SRoB Blog

Anais Hendricks is the fifteen year old protagonist in Jenni Fagan’s debut novel. Anais is not the only name she has had, but it is the one she currently goes by. It was given to her by her prostitute foster mother and reinforces her dream of living in Paris where, like Anais Nin, she would adopt a bohemian lifestyle.

Scottish Poetry Library and Aye Write! join forces

The Future, Al Gore (WH Allen £25)

Eight years ago someone asked Al Gore ‘What are the drivers of global change?’ He listed what he calls ‘the usual suspects’ but subsequently decided that the question deserved closer attention than he had given it. The Future is his considered response and at 558 pages including 154 pages of endnotes, nobody can say he hasn’t put in the time.

Lesley Duncan and Alan Riach (eds), The Smeddum Test, 21^st Century Poems in Scots: The McCash Anthology 2003-2012 (Kennedy & Boyd £12.95)

The Glasgow University McCash endowment established an annual Scots poetry competition in 1973 and this anthology showcases some of the best entries from the last ten years. In some of those years a theme was set. In 2012 it was Thomas Campbell’s ‘The Pleasures of Hope’.

Britain’s Last Frontier: A Journey Along the Highland Line, Alistair Moffat (Birlinn £17.99)

Alistair Moffat’s latest idea is to imagine his way along the Highland Line, exploring history, geography, geology, language and culture as he goes. It is a meander on both sides of the line and across disciplines and time. Unfortunately, an introduction by James Naughtie is not a particularly helpful send off. He seems more concerned with making the case for North East Scotland’s exceptionalism (his own village in particular) than setting up Moffat’s potentially fascinating quest.

Ronald Frame in conversation with Adrian Searle 

Ronald Frame eschews the uniform of the contemporary male Scottish writer:  untucked shirt, jeans and sannies. Instead, it’s Harris Tweed, pressed trousers and polished brogues. He’s a bit Richard Fordish or maybe a woolly Simenon, sans specs and pipe. The only blemish in an otherwise immaculate ensemble is that the sleeves of his jacket are a tad long. He’s wee.

The end of the political conference season is a good a time to have a belated look at David Torrance’s edited ‘Great Scottish Speeches’, republished in paperback earlier this year. Torrance put the collection together by taking suggestions from Facebook and then adding a few favourite speeches of his own.

Even though it has a precedent in ‘Great Irish Speeches’, ‘Great Scottish Speeches’ is a tri-loaded title by any standards. Torrance uses the early part of his introduction to deconstruct it. A speech ‘is any piece or oratory that sources confirmed had been delivered by its author’ which can be anywhere from a paragraph to several pages in length. ‘Great’ is judged primarily on content though coherence, argument, brevity, delivery and moment should also be taken into consideration. ‘Scottish’ is a speech made by anyone in Scotland or a Scot anywhere else. Mercifully, ‘Scot’ remains undefined.

A month back I posted a piece bemoaning the fact that no Scot had won the Booker Prize since James Kelman in 1994. It came as a bit of a surprise, then, when this morning’s twitter crowing seemed to suggest that this year’s prize had been won by Scotland’s very own Ewan Morrison for ‘Tales from the Mall’, especially as I don’t remember him being on the short list and the Booker announcement isn’t due until later today.

Closer inspection of my tiny Blackberry screen revealed that it is not the Booker Prize that Morrison has won but ‘Not the Booker Prize’, a ‘dubious and coveted honour’ organized by The Guardian. Morrison effectively hammered the opposition with the silver medal going to a book called ‘Pig Iron’ and the bronze to an author called ‘Ironmonger’. But as it turns out, it is Oor Ewan who will have to show his mettle.

Andy Coogan is Sir Chris Hoy’s great-uncle, but you will find no mention of that in this remarkable book. Judging by the way Coogan presents himself, he is far too humble to play on such a lofty association.

In fact, Coogan is a somewhat reluctant memorialist. At 95 he is just telling his story now, inhibited in earlier years by the possibility that he might offend family and friends. He even seems concerned about an undertaking he signed with the British Government at the end of Word War Two not to talk about his imprisonment or what he saw of the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.

A rather dense looking book on railways wouldn’t normally recommend itself for review especially as I don’t know a BRCW Type 2 from an A3 Pacific. However, I make an exception for David Spaven’s Waverley Route: the life death and rebirth of the Borders Railway.

I was a youngster in Galashiels when the Waverley line closed in 1969 on the back of the Beeching Report. At the time, I didn’t see that much to be concerned about. My friends and I would no longer be placing coins on the track to see how trains distorted them. On the other hand, nobody had to put an ear to the rail and listen for approaching trains before we passed through the Torwoodlee tunnel in search of more productive fishing spots.

Read Ian Jack 'What is true Scot'? here

There are no Scots on the 2012 Man Booker Prize shortlist. This is hardly a surprise given that there weren't any on the longlist either. Cue the usual complaints, though Irvine Welsh set the hares running even earlier than usual this year by declaring the Booker “highly imperialist orientated” during a session at EIBF. A ‘rudimentary grasp of sixth form sociology’ is all you need, he said, to refute the Booker’s claim that it is non-discriminatory. But statistics work too according to an ‘open letter’ I just read directed originally to Professor Louise Richardson, Principal of St. Andrews University.

A strange letter in some ways, it starts by pointing out that only one Scot has won the Booker and five made the shortlist since 1969 but grants that Scots are a ‘negligible 0.2% of the population of the Commonwealth’ and this may be seen as ‘an over-representation of Scotland.’ The English, however, are over-over represented with 24 winners while ‘England accounts for a paltry 2.5% of the population of the Commonwealth’.

The auspices weren’t great. A classic Scottish mid-winter summer’s day and a power cut to boot. When I arrived at the Brodick Hall on Arran, I expected to find Jackie Kay and a half dozen hardy poetry fans reading by torchlight. Instead the electricity returned in the nick of time and the hall was packed.

First up was the SRB's own Theresa Munoz whose poem 'All the places I have' was commended from the 844 (844!) entries for the McLellan Poetry Competition. In a pitch-perfect reading Munoz translated the intricate spacing of her page poem into a series of pauses as she explored the emotional geography of two intersecting lives:

 So that’s it. The tents are coming down, the gates will be locked and Charlotte Square Gardens should soon return to its customary sylvan tranquility untroubled by human intrusion.

Three questions remain. Why was everybody so old? Why was everybody so white? And why were there so many politicians at EIBF 2012?

Perhaps Scots really are a zigzag of contradictions. How else to explain the fact that this year’s EIBF was inundated with politicians while the most engaging literary event of the second week took place at the Festival of Politics in the Scottish Parliament?

The University of Dundee’s decision to archive the records of Canongate Books provided a handy excuse for a panel review of the history of that remarkable publishing company. Though assisted by the occasional jolly jape from chair Alan Taylor or Canongate author Richard Holloway, this was the Jamie Byng show.

The session started with a humdrum lecture by David Torrance on the subject of nationalist rhetoric. It was delivered in the style of a first year survey complete with podium and notes. Scottish nationalism has always had articulate spokesmen, he said, with Compton Mackenzie and Robert Cunninghame Graham cited as examples. Alex Salmond is in this tradition though not an orator of the very highest order and prone to say things that can mean “anything you want them to”. There was the odd squib – John MacCormick’s ‘radical liberalism’ would have morphed into Thatcherism had he lived longer according to Torrance – but generally speaking this was a straightforward production. He said nothing about the role of exaggeration in oratory but the BBC’s Brian Taylor filled that void by declaring the presentation ‘absolutely superb’.

The lecture was over in fifteen minutes and may have had more method in it than previously apparent. The forty five minutes left for questions turned out to be the real point of the exercise. The Q and A got off to a surreal start when a female Home Counties voice declared its Scottishness before asking whether the First Minister used a quotations dictionary when he said all that stuff about student tuition fees and “rocks in the sea”. The same person also liked the thing the FM said after the last Scottish election about “taking it carefully” when he was “walking across Prestonfield Pans”.  Torrance added to the confusion by twice misquoting Burns (saying 'the rocks melt in the sun' and then repeating it) while claiming that Salmond tends to reuse quotes he likes while sometimes getting them wrong.

John Calder who organised the writer’s conference in 1962 now bears a passing resemblance to Mr Grainger of the British sitcom ‘Are you being served’. At the start of the session Calder even appeared to be asleep in his chair.

Asked if he was free (or words to that effect), the transformation was startling. He opened with an impassioned plea for Home Office inundation on behalf of writer Aleksander Stefanovic who had attended the conference in 1962. Stefanovic was refused a visa to travel to EIBF 2012. Fifty years ago the same writer’s presence upset the official Yugoslav representative Petar Šegedin. Plus ça change!

It started like a classic rock concert. There was even some wrinkly-armed overhead clapping when the hero ascended the platform. The air was thick with nostalgia for a time before power when big ideas could scatter like seeds and nobody had to worry about bringing them to fruition.

And Paddy Ashdown has some big ideas. He considers that the “gimbals” (a favourite word) which support established orders of power are shifting. We are at the beginning of the end of western hegemony. America is in decline, China ascending. There will be blood he says if we do not adapt to the new reality.

Andrew Keen says that the internet was created by an unlikely alliance of counter culture, the military industrial complex and the United States Government. He’s not as concerned about that as he is about social media and Facebook in particular. Created by a child entrepreneur, Facebook promotes the cult of the ‘social everything’ and eschews all the complexities that ‘colour the human condition’.  Social networks generally claim to serve the public good but are essentially about making profit by selling data to advertisers. The internet and social media are the new reality says Keen, but the dangerous obsession with self revelation will only be mitigated if we learn how to lie and the internet learns how to forget.

The session was nicely facilitated by Ewan Morrison who opened by declaring himself a Keensian. Any partiality there was more than offset by an audience member who had not read Keen’s latest book ‘Digital Vertigo’ but thought that his argument had 'banality at its core'. In case that was not clear enough, he added that he had read Keen’s first book ‘The Cult of the Amateur’ and it was 'sloppy and full of errors'.