celticman's blog

I might have read Margaret Elphinstone’s book, The Sea Road before. Everybody loves Vikings, especially President Putin. The Rus people, he claims, are directly descended from The Sea Road and not from the Asiatic hordes in the East. Another way of saying, white is right. White is might. Pass the longboat and invade Ukraine where it all began. I know what you’re thinking, Alzheimer’s. That’s what really scares me. Memory loss. Not being Valhalla...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001j079/the-shamima-begum-story Elie Wiesel: “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.” Near the end of The Shamima Begum Story, Josh Baker asked her a question we often hear: ‘What would you tell your fifteen-year-old self?’...

Putin vs The West, BBC 2, BBC iPlayer, Narrator Caroline Catz, Editor Toby Marter, Director Tim Stirzaker, and Series Producer Norma Percy. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0dlz7tz/putin-vs-the-west-series-1-1-my-backyard https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0dlzcrb/putin-vs-the-west-series-1-2-back-with-a-vengeance https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0dlzdwr/putin-vs-the-west-series-1-3-a-dangerous-path The Doomsday Clock sits 90...

Betty Smith hit a home run with her debut novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn , which sold over a million copies. What it’s selling is nostalgia. A version of the American Dream most immigrants would be familiar. For many cold rooms and childish hunger would be within living memory. They’d be reading about versions of themselves. Irish town, Italian town, German town, Jew town were you got Jew bread, rye bread. A place were the narrator, thirteen-...

I turned up on the wrong day for John Wilkie’s funeral and had to come back to the crematorium. No harm done. I saw more of John Wilkie’s work van than I saw of John Wilkie. He worked for the biggest employer in Britain, the NHS, and delivered stuff to disabled folk. It was parked outside my sister’s house and took up two parking bays. Cars double-parked all the way up the horseshoe-shaped avenue. She doesn’t have a car or a driveway. In our day...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001hhfc/storyville-three-minutes-a-lengthening I’m a fan of Storyville. There have been lots of documentaries on recently to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, 27 th January. The date is chosen to mark the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp. There are two stories here which wind around three minutes of film, but which takes over sixty minutes to tell. The first story...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0dm3cwv/the-us-and-the-holocaust-series-1-1-the-golden-door-beginnings1938 https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0dm3fnf/the-us-and-the-holocaust-series-1-2-yearning-to-breathe-free-19381942 https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0dm3gdg/the-us-and-the-holocaust-series-1-3-the-homeless-tempesttossed-1942- https://dirkdeklein.net/2022/01/20/the-wannsee-conference-minutes/ https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/dreamland In one of Flannery O’Connor’s most famous short stories ‘A Good Man Is Hard To Find,’ the grandmother doesn’t want to go to Florida on vacation. This is the era of the Great Depression in America. She rattles on about this fellow that’s escaped from the State Pen, ‘The Misfit’. She doesn’t want to go anywhere with such a fellow ‘aloose’. Dreamland has Alison Wells (Margot Robbie) aloose with a $10...

I’ve seen the film, now I’ve read the book. Yeh, I know that’s the wrong order. Books are better. But I got there in the end. That gives me a pivot to spin on and talk about endings being beginnings. When you’re young, you never think you’ll get old. And when you’re old you never think about dying, until you have to. ‘Make death proud to take you.’ I’ve hung that out there. A quote from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar . Noodles is the man for quotes...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/bombshell A topical film in the week the moron’s moron and 45 th American President mistakes the woman he’s accused of raping as being his ex-wife. And you can’t rape your wife, right? Here we are in the sleaze pit of Fox News. Donald Trump has put himself forward as a candidate for the Presidency. Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron) has primed herself to ask Trump some critical questions about his attitude towards...