Eggplant.place

4d

He has gone down into darkness at the wrecked end of the year
And is lying, gaberlunzie, in the needled nest of frost…

—Gerry Cambridge, “Processional at the Winter Solstice”
published in Notes for Lighting a Fire (HappenStance Press 2012)

https://happenstancepress.com/index.php/shop/product/4-notes-for-lighting-a-fire-gerry-cambridge/category_pathway-12

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #midwinter #solstice

Processional at the Winter Solstice
by Gerry Cambridge

He has gone down into darkness at the wrecked end of the year
And is lying, gaberlunzie, in the needled nest of frost.
The arctic thrushes call for him although he cannot hear,

And the worm too understands him in the chilled grip of its dark,
And the ptarmigan in blizzards where no thought is worth a crumb,
And treecreepers in shivering puffs in Wellingtonias’ bark.

Shop windows glint in city lights like ice and sky, but still
No tinsel gifts can touch him, freed to silence like a stone’s;
His face is white as paper’s white in miles-high midnight chill.

He lies as plain as frost-dust where those starving thrushes call,
And his lime and ray-struck armoury could hardly be less small
On the anvil of beginnings in the sun’s gate on the wall.

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6d

Coming up Buchanan Street, quickly, on a sharp winter evening
a young man and two girls, under the Christmas lights –
The young man carries a new guitar in his arms,
the girl on the inside carries a very young baby,
and the girl on the outside carries a chihuahua…

—Edwin Morgan, “Trio”
published in CENTENARY SELECTED POEMS (Carcanet, 2020)

https://www.carcanet.co.uk/9781784109967/centenary-selected-poems/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #Glasgow #Christmas #BuchananStreet #EdwinMorgan

Trio
by Edwin Morgan

Coming up Buchanan Street, quickly, on a sharp winter evening
a young man and two girls, under the Christmas lights –
The young man carries a new guitar in his arms,
the girl on the inside carries a very young baby,
and the girl on the outside carries a chihuahua.
And the three of them are laughing, their breath rises
in a cloud of happiness, and as they pass
the boy says, “Wait till he sees this but!”
The chihuahua has a tiny Royal Stewart tartan coat like a teapot-holder,
the baby in its white shawl is all bright eyes and mouth like favours in a fresh sweet cake,
the guitar swells out under its milky plastic cover, tied at the neck with silver tinsel tape and a brisk sprig of mistletoe.
Orphean sprig! Melting baby! Warm chihuahua!
The vale of tears is powerless before you.
Whether Christ is born, or is not born, you
put paid to fate, it abdicates
under the Christmas lights.
Monsters of the year
go blank, are scattered back,
can’t bear this march of three.

– And the three have passed, vanished in the crowd
(yet not vanished, for in their arms they wind
the life of men and beasts, and music,
laughter ringing them round like a guard)
at the end of this winter’s day.

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6d

The NEW SCIENTIST Book Club is reading the science-fiction masterpiece THE PLAYER OF GAMES by Iain M. Banks. In this video, Iain’s friend & fellow author Ken MacLeod discusses everything from how the pair met as teenagers at school to Banks’s literary influences, & even his idea for a final novel set in the universe of the Culture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7OW6A8XCgg

#Scottish #literature #sciencefiction #scifi #IainBanks #IainMBanks #TheCulture

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5d

“If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say ‘give them up,’ for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.”

—Robert Louis Stevenson, “A Christmas Sermon”

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#Scottish #literature #19thcentury #Victorian #RobertLouisStevenson #Christmas

A double-page spread of an ornate layout of Stevenson’s “A Christmas Sermon” – a limited edition with gilded title, rules & initial capitals, by John Henry Nash (San Francisco, 1928)

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5d

“He looks much older than he is, for it is not quite twenty years ago that Johnnie founded the Society for the Abolition of Christmas”

—Muriel Spark, “The Leaf-Sweeper”
in THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES, published by @canongatebooks

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https://canongate.co.uk/books/1371-the-complete-short-stories/

#Scottish #literature #MurielSpark #Christmas #shortstory #shortstory #womenwriters #20thcentury

THE LEAF-SWEEPER

Behind the town hall there is a wooded parkland which, towards the end of November, begins to draw a thin blue cloud right into itself; and as a rule the park floats in this haze until mid-February. I pass every day, and see Johnnie Geddes in the heart of this mist, sweeping up the leaves. Now and again he stops, and jerking his long head erect, looks indignantly at the pile of leaves, as if it ought not to be there; then he sweeps on. This business of leaf-sweeping he learnt during the years he spent in the asylum; it was the job they always gave him to do; and when he was discharged the town council gave him the leaves to sweep. But the indignant movement of the head comes naturally to him, for this has been one of his habits since he was the most promising and buoyant and vociferous graduate of his year. He looks much older than he is, for it is not quite twenty years ago that Johnnie founded the Society for the Abolition of Christmas.

Johnnie was living with his aunt then. I was at school, and in the Christmas holidays Miss Geddes gave me her nephew's pamphlet, How to Grow Rich at Christmas. It sounded very likely, but it turned out that you grow rich at Christmas by doing away […]

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5d

Anette Degott’s talk ‘“No Extra Words” – The Scottish Poet Norman MacCaig (1910–1996)’, recorded on 16 December

@litstudies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3OGDm8x6ak

#Scottish #literature #poetry #NormanMacCaig #20thcentury

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1y

Curly Highland cow portrait - handmade acrylic painting.
Have a great day!

See more here:
https://karen-kaspar.pixels.com/featured/curly-highland-cow-portrait-karen-kaspar.html

#cow #highlander #cattle #farm #MastoArt #art #AYearForArt #FediArt #FediGiftShop #artist #arte #InteriorDesign #MastodonArt #ArtistsOnMastodon #TraditionalArt #kunst #contemporaryArt #creativeToots #ArtForSale #handmade #farming #animals #portrait #scottish #animal #painting #schottland

Curly highland cow portrait is a handmade acrylic painting by artist Karen Kaspar.
A shaggy Highland cow with a thick, reddish-brown coat looks directly at the viewer, its long horns extending outward. The background is a solid light blue, contrasting with the textured appearance of the cow's fur.
I painted this portrait in landscape format. This painting is also available in my shop. Here I cropped it to portrait format, so you can choose what best suits your walls.

ALT

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4d

Angus at midwinter
or near as makes no odds –
faint shadows raxed
over fields of dour earth,

every fairmer’s fenceposts
splashed with gold.

—Kathleen Jamie, “Solstice II”
in SELECTED POEMS (Picador 2018

https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/kathleen-jamie/selected-poems/9781509882953

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #midwinter #solstice

Solstice II
by Kathleen Jamie

Here comes the sun
summiting the headland – pow!
straight through the windows of the 10.19
– and here's us passengers,
splendid and blinking
like we're all re-born,
remade exactly, and just where we left off:
the students, the toddler, the tattoo'd lass,
the half dozen roustabouts
headed off-shore
cracking more beers
and more jokes.
Angus at midwinter
or near as makes no odds –
faint shadows raxed
over fields of dour earth,

every fairmer's fenceposts
splashed with gold.

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3d

“It was the time of year when things could change their nature. […] And already, my true love said taking my arm, we're past the shortest. Light is shaving the darkness off already, a couple of minutes a day. Have you noticed?”

—from 2008: “Do you call that a Christmas present?” – a short story by Ali Smith

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/ali-smith-do-you-call-that-a-christmas-present-1203321.html

#Scottish #literature #shortstory #Christmas #AliSmith

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3d

“Of old, Edinburgh University was the scene of heroic snowballing; and one riot obtained the epic honours of military intervention.”

—Robert Louis Stevenson, PICTURESQUE NOTES: EDINBURGH (1878)

🎨 : “Snowballing Outside Edinburgh University”, by Samuel Bough (1822–1878). Watercolour on paper, 1853

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Download PICTURESQUE NOTES as a free ebook from @gutenberg_org

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/382

#Scottish #literature #19thcentury #Victorian #RobertLouisStevenson #Edinburgh #winter

“Snowballing Outside Edinburgh University”, by Samuel Bough (1822–1878). Watercolour on paper.

A mid-nineteenth-century street scene in Edinburgh. At a street corner, on either side of the road, two groups of youths are throwing snowballs at each other. Some people watch from windows; other onlookers stand by. On one side of the street two women and a child hurry past.

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209d

Isobel Wylie Hutchison (1889–1982)—author, poet, film-maker, botanist, #arctic explorer—was born #OTD, 30 May. A 🎂 🧵

WalkHighlands shares an extract from PEAK BEYOND PEAK, describing how she tackled the Corrieyairack Pass between the #Cairngorms & Loch Ness

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https://www.walkhighlands.co.uk/news/peak-beyond-peak-the-unpublished-scottish-journeys-of-isobel-wylie-hutchison/

#Scottish #literature #20thcentury #womenwriters #hillwalking #mountaineering

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1y

The City is of Night; perchance of Death…

James “B.V.” Thomson (1834–1882) – poet, journalist, translator, anarchist, atheist – was born #OTD, 23 Nov, in Port Glasgow. Best known for his long poem THE CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT, he influenced TS Eliot & is seen as a progenitor of Modernism

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https://psychogeographicreview.com/the-city-of-dreadful-night/

#Scottish #literature #poetry #Victorian #19thCentury #modernism #TSEliot

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209d

When you were people
We could have loved you,
Found out your names
And brought you presents…

—“Poem for Innocent Victims of War” by AC Jacobs (1937–1994) – born #OTD, 30 May

Published in NAMELESS COUNTRY: Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2018)

A 🎂 🧵

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https://www.carcanet.co.uk/9781784106751/nameless-country/

#Scottish #literature #poetry #Jewish #diaspora #20thcentury #warpoetry

Poem for Innocent Victims of War
A. C. Jacobs

You did not die for me
Or love or desperation.
No-one chipped your names
On plaques on peaceful blocks of stone.
You are just the useless dead
Who mock our daily sin of passion,
Climb through our heads in cold, slow silence.

When you were people
We could have loved you,
Found out your names
And brought you presents.
We could have walked around with your response.

Or even if you chose to die
We might have understood your longing
And written down your utmost fear.

Now, though, you have got beyond our feelings,
And we can never almost follow
To learn your last shared and perfect secret.

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313d

Mastodon.scot is a Mastodon server mainly intended for people in Scotland or those who identify as Scottish:

https://mastodon.scot

You can find out more at https://mastodon.scot/about or contact the admin @trumpet

#FeaturedServer #Scotland #Scottish #Scot #Scots #Gàidhlig #Gaelic #Mastodon #Fediverse #FreeFediverse

Edited 313d ago

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198d

"Give me a little less
with every dawn."

Marjorie Lotfi performs John Burnside's "Prayer" in a film directed by Savannah Acquah, from a new series from the ‪Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation & the Writers’ Mosaic

https://www.brinkerhoffpoetry.org/poems/prayer

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #JohnBurnside

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273d

“its power as a starter in crowd psychology comes from Mackay’s insistence on humanising the follies he describes. No macroeconomic constructs here – just good old greed, optimism, superstition & cunning plans”

—Charles Mackay (1814–1889) was born #OTD, 27 March – best remembered today for his 1841 book Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds

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https://www.peterharrington.co.uk/blog/the-great-and-awful-book-of-human-folly-charles-mackays-popular-delusions-2/

#Scottish #literature #19thcentury #Victorian #psychology #masspsychology #economics #stockmarket #bubbles

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269d

Andrew Lang (1844–1912) was born #OTD, 31 March. An extraordinarily prolific anthropologist, writer & literary critic, he is best remembered today for collecting & editing fairy stories from around the world

A 🎂 🧵

1/6

https://universityofglasgowlibrary.wordpress.com/2016/05/20/the-man-of-letters-in-fairyland-andrew-lang/

#Scottish #literature #19thcentury #Victorian #kidlit #fairytale #AndrewLang

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195d

James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) was born #OTD, 13 June. As a physicist, he ranks alongside Newton & Einstein (“He achieved greatness unequalled”—Max Planck; “I stand on the shoulders of Maxwell”—Albert Einstein).

Maxwell also wrote poetry: “Rigid Body Sings” is based on “Comin’ Through the Rye” by Robert Burns

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45774/in-memory-of-edward-wilson-who-repented-of-what-was-in-his-mind-to-write-after-section

#Scottish #literature #poetry #19thcentury #Victorian #Scots #Scotslanguage #Physics #science #physicist

In Memory of Edward Wilson, Who Repented of what was in his Mind to Write after Section
BY JAMES CLERK MAXWELL

Rigid Body (sings).

Gin a body meet a body
Flyin’ through the air,
Gin a body hit a body,
Will it fly? and where?
Ilka impact has its measure,
Ne’er a ane hae I,
Yet a’ the lads they measure me,
Or, at least, they try.

Gin a body meet a body
Altogether free,
How they travel afterwards
We do not always see.
Ilka problem has its method
By analytics high;
For me, I ken na ane o’ them,
But what the waur am I?

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258d

I couldn’t touch a stop and turn a screw,
And set the blooming world a-work for me,
Like such as cut their teeth—I hope, like you—
On the handle of a skeleton gold key…

—“Thirty Bob a Week”, by the 19th-century poet, playwright & novelist John Davidson (1857–1909) – born #OTD, 11 April. A 🎂 🧵

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Page images from THE YELLOW BOOK vol. 2, 1894 – available on @gutenberg_org

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/41876/41876-h/41876-h.htm#Page_99

#Scottish #literature #poetry #19thCentury #Victorian #Modernist #Modernism #workingclass

John Davidson
Thirty Bob a Week

I couldn’t touch a stop and turn a screw,
And set the blooming world a-work for me,
Like such as cut their teeth—I hope, like you—
On the handle of a skeleton gold key.
I cut mine on a leek, which I eat it every week:
I’m a clerk at thirty bob as you can see.

But I don’t allow it’s luck and all a toss;
There’s no such thing as being starred and crossed;
It’s just the power of some to be a boss,
And the bally power of others to be bossed:
I face the music, sir; you bet I ain’t a cur!
Strike me lucky if I don’t believe I’m lost!

For like a mole I journey in the dark,
A-travelling along the underground
From my Pillar’d Halls and broad suburban Park
To come the daily dull official round;
And home again at night with my pipe all alight
A-scheming how to count ten bob a pound.

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145d

Beyond ruined houses and a past
eroded by salt and marram grass
stretch miles of sand dunes
where as kids we hurled ourselves
into space …

—Eleanor Livingstone, “Breathless”
from In the Event of Fire: New Writing Scotland 27 (ASLS, 2009)

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry

Eleanor Livingstone
BREATHLESS

Beyond ruined houses and a past
eroded by salt and marram grass
stretch miles of sand dunes
where as kids we hurled ourselves
into space, legs and rebel cries
suspended in the air, landing

spread-eagled in cotton shorts
and bare legs, winded but alive.

On August evenings years later
under cover of dark we returned
stumbling in and out of rabbit holes
to find the sand sun-warmed, soft
and far enough removed for us
to lie as still and silent as the sea

but for fingers finding buttons
and the racket of our hearts.

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208d

Thae laddies in the Celtic shirts,
a baker’s dozen
lumbering all the way to the summit cairn
the hot last Saturday of May
as larks trilled
and the loch-side braes released their midgies…

—Kathleen Jamie, “Ben Lomond”
published in THE BONNIEST COMPANIE (Picador, 2015)

https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/kathleen-jamie/the-bonniest-companie/9781509801718

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry

Ben Lomond
Kathleen Jamie

Thae laddies in the Celtic shirts,
a baker’s dozen
lumbering all the way to the summit cairn
the hot last Saturday of May
as larks trilled
and the loch-side braes released their midgies …

Well, up at the raven-haunted trig-point
(as the sun shone bright o’er the whole lower Clyde)
they unfurled a banner,
and triumphant-sombre, ranked themselves behind it
for the photies,
‘R.I.P.’ it read, then the name of a wee boy

they’ll never meet again. Ach,
would the wean were playing fit-ba
on some bonny banks somewhere …

There’s no accounting for it, is there?
I mean the low road, and the high.

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208d

Twentieth-Century Radical Scottish Gaelic Magazines and Contacts with Wales

A recording of Dr Petra Johana Poncarová’s talk, given on 22 May at the Centre for Advanced Welsh Celtic Studies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiKkgWYyhW8

#Scottish #literature #magazines #20thcentury #Gaelic #Gaidhlig #Wales #Welsh #CelticStudies

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208d

Finding Common Ground: New Scots Stories
16 June, Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh. Free, booking required

Join Finding Common Ground for a community walk & creative writing workshop as part of Refugee Festival Scotland. Discover unexpected connections between migration stories new & old; listen to seldom-heard voices; & find common ground in journeys across landscapes, languages, & literatures

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/finding-common-ground-new-scots-stories-tickets-1382461552719

#Scottish #literature #storytelling #refugees #migration #languages