celticman's blog

Why should we listen to Viktor E.Frankel? Well, he’s a scientist, philosopher, a psychiatrist and author, but the real reason we should listen to him is because of the time he spent as an inmate in Auschwitz, Dachau and other concentration camps. That gives what he says heft, he’s walked the walk and suffered the indignity of being regarded as less than human and treated as a throwaway thing. His life and death as a Jew having little or no...

I really enjoyed this short novel. Many of the themes resonate, identity, disillusionment, a search for meaning in a life that has no meaning. He stood at the back gateway of the abattoir, his hands thrust into his pockets, his stomach rigid with the ache of want. Men in white coats and baseball caps whistled and shouted as they moved between the hanging carcases. He couldn’t see his father, yet he did not want to venture in. He knew the sweet...

The Bulger Killers: Was Justice Done? http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-bulger-killers-was-justice-done/on-demand/66601-001 James Bulger: A Mother's Story https://www.itv.com/hub/james-bulger-a-mothers-story/2a5514a0001 I watched both of these programmes. We know what happened. Twenty-five years ago, when Tony Blair was Shadow Home Secretary, ten-year-old Robert Thompson and Jon Venables took toddler James Bulger from a shopping centre in...

Tim Winton is one of those annoying kids. He wanted to be a writer when he grew up and by the time he was nineteen he was publishing. Pisses you off, doesn’t it. It’s the story of the exception to the rule. Here’s a white, working-class kid, from Perth of all places, that won all kinds of prizes and made it not just in Australia, but world-wide. Good on yer cobber I say. My mock-Australian is like my writing, to be avoided, but I just keep doing...

This is an old book in that Carl McDougall received a bursary from the Scottish Arts Council to write his debut novel. How quaint that sounds now. It’s like having a governess or a government that valued literature. I ripped through the book quickly. The story pays homage to Jane Eyre. The hero and narrator of the novel is Angus McPhail. ‘Give me the child until and I will give you the man’ is the maxim of Aristotle, or Ignatius Loyola and the...

Setting the scene move fast and break things enriches the already wealthy. The Schumpeterian idea is our future for better or worse. Children born now will be the most tracked in history. In some novels only the wealthy can eradicate their digital footprint. Paradoxically, not to be known, is to be somebody. The security risk of tracking devices in our home was touched on here. It's not just phones, but our fridges, washing machines, kettles,...

This anthology of Scottish writers, illustrated by their poetry or prose, was a TV series. I’d quite like to have seen it. I’m not sure how it would have worked, off the page, but no matter. The piece that stuck a real chord with me, was from someone I’d never heard of James Kennedy ‘The Highland Crofter’ (below). It was a lament for the Highland Clearances. Kennedy, a blacksmith and evicted crofter left Loch Tay and settled in Doune, Canada...

I was aware of Carl MacDougall in an oblique way. I hadn’t read any of his work, but knew him to be the editor of one of the classic Scottish texts The Devil and the Giro: The Scottish Short Story . When I found out the Scottish Book Trust had approached him and he had agreed to be my mentor for my second novel I was chuffed. I googled him. This is his latest short-story collection, by the now defunct publishers Freight. I admit to a bias here...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b09m6dq6/miriams-big-american-adve... You know the format, actress Miram Margoyles, a self-proclaimed fat, Jewish, lesbian old lady, travels across America finding out what’s what or who’s who or something intelligible to report or see. Here she visits a summer camp in Indiana. Stars and stripes and saluting the flag, hand on the chest at 7am in the morning, type of place. That’s how you build a nation...

Cloudstreet , Tim Winton’s homage to his homeland in Perth Australia has been kicking about for a few years. Winton wrote an afterword in 2015. Sometime you find a book and sometimes a book finds you. The novel I’m rewriting has many of the features of Cloudstreet . If it ever hits the light of day…well, we’ll see. I’m not really sure who the narrator of Cloudsteet is and being a pretend writer I’m usually pretty good at hiding that kind of...