Lmst

A man walked out of the sea one February morning dressed in a boilersuit & bunnet, and wearing a tartan scarf which had been tucked crosswise under each oxter to be fastened by a safety-pin at a point roughly centre of his shoulder blades…

—James Kelman, “Incident on a Windswept Beach”

Published in THE STORY OF THE STONE: Tales, Entreaties, and Incantations (PM Press, 2025)

https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1769

#Scottish #literature #JamesKelman #Flashfiction #Scots #Scotslanguage #Scotstober

James Kelman
Incident on a Windswept Beach

A man walked out of the sea one February morning dressed in a boilersuit & bunnet, and wearing a tartan scarf which had been tucked crosswise under each oxter to be fastened by a safety-pin at a point roughly centre of his shoulder blades; from his neck swung a pair of heavy boots whose laces were knotted together. He brought what must have been a waterproof tobacco-pouch out from a pocket, because when he had rolled a smoke he lighted the thing using a kind of Zippo (also from the pouch) and puffed upon it with an obvious relish. It was an astonishing spectacle.
Hastening over to him I exclaimed: Christ Almighty jimmy, where've you come from?
Back there, he muttered oddly and made to proceed on his path.
At least let me give you a pair of socks! I said.
But he shook his head. No ... I'm not supposed to.

“It didn’t occur to me for about five or six years after leaving school that literature was something I could be involved in. Then I discovered it was possible to write stories myself…”

—an extract from James Kelman on “Elitism & English Literature”, from a book I’m currently typesetting

#Scottish #literature #workingclass #writers #writing #JamesKelman #elitism

It didn’t occur to me for about five or six years after leaving school that literature was something I could be involved in. Then I discovered it was possible to write stories myself, I just had to go out and buy a couple of reliable ball-point pens and a good-sized notebook. I could even write stories about ordinary people if I wanted to. There wasn’t anybody going to stop me by using physical force. After that I found out there were other people in this country also doing such things, and there were other people who had been doing such things for a couple of hundred years. It was just that nobody in any of the positions of power in society had got round to telling me.

“We’ve returned to a stage where ‘reality’ as presented by authority is allowed unchallenged. We live or die by a value-system that is abhorrent, typically upper class, white-Anglo-Saxon-heterosexual male. In prose fiction this is expressed by a 3rd party narrative where the ‘voice’ is Standard English Literary form.”

—Existence is a guerilla campaign: Rastko Novaković interviews James Kelman

https://salvage.zone/existence-is-a-guerilla-campaign-an-interview-with-james-kelman/

#Scottish #literature #voice #narrative #power #class #JamesKelman

James Kelman’s American Odyssey

“It is this relationship with America that has become essential in understanding Kelman and his writing. The country offered him a second home while he took up teaching posts… As this is the case it is particularly interesting to consider You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free and Dirt Road together. Written twelve years apart, their similarities and differences are telling.”

@bookstodon

https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2018/07/go-west-james-kelmans-american-odyssey/

#Scottish #literature #JamesKelman

March #reading: a lot of current reading is no more than 'to read the fiction I have brought onto the shelves and not read yet' -- some of these I have carried around for years.
#GustaveFlaubert Sentimental Education and Three Tales
#LemnSissay My Name is Why
#JamesKelman The Busconductor Hines 1984
#ChinuaAchebe Anthills of the Savannah 1987
#HenryGreen Loving 1945
#AndreyPlatonov Happy Moscow -- written 1930s, translated 2001by Robert and Elisabeth Chandler. Astonishing.

Cover of Andrey Platonov, Happy Moscow, schematic painting of a smiling woman 'Girl with the hat' by Malevich

Reading a bit of 1980s. Both these books are superbly, sometimes astonishingly well written, politically sharp and with deep resources of humour and perceptiveness. Achebe's last novel (1987) feels like a quite different type of achievement than his earlier work. Kelman's first novel (1984) just couldn't be better. Poets are the unacknowledged thingwaybobs, some novelists too. #JamesKelman #ScottishLiterature #ChinuaAchebe #AfricanLiterature #books #vendredilecture