celticman's blog

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-quiet-girl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quiet_Girl The Quiet Girl is a quiet film with a quiet girl like a spider at the centre of a web of things that happen over which she has little or no control. Summer 1981. Nine-year-old Cáit (Catherine Clinchis) lives with her wastrel dad, a pregnant-again-mum and a brood on other brothers and sisters on a rundown Irish farm. Cáit’s belonging are packed up and...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/anais-in-love https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ana%C3%AFs_in_Love Anaïs in Love is to Paris, what Frances Ha is to New York. Annais (Anaïs Demoustier) is the eternal student, with a half-finished doctorate whose subject matter of French passion in the distant past puts herself at the centre of her non-studying universe. Each moment, each day, each missed deadline, uncovers new material waiting for her. Her mum’s...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b05569p9/good-vibrations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terri_Hooley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Vibrations_(film) I was between books and wondering what shite to watch. I was going to say on the telly, but that’s as odd as admitting to owning a Singers Sewing Machine. Films and documentaries. Stuff that makes you think without really having to think. Good Vibrations was a bit of both and simply...

The Big Nowhere comes at the end of James Ellroy’s take on 1950s Los Angeles. Angels in The City of Angels are in short supply. Every crummy cop is on the take and it works all the way up the ladder to the city bosses and studio heads such as Howard Hughes. In walkies and talkies only money matters. Hughes can fill his studios with starlets and have apartment’s at ready to be filled with the fifteen-year-old farm girls with big knockers that he...

William Blake Says: Every Thing That Lives is Holy. ‘Long live the Earth, deeper than all our thinking we have done enough killing’. Mass murder, displacement, famine. Blake was wrong. We can never get enough killing. W.H. Auden, Epitaph On A Tyrant , got it. ‘When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laugher, And when he cried the little children died in the streets.’ It’s personal for Mohammed Moussa. His mother, his sisters their...

Cogito ergo sum . The starting point of a million essays on philosophy. The duality of mind-body. Professor Guy Leschziner suggests it’s more complex, with what we think and who we are based on our sense of self is fallible and inconsistent based on a reality that isn’t really real, but a projection based on our internalised perceptions. Phew. Take a breather. He’s a neurologist—he gets angry at ‘these morons, those who are anti-vaxxers and anti...

Who are you? What are you? For a memoir a bit of backstory is needed. Try and fit ‘patriot’ into a single sentence in as many forms as you can manage. It’s on the book cover. The man who resigned because of a government cover-up. A smearing campaign against a patriotic whistle blower. I made notes and watched a documentary on Prime. If the world has a cancerous growth called global warming, wouldn’t it want to know? Eh, nope. Many of the tactics...

Let’s start at the beginning. I’m a reader who writes. You can’t be a writer who doesn’t read. Writing is secondary and often unnecessary, but I claim it as a calling of sorts. ‘I know no one wants to hear me say how hard writing is—quit while you can’. I liked Goldberg telling me that. Reminding me that. I’m pretty good at making starts. The equivalent of joining the gym on the New Year and promising to go swimming and sauna once a week too. I’...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002mrgq/the-idea-of-you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idea_of_You Straightforward rom-com. What’s the hook? Solène Marchand uses the wrong toilet. I used to do it quite a lot. Pee up closes and against the side of the bus at football matches. But it has to be a lot classier. Cause Solene is really Anne Hathaway. It needs to be something better than that. You can’t just have Anne Hathaway peeing outside...

I read this essay because I was writing a vampire story called Rust and Dust. I might even finish it. Not with a stake through the heart, but a seat at the table and fingers hovering over the keyboard as Ben Mears, the protagonist does in Salem’s Lot , before his home town Jerusalem's Lot is invaded by a strange Eastern European man, who unleashes a holocaust of vampires. Mears through happenstance has to save his town and America from those...