celticman's blog

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002zljp/monster ‘What is truth?’ Pontius Pilot is alleged to have asked this kind of question before passing judgement. It may have seemed to him a sensible thing to do. For Judeans that was passing the bronze prutah. An institutional washing of the hands that predated Moses. Monster has a tripartite structure. It looks through the lens of the story from different points of view. Saori Mugino (Sakura Andō...

Most career criminals live in grey areas and not the eternal sunshine of the superwealthy. Some of us may know them. Paul Tait for example came out as The Bad Guru and offers redemption. I knew he indirectly bought and ran with his brother many legitimate businesses in Clydebank, such as The Horse and Barge. A Celtic pub. What interested me more from an authorial perspective were his links with the IRA and his ability to flit from country to...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0030qjb/tuesday Tuesday is a stupid film. I don’t mind stupid. Sometimes I welcome it. It makes me feel smarter. I didn’t really get it at first. Some kind of scene in which a grime-covered, size-shifting macaw who listens to hip-hop, lifts its wing and people are at peace? It took me a while to realise this was Death. The plot is identical to (I re-read it to make sure) to Duncan Williamson’s short story,...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0030fhy/monkey-man There was a time in Holywood when men were men. They had to smoke like a steam engine leaving the station. Drink like there was no tomorrow and break enough hearts to keep the tabloids busy inventing new kinds of innuendo. Some of them were singers, crooners or dancers. They had to shoot straight and have the innate ability to gallop away on any old horse when needed. Which brings me to...

Fahrenheit 451 (1953) was a political novel in much the same way as George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Ray Bradbury’s most well-known novel was incendiary. Brave even, when all around were losing their heads over the perceived threat of the red menace and McCarthyism stoked the flames in the mass media, and was rewarded by even more attention and status in the media McCarthyites fed stories to. You wonder what either writer would have made of the...

Holy Ghost is ‘A Virgil Flowers Novel’. That may be meaningless. As it was to me. Although being brought up a Catholic, I know who the Holy Ghost is, or was, or ever will be. And I know who Stephen King is. When the cover gives a Stephen King blurb: ‘One of the greatest novelists of all time’, you’ve got to look, even though you know hokum when you hear it. I know now who Virgil Flowers is. John Sandford has written around 30 books. Many with...

I tried to remember. Names in which the subject describe the object. Mo Wilde and Wilderness cure. In real life, we call these coincidences aptronyms. A tutor of Creative Writing I once had was, for example, called Elizabeth Reeder. Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer is another example. Oscar Wilde’s (no relation to Mo Wilde) The Importance of Being Ernest played with that idea. A charactonym, loaded labels with hidden meaning, designed to...

The cover describes Cathy Rentzenbrink’s Everyone is Still Alive as ‘A Total Triumph’. Ah, that rare beast? A fictional triumph? Well, it almost failed my first 30 pages test-reading. It was OKish. A Magnolia Tree planted in Magnolia Road doesn’t quite have the same resonance as say A Tree in Harlem . Middle-class folk doing middle-class things. Ho-hum. The other problem I had was I’d read her latest fictional work first. Ordinary Time tells the...

Patrick Radden Keefe (2018) Say Nothing is a book to savour. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award, Orwell Prize for Political Writing, and was named one of the New York Times 20 Best Books of the 21st Century. It’s not just a murder-mystery whodunit. But shows how money, power, and secrecy combine to warp memory and the idea of an authentic truth that can be picked up and put down again—and not just in Northern Ireland. Say Nothing...

I’d no idea who Tim Walker was or is, but because he writers for the Daily-hate-Mail and often works as a theatre critic, I’d stick him down as being a run-of-the mill and middle-class lad who done good for himself. His 71 pen portraits were mostly of people I knew, famous people. It helped that each interview had a photo. I could flip to that to see if I knew the face. Even with a photo, I didn’t remember who Antonia de Sancha was. Her...