celticman's blog

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...

The Rise and Fall of the Krays, STV, ITV Hub. https://player.stv.tv/summary/espresso-krays ‘Rise’—‘Fear and Fame’—‘Fall. The first episode charts how the Kray twins with a propensity for violence rose from a humble working-class background in the East End of London. We’re on familiar territory here. The wife-beating father, who kicked their mum in the stomach, and caused her to miscarry. But no mention of their older brother, Charlie. Her...

I’m not American, nor undocumented. I’m not a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. I’m a British citizen, born in Scotland who voted for independence in the recent referendum. I’d qualify for an Irish passport on my father’s side and probably my mother’s too. Neither of them was born in Ireland. A product of the great diaspora, when the population of Ireland halved from around 12 million citizens, and then almost halved again. President John F...

You’ve probably not heard of Jennifer Worth. Certainly, I hadn’t, when my sister gave me this book. You probably heard of Call the Midwife . It’s one of the most popular programmes on telly and a massive hit for the commissioners at BBC. It’s got everything you need: nuns in funny wimples and nurses dressed in uniform (with nursing hats made out of doilies) no nonsense matrons and cute as pie, newly born babies, which provoke a collective aahhhh...

I’m not a great fan of Elizabeth Strout. Yet I’ve read most of the books in this series ( My Name is Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge, Olive Again, and Anything is Possible ).William Gerhardt who Lucy was married to for twenty years, and had two daughters with, before they separated and she married David, the cellist (who died last year), would explain it in terms of compulsion. William admitted he had affairs when he was married to Lucy. That was...

Where there are sheep the wolves are never far away, Plautus. Danny Weston weaves a spell that adolescent children—and those that think young—should follow under a Hunter’s Moon. A combination of coming-of-age drama, morality play and a supernatural thriller. It resonates with contemporary themes and Scottish folk lore. Callum, aged fourteen, narrates. Kids will warm to him, because he is the feisty everyman-child. His father lost him in a card...