The Browser by Stuart Kelly

Published on Sunday 18 April 2010 12:38

The Scottish Poetry Library hosted "Show And Tell" last week, a new soirée devoted to innovative literary performance.

Perhaps to indicate that they were offering something new to the jaded palates of the literati, alongside the Chateau Thames Embankment red and white wine, they had a "hot and spicy" option: never in my born days did I think I'd witness people drinking Buckfast in that auspicious building. Please enjoy poetry responsibly. It was also charming to be nearly the oldest person in the room. The readings were fantastic: Edinburgh's Gavin Inglis read one of his "Crap Ghost Stories", about the world's first online spectre, and Sam Taradash read an astonishingly accomplished piece that Raymond Carver would have envied.

Literary magazine cut

News has reached me that the soon-to-be-wound-down Scottish Arts Council has decided to cut the funding to Lallans, the only literary magazine devoted to Scots, which has been running continuously since 1974. What adds insult to injury is the sad news that John Law, the editor, died in February and the Scots language poet William Neill died earlier this month. It transpires that the Brownsbank fellowship, based in the last home of Hugh MacDiarmid, the founder of the Scots Renaissance, is to be cut as well. So much for the "confident, cultured Scotland" the Arts Council maintains it fosters.

Political page-turners

Which party would I vote for, based solely on the selections for the Waterstone's tables put forward by William Hague, Vince Cable, Peter Mandelson and Nicola Sturgeon? That's between me and the ballot box. But it's curious to note Hague chooses Robert Harris's Lustrum (dedicated "to Peter") about spin in Roman politics. As does Mandelson. Among Sturgeon's choices, it's superb to see Willy McIlvanney's Docherty, but disappointing to see Arthur Herman's The Scottish Enlightenment, the prose equivalent of a Royal Mile Wha's Like Us tea-towel. Either Alexander Broadie or James Buchan on that topic would have been a far better choice.

&#149 This article was first published in The Scotland on Sunday, April 18, 2010