celticman's blog

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P5A2QFp0cE this moved me.

What attracted me to Elana Ferrante’s short, debut, novel was her refusal to publicise her books and the belief that a –good – book would find an audience. It seems counterintuitive, but the purity of such belief is hard to argue with, even though if I hadn’t read about her in the Observer Review , I wouldn’t know who she was and would not have read or written this review of her book. Twenty or thirty films in English are being sold to us every...

A writer has only one imperative or simple rule – read. Often I have little understanding of what I’m reading. Usually there is a but here. I do not understand Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, but…kinda like a meme from T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding: ‘We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started.’ Or Rumi’s parable of the elephant and six blind men. One holding onto a leg, or trunk, an...

The Second World War is a fading memory and America rules the world. Bill Bryson (2007) The Life and Times of The Thunderbolt Kid: Travels Through My Childhood shows how it was won and it’s not on the front cover with a kid with a hard plastic hat painted silver, aerial attached, Pegasus’s ears pasted on, his face screwed up as he points a plastic ray gun of brightest gold, while behind him sparks fly and a surreal red and white star explodes,...

We create connections where there are none, Elie Wiesel’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in 1978, was in the winter months and fell on the same day as my birthday. Night is a slim volume, able to be read in one sitting. But it is a holy book, and in these increasingly dark times, it asks the hard question of what happens when. I dreamed my elder brother stood by my bed and mouthed words of warning. Ghosts speak and what our...

I predicted 4—1 to Celtic before kick-off. My predictions usually hit the bar and go out for a corner, so no great surprise there. The bookies were laughing, yet again. Celtic’s hundredth-trophy win, fling in the Scottish Premier League that’s one-hundred and one and if it’s as easy as this then it won’t be long until the Scottish Champions hit two-hundred. Aberdeen got a boost before the game with the omission of Scott Sinclair who has went...

Lionel Messi was meant to be a sick note, not a seen it, done it message– he only scored two goals in just over ninety minutes here, one a penalty, which doesn’t really count. His first came from another tax dodger currently under investigation by the Spanish authorities (why can’t we do that here?) Up until that point Andy Rat and me had been celebrating each ten minute spell that passed without Barca scoring, me with a pint. Andy with a coke...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/group/b083bjdv I’m a big fan of BBC 4 and Nordic noir. This feels like cheating, get into dialect and ask yourself how the fuck can we have Aussie noir, when everything is bright and breezy and the action takes place within spitting distance of Bondi beach? But here we have the usual motifs, an outsider in the police department, looking to prove herself Tori Lustigman (Yael Stone) a pint-sized cop, an Aussie Sarah...

If we exclude the launch party for my debut novel Lily Poole , where I didn’t have to do anything much, but go to the bar and buy drinks and get a couple of selfie-styled photos, then yesterday’s outing in Dalmuir Library was my first outing as an author. There were only two things made me more nervous than losing something on a flip of the coin. A heads up (i) There would be an audience. (ii) No audience. The tale of the latter was far more...

Hyperbole: hyperbole hʌɪˈpəːbəli/Submit noun exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally. synonyms: exaggeration, overstatement, magnification, amplification, embroidery, embellishment, overplaying, excess, overkill. Pre-Trump becoming the 45 th American President and post-Trump, taking up tenure of office and becoming United States President, is not will Donald J Trump, last the four-year term, but will the world? That may...