SRoB Blog

Kirsty Logan, Paul McQuade, Carole Jones, Zöe Strachan, George Anderson 

Event Review: Kin, Summerhall 09/02/2013

I grew up in Scotland and I’m a poetry buff, so it was about time I attended StAnza. Five years ago a reform of secondary school education in Demark made it easier for me to attend the event, as I was granted five days’ holiday a year whenever I chose. However, turbulence in my professional life (the reform wasn’t only about me being granted five days’ holiday) as well as in my personal life (I was forced out of my home of 16 years by an abusive neighbour) meant that I was preoccupied with other things. After StAnza 2010 was over, however, I was sent the programme by my sister, who lives just outside St. Andrews, and I took that as an invitation.

In the event, my Principal regards my attendance as being work-related, so in addition to my five days’ holiday he has granted me two days’ paid leave of absence. This means I can go over to Scotland the weekend before the event, attend it until it finishes on the Sunday evening, and catch a cheap flight back from Edinburgh on the Tuesday morning.

From Tartan to Tartanry

Ian Brown (ed.)

This week marks the second run of one of the most remarkable, if unsung, festivals in the land. Previously is Scotland’s history festival. Over the next two weeks more than two hundred events will take place in Edinburgh’s bars, churches and theatres, streets and coffee houses. The ambition of the organisers is to take history out of the university lecture theatres, museums and libraries and present it to the people in the places where they gather and socialize.

If the festival of 2011 is anything to go by, that of 2012 will be another stunning success story. Nearly 6000 people across a broad demographic profile turned out last time for 236 events held by 69 partner organisations in a city wide celebration of Scotland’s history. The audiences were educated, stimulated and entertained by a rich programme of original theatre, guided tours, film, historical re-enactments, poetry, family history workshops, comedy and debates involving public figures and renowned historians.

SRB interviews poet and publisher Colin Will 

A gannet suspended in rock. An invisible causeway shrouded in mist. A basement lined with catalogued boxes filled with eccentric objects. Rituals, signs, mysteries. Such are the protagonists of Robert Macfarlane’s latest book, in which he is inspired by a spectral host of literary wayfarers and coincidental characters whilst rediscovering often forgotten, ancient paths for his contemporary readers. 

Macfarlane’s book comes in the wake of a variety of likeminded pieces: Geoff Nicholson’s The Lost Art of Walking, Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust and A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Will Self’s Psychogeography and most recently Jennifer Wallace’s poetry and prose selection It Can Be Solved by Walking. Consider them as guides to putting one foot in front of the other, and our understanding of this movement through a matrix of time, space and imagination, and you join Macfarlane on his walk. Each writer approaches psychogeography – Debord’s theory of geography’s effect on our senses – in different ways. They each appreciate, however, Macfarlane’s supposition that “landscape has long offered us keen ways of figuring ourselves to ourselves”. 

By Michael Russell

[September 11, 2012 was the centenary of Robin Jenkins birth. This tribute to Jenkins was originally presented as a lecture at Cowalfest] 

First Published in the Sunday Herald

GORE Vidal never suffered from writer’s block and had little patience with anyone who said they did. His regimen -- as befitted someone born at West Point -- was military in its adherence to routine. “First coffee. Then a bowel movement. Then the muse joins me,” he once said in the tone of a doctor dictating a prescription. He was a man who did not invite contradiction, expecting his statements to be accepted as if they were papal pulls. As the self-appointed laureate of the rise and fall of the American Empire, as Gibbon was of Rome’s, he was imperial in manner and Caesarean in demeanour. What Vidal said went. It wasn’t too hard to imagine him in a toga.