celticman's blog

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-little-stranger/on-demand/48945-001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Stranger_(film) I’ve read a few of Sarah Walter’s books, but, as usual, with holes in my memories, I can’t remember much about them. Her other books and translation to screen include Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity (1999), and Fingersmith (2002). I haven’t read Affinity . Waters is celebrated for her ability to weave intricate...

Poetry frightens me a bit. It’s just so complicated. But when you get it right, as Bex Hainsworth had done in Walrussey , it sounds simple. Like many of the writers of poetry on ABCtales—where her pseudonym was Mistaken Magic—she got ‘cherried’. A poem being especially worthy of attention. She followed the usual route of Poem of the week. Nobody really cares about that stuff, but it’s nice at the time. A little fill-up before going back to...

Patrick Radden Keefe is an award-winning author of Empire of Pain . Before I read his book I hadn’t heard of the billionaire Sackler family and how they created an opioid addiction factory (Purdue Pharmacy) that killed tens of thousands and made them obscenely wealthy. I had, however, heard of the moron’s moron and former President Donald J.Trump. I’m a Trump watcher. It baffles me that 74 million Americans voted for him in 2020. And it...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/petite-maman/on-demand/74620-001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petite_Maman Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady blindsided me. It was one of those films where you hold your breath because it’s pretty much perfect. I hoped Petite Maman would be a similar experience. It wasn’t. Petite Maman aligns with the film’s theme. It involves a young girl exploring her mother’s past and forming connections across different...

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/video/detail/B0885DCCF8/ref=atv_hm_hom_c_OI67r7_20_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_to_Be_Normal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Tennant Mad to Be Normal is great fun. David Tennant plays gallus as fuck, Scottish, psychiatrist, R.D.Laing. Familiar territory for Tennant. His first major TV role was Campbell Bain in the BBC Scotland drama series Takin' Over the Asylum (1994). Here he’s got a promotion to a...

Before I read this book, I thought like Erik Larson there was a direct line between the sinking of the Lusitania and the United States joining the war on the side of the Allies, much the same as happened at Pearl Harbour. But the Lusitania was sunk by German U-20 7 th May 1915. But the United States maintained a policy of neutrality despite German U-Boats sinking tens of thousands of tons of shipping and killing American citizens until the...

Saltburn wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Upstairs Downstairs, Brideshead Revisited, Sophie Ellis-Bextor and Murder on the Dance Floor can go and take a good fuck to themselves as far as I’m concerned. What did you think? Notes. It’s a bit of a mishmash. Plot (2008 Film) for example follows Charles Ryder's relationship with the Flyte family, particularly his close friendship with the charismatic but troubled Sebastian Flyte, and the...

I’m going to read John Valliant’s latest book, Fireweather an account of how we’re destroying our planet. Before going forward, I looked backward to Valliant’s account of how an Amur tiger, sometimes known as a Siberian tiger, killed and ate a hunter Dmitri Markov in the Primorye territory in Russia’s Far East, near the Chinese border were temperatures plummeted to 40-below zero Centigrade during the winter of December 1997. Few or any of us...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/nomadland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomadland https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/02/nomadland-living-in-cars-working-amazon ‘I’m not homeless, I’m houseless,’ Fern (Frances McDormand) corrects a young girl she’d tutored after a chance meeting in a superstore, who’d heard she was homeless. In other words, Fern had gone from being one of us to one of them. A person to be feared and derided. ‘...

I read all of Carl MacDougall’s books apart from his short-story collection Elvis is Dead . Reading is what I do. But I had ulterior motives. I was sponsored by Scottish Book Trust and mentored by Carl MacDougall for an unpublished novel The Cruelty Man 2018, which belatedly is being published by Spellbound Books as Beastie in 2024. I wanted to meet the man on the page before meeting the actual man. I knew far more about him than he knew about...