celticman's blog

I’m sure I’ve got a Scottish identity. You might have one too. I wasn’t looking for mine, but here it is. We’re all Jock Tamson’s bairns. It doesn’t lie in that ear squeal we hear on every channel when counting down to New Year. Or the cheuctering twirling plaid and stripping the willow. Or the Scottish and Rye of The Still Game. These to me are fanny water. Listen instead to Anton Chekhov in A Dreary Story which sounds to me very Scottish, and...

Carl MacDougall’s grandfather was a head waiter in a hotel before the Second World War. What’s that got to dae with anything? you might be asking. Well, it changes the nature of time and the ordinary working day. When other workers are knocking off service staffs are going to work. They have a different sense of time. Andy Paterson was a waiter before he was fitted up on a drugs charge and sent to prison. Prison also changes a man’s sense of...

I’m a duff reviewer. The narrator is a former Glasgow journalist trying to make sense of his life after his wife dies, but I don’t know his name. I’m not sure he has a name. Let’s call him everyman adrift. His background is on the page. And I like to play detective and mitch and match with the author. She was a second-year student and I was her tutor; a disgraceful state of affairs, as popular then as now. I was attracted by the difference. My...

On the flyleaf Heather Morris’s The Tattooist of Auschwitz is ‘based on the powerful true story of Lale Solokov’. You see that kind of affirmation attached to film titles. Lion , for example, was based on the screenplay of a book by Saroo Brierly and Larry Buttrose and it’s Saroo’s story that is told. Morris’s book is based on the screenplay she wrote based on the life of Lale Solokov (Ludwig Eisenberg). Gita (Gisela Fuharmannova [Furnam]) also...

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,...