us. We create the future in our imagination. Only the past is pure reality.’ Colson Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Underground Railway , a blend of fiction and fact. The Nickel Boys doesn’t need to stray far from the truth. America jails more people than any other nation combined, blacks for once have a majority. Whitehead in dipping...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0014j4m/storyville-try-harder I’m unfamiliar with the American college application process. It’s a big country, but modelled, in theory, so school-test scores determine which colleges will accept students. The American dream is a quite simple belief that if you work hard you’ll get your just rewards. Student, Tina Zheng, for example, plans to be a brain surgeon. The adolescents featured in this documentary...

Roy Shaw (2003) Prettyboy. In the inside cover, Roy Shaw, in Acknowledgements, writes BUY MY BOOK…OR ELSE! There were a lot of or elses for Roy Shaw. The Prettyboy—a media tag before a bareknuckle bout. He saw it as a marketing tool, in the same way as Thomas ‘Hitman’ Hearns or other professional boxers. He was born in Stepney, London 1936. Bullied at school. He found when he hit back at his attackers he’d talent for inflicting hurt. And the...

Storyville, Misha and the Wolves, BBC 4, BBC iPlayer, Writer and Director Sam Hobkinson. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00142bh/storyville-misha-and-the-wolves Jessica Brody, Save the Cat! Writes a Novel takes lessons from screenwriters.. The Hero’s journey. The ‘shard of glass’. ‘A psychological wound that has been festering beneath the surface of your hero for a long time.’ The moron’s moron, for example, a narcissistic psychopath with...

On the cover is a picture of Lenny McLean, with a banner, The No.1 Bestseller and a quote (from Lenny) ‘I look what I am, a hard bastard’. The book has been ghost-written by Peter Gerrard who has worked with Reggie Kray and Ronnie Knight. The back cover shows a picture of a glowering Lenny with a sweep-over bald patch, wearing a white t-short, hands clenched as fists. The background shot is the sign for The Blind Beggar pub where Ronnie Kray...