celticman's blog

Every day is All Fools Day when you’re just being yourself. Same beginning. Then two trillion -or more- cells later, we come apart. In between we acquire a repertoire of habits. Vincent Deary’s ‘How we are’, the first in his trilogy of How to Live, picks apart what makes us ourselves. In essence, a person and their reality, make up their personality. That’s me speaking, not Deary (and what a wonderful name for a pseudo-philosopher). I was...

It’s National Poetry day so I thought I’d look at Edward Hirsch’s (2014) Gabriel: A Poem . I’m not qualified to write about poetry. I’m not qualified to write about grief. Edward Hirsch is qualified on both counts. He wrote A Poet’s Glossary and How to Read a Poem both of which I intend to buy. Poetry is a foreign country and I’d like to learn the language. I might even attempt a few of the mangled phrases that novices use and, with a lot of...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p025zl7d/the-secret-life-of-books-5... I’m a big fan of Jane Eyre and that Charlotte Bronte, well, she’s well hot too. We all know the story of little orphan Jane Eyre all alone in the world. She’s a plain girl with a fiery temper. In the opening pages she bests her bully of a cousin, John, and tells her Aunt Reed, who is her guardian, what’s what, which isn’t a winning combination. Only beautiful girls are...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01sd320/sex-drugs-rock-roll Sex - yes, I’ve tried it, but the latest research finds our parents did it more and enjoyed it more. I don’t find that hard to take. Drugs- not really. Rock & Roll - not my cup of tea. I guess I’m not fitted for this biop of singer Ian Dury played by Andy Serkis. Well, let us pop to near the end. Mr Dury returned to talk to the other spazzies (his world and his word, not mine...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04jmx7l/marvellous Marvellous really was marvellous. Writer Peter Bowker mines magic and Toby Jones performance playing Neil Baldwin was not outdone by the appearance of the real-life, but older, Neil Baldwin. If you’ve not seen it, give yourself a treat and watch - and listen. There’s some natty hymns. Neil’s mum was a committed Christian. It gave her life meaning. Her son Neil took it a stage further. Ask...

Derren Brown burst onto the scene by shooting himself in the head. It’s difficult to top that, but if he told his audience (including me) that birds fly upside down at night, you would have to take him seriously enough to open the curtains and look outside. You wouldn’t see anything, because it was too dark. He would explain that what he was saying wasn’t true, tell you how he did it and then birds would fly upside down. Derren Brown is a god of...

I read the introduction by Jonathan Franzen. I can’t remember much of what he said. I’d guess that he talked about the way she makes a long story a short story. I’d guess that he talked about the way characters come to life on the page and just when you figure you’ve got a fix on them they do something that throws you, a poetic volte, and the story switches direction, goes on a different track that lets the reader see the characters—their...

Rebecca sits at number eight on fiction classics at Sainsbury books ( The Great Gatsby in number one). My Cousin Rachel is a more mature work with echoes of Manderlay. Du Maurier loved her English home so much that even her two daughters took second place to the house and gardens. When du Maurier locked herself in her study to write – they no longer existed. It’s all here, the English upper class that run the world. Ambrose Ashley is a...

The first letter dated September 1982 is addressed to Dear Vic (that’s Nina’s sister) and she gives her address as 53 Gloucester Crescent London NW1. If you’ve got an NW1 address the Mosaic algorithm which credit companies favour and sorts postcodes into easy to read bundles, which brackets what kind of person you are, by where you live, and determines how much credit you can be pushed, would use terms for NW1ers as Cultural Leaders (or Global...

Northanger Abbey isn’t so much a place as a time. In the introduction to Jane Austen’s (2000) Northanger Abbey the reader is informed it was written in 1897-8, but not in publication until 1803. So it’s a relatively old book, written in English, in a style of indirect free discourse (whatever that means) which Austen patented. It is also steeped in the sensibilities and, in particular, the Gothic literature of the time. The reader is addressed...