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ing ideologues the systematic undermining of the public library sector the closure of three major scottish publishers the formation of a new arts bureaucracy the move to curriculum for excellence the loss of borders the achievement of parity between e book sales and paperbacks on the world s largest online books retailer and a great big recession so many of the proposals put forward during the stushie are already hamstrung by a rapidly changing set of situations nevertheless the default position of the response that s a matter for creative scotland seems inadequate they may acknowledge there is a thistle to be grasped but merely saying that they are fairly sure they know who might have the requisite gloves to do any future grasping is not enough the headline grabber was the nixing of the proposed scottish academy of writers the excuse was the emptiness of the coffers now there were various questions that needed to be addressed about an academy the process of election the nature of their role and so forth and it may be that the academy can be resurrected when there s a more money and b a fully worked out proposal however to say the new makar liz lochhead will do all the ambassadorial stuff is limiting she s only one writer she only represents one strand of contemporary scottish literature as for the idea of a national book week my anxiety is that it s a great way to not think about books for 51 weeks of the year when will it even happen from march to october there are literary festivals across the country anyway who will deliver it ah there s a consultation to decide all this the mills of god grind slow and exceedingly fine the future of publishing scotland is a matter for the members of publishing scotland quoth the response that s a rather two edged phrase it is indubitably true but there is the slight matter of public funding if a group of scottish bakers want to have an alliance for the promotion of potato scones they are liberty to do so and nobody can tell them to cease and desist but nor is the government required to provide money for them to continue in promoting potato scones even if they decide to give money to the best potato scone producer we await the flexible funding decisions with no small degree on interest once you strip away all the over to you creative scotland stuff there are a number of areas which will still require attention there is much praise for the live literature scheme and rightly so but remember folks it s a match funded scheme more money going in means nothing unless schools libraries and community groups have the money to access it and guess what the coalition is putting under threat err that would be schools libraries and community groups rather than providing direction the response is another yawning void of expectation since i m now re awakened here s a few teasers for the next while what is project ararat should 1981 have been different mcshandy vs the state of nature only one will survive leave a comment filed under uncategorized november 20 2010 7 54 am notes towards a gothic understanding of the present days complete isolation was the prime condition of the preservation of old china that isolation having come to a violent end by the medium of england dissolution must follow as surely as that of any mummy carefully preserved in a hermetically sealed coffin whenever it is brought into contact with the open air now england having brought about the revolution of china the question is how that revolution will in time react on england and through england on europe karl marx new york daily tribune june 14 1853 china the rotting semi civilisation of the oldest state in the world engels new york daily tribune may 22 1857 there is a sleeping giant let him sleep if he awakes he will shake the world attributed to napoleon sometime on november 1st 2004 hackers sat down at computers in southern china and set off once again on their daily hunt for u s secrets since 2003 the group had been conducting wide ranging assaults on u s government targets to steal sensitive information part of a massive cyberespionage ring that u s investigators have codenamed titan rain time magazine 25 august 2005 what the bourgeoisie produces above all is its own gravediggers karl marx the communist manifesto fears grow over repossessions scotsman november 11 2010 capital is dead labour that vampire like only lives by sucking living labour and lives the more the more labour it sucks karl marx das kapital i 10 a man s heart is a wonderful thing especially when carried in the purse karl marx das kapital i 9 the continuing prevalence of pale sexy vampires and the rise of related comic sub genres the growth of teen focused dystopian fiction and the transformation of the children s publishing niche into a big advance along with big financial pressure publishing category were just some of the topics covered by a panel of agents at publishers weekly s beyond twilight what s hot in the teen market in publishing and hollywood publishers weekly april 7 2010 the vampire will not let go while there remains a single muscle sinew or drop of blood to be exploited karl marx das kapital 1 10 spending cuts trap poorest in boarded up ghost towns guardian november 18 2010 4 comments filed under uncategorized november 1 2010 5 59 pm heriot pastoral ghost buses and this week s review the selfish part of me hopes that nobody is reading this and that to paraphrase the words of the 70s tv programme why don t you you ve all just switched off your television sets hard drives and gone out to do something less boring instead i know that s what i ve been doing and it s a very happy making thing re reading that first sentence in fact i ve forgiven myself any feeling of selfishness and decided that it actually reveals an altruism i didn t think myself capable of expressing anyway the combination of guilt and loquaciousness means that i ll be trying to update this more frequently by the way does anyone else find it peculiar that on friday night broadband went down all over the place just as a new terror plot was uncovered heriot continues to be idyllic we had guisers last night and compared to the extortion with menaces i was familiar with in leith it was picture postcard cute we ve had the in laws to stay and cooked a sunday lunch for eleven people all of whom managed to get round the kitchen table the major work on the garden has commenced in enthusiasm if not in earnest with bulbs and a long hard look at the mountains of clinker in what will be the composter i discovered i can watch a nuthatch for twenty nine minutes and that a pheasant looks strikingly like an chinese print version of itself in the dawn light this morning we looked down on the valley and saw it swathed in fog it felt rather high romantic the new cottage even the commute is enjoyable and has led to a minor psychogeographic intrigue for a while we d been seeing what i called the ghost bus a bus with the number zero instead of a route designation i cooked up all kinds of schemes about rogue buses that deviate from their established circuits and go native hiding out on b roads and conducting clandestine meetings then we saw the real ghost bus a bus with no number whatsoever not even a zero and all its lights switched off a kind of spartacus or scarlet pimpernel of the omnibus world now finding buses awry from their usual routes has become a hobby and i ve spent far too long looking at route maps finding the areas furthest from the bus comfort zones and wondering far too much about how the routes come into being there are also odd gaps in the numbering sequences so in edinburgh there s no number six nine thirteen seventeen twenty eight thirty nine or forty i think i might resurrect some of these cursed routes who knows they might even pass straight through buildings nowadays this week s review a book everyone should read and i don t say that often this is the kind of book that restores my faith in publishing it is serious erudite weighty just shy of 1 000 pages long ambitious and successful in all those categories peter watson attempts nothing less than a complete survey of the intellectual scientific and cultural life of germany and german speaking peoples from the 18th century to the present day at its heart is a simple question imagine a pair of scales on one side place bach mozart beethoven schubert mahler and wagner goethe schiller hoffmann heine thomas mann and the grimm brothers kant hegel nietzsche marx and freud euler gauss reimann and gödel einstein heisenberg planck and bohr brecht fritz lang otto preminger and billy wilder paul klee caspar friedrich gustav klimt joseph beuys theodor adorno hannah arendt walter gropius herbert marcuse dietrich boenhoffer and paul tillich on the other place adolf hitler do the achievements of these philosophers writers artists physicists mathematicians film makers theologians and thinkers weigh more heavily towards the popular conception of german ness than the achievements of an austrian demagogue and failed water colourist watson is clear that the contribution of germany he refers to it as the second scientific revolution and the third european renaissance has been overshadowed by the horrors of the nazi regime and that the british remain stubbornly and pompously dismissive of german culture he cites a german academic lamenting the lack of an english equivalent for the word kultur and being rebuked by an oxford academic that there was a perfectly good english word for one obsessed with the high arts a prig he is however shrewd enough to realise that the question won t disappear under a flurry of facts and enthusiasms indeed it is a question that vexes contemporary germany was there a sonderweg a special path unique to germany as first advanced by the historian von ranke in 1833 and did this special path lead inevitably to auschwitz watson ingeniously argues that the very predispositions that allowed for such an intense cultural flowering were identical with the preconditions for the rise of the fascists he identifies features such as a disdain for the public sphere the cultivation of innerlichkeit or inwardness and a deep rooted sense of intrinsic purpose the personal bildung or self realisation transformed to national manifest destiny in the period that he calls between doubt and darwin different approaches to determining what humans were for were advanced by artists scientists and philosophers and the key theme was inwardness nazism was not inevitable but it became more probable yoked to factors such as germany s rapid and belated industrialisation it is a book where the gathering night brings the reader up sharply as we move from the heady days of weimar classicism and beethoven s ode to joy there is a perceptible darkening from heine insisting he was german first and jewish second to the rise of bismarck the solution of the great problems of these days is not to be found in speeches and revolutions but in blood and iron 1862 and his armourer the cannon king alfred krupp to the philistine posturing of wilhelm ii who said liebermann s art was poisoning the soul of the german nation the scene is gradually set watson brilliantly evokes the exodus of intellectuals and not just in terms of the apocryphal american claim to the soviets our german scientists were better than your german scientists their influence was as great in britain think of the architectural guides by nikolaus pevsner the story of art by ernst gombrich the liberal thinking of karl popper the publishing magnate george weidenfeld or the hungarian germanophile emeric pressburger who lauded the raf in the lion has wings about those who stayed behind watson is almost embarrassed there is a fascinating section on hans baumann who wrote tomorrow belongs to me originally a catholic youth movement song and over 150 songs lauding hitler as the saviour of the nation who became a children s novelist after the war barnabas the dancing bear was one of his but the career of ernst jünger is sketchy and hanns johst hitler s poet laureate is mentioned only for thomas paine his anti brecht drama of 1927 he died in 1978 although ig farben s ambiguous war record zyklon b and aspirin is mentioned the book is silent on ibm s equally tainted stance a book such as this will have to sacrifice some detail to the broad scope and in general watson s choices are judicious and apt in the post war period he has an interesting line on cardinal ratzinger s theology but the brush strokes in general are more hasty part of this may be that the literature of austria and switzerland has been more interesting boasting such figures as thomas bernhard gert jonke elfriede jelinek thomas glavinic and christian kracht nor is there room for extensive discussion of the curious phenomenon of östalgie nostalgia for the old gdr watson amply proves his case that german kultur is both rich and deep and the british stereotypes of herr flick do not do justice to this vein of intellectual history he concludes with 35 under rated germans a list i fear was demanded by the publishers since the book must have at least 350 such case studies leave a comment filed under uncategorized october 17 2010 7 08 pm this week s review the future and past of literature the wonderful colin heggie came up with this brilliant montage to illustrate this week s review a double header of philip roth s nemesis and charles yu s how to live safely in a science fictional universe the divide between the tradition of literature and the possibility of literature has never seemed as clear to me and i ve been thinking a lot about tradition and the manner in which so many of the emerging generation of scottish writers seem to be intent on aping their elders rather than japing them it s as if they want some kind of ghastly literary dinner party to be given the imprimatur of the established rather than knocking them over perhaps heresy i know we ve actually had our time in the sun in scotland and are embarking onto a neo edwardian post popean new caroline period of rather dull imitative literature anyway this week s review these two novels present a neat compare and contrast exercise on the state of contemporary fiction roth s novel is his 29 th and he is the winner of the gold medal in fiction yu s novel is his first and after a publishing some short stories he was chosen for the 5 under 35 programme where former winners of the national book award selected one young writer whose work impressed them yu was incidentally the choice of the under rated richard powers both interrogate questions about manliness and failure but while roth s novel manages to be both onerous and slight yu s is both light and deep nemesis is set in 1944 and introduces bucky cantor a well meaning physical education teacher in newark whose poor eyesight has disqualified him from participating in the war as his class mates battle nazism he is thrust into combat against a polio epide...