Lmst

Scottish Scholars & Secrets: Developments of Dark Academia in Edinburgh – from 24 June 2025

Natasha Anderson finds roots of Dark Academia running through Edinburgh’s gothic literary traditions, in works by Robert Louis Stevenson, Muriel Spark, & Ian Rankin

@litstudies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahpagiSHK78

#Scottish #literature #gothic #Edinburgh #DarkAcademia #RobertLouisStevenson #MurielSpark #IanRankin

It’s the cocktail hour. The air is still.
Mister gets busy on the charcoal grill.
Social-kissing women, backslapping men
has failed to break the ice. But then
Missiz appears like magic from the dusk.
Cool, ten years his junior, she smells of musk
and ‘Madame Rochas’. Two small spots of anger
high on her cheekbones linger…

—Liz Lochhead, “Fourth of July Fireworks”

Published in THREE SCOTTISH POETS, @canongatebooks 1992

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #4thofJuly #FourthofJuly

Fourth of July Fireworks
by Liz Lochhead

The guests are gathered.
Boston-Irish Nancy, half in huff
says, ‘Better help yourselves,
you all know Mister’s timing well enough.’
Aside at me she mutters.
‘Millionaires can afford to let things wait.
Honest-to-God Mister would be late
for his own funeral.’ Cigarstore Indian,
I hide behind my apron, wait and drink in all I can.

(We don’t exist. They pick our trays,
Tom Collinses, Martinis and canapés.)

Oh horror, New England night,
when I fetched the ice down and that snake
looped my feet in the kitchen garden! I still shake.
‘Harmless,’ says Nancy.
I hear her hiss, ‘Some host!
That beggar’ll only get here when he’s sure he’s last.’

Fourth of July. Cape Cod. Dead on cue,
last-man Mister comes running to his barbecue.
Arms flailing like a cricketer’s across the lawn
from his ‘so English’ house with a flame red shirt on.

It’s the cocktail hour. The air is still.
Mister gets busy on the charcoal grill.
Social-kissing women, backslapping men
has failed to break the ice. But then
Missiz appears like magic from the dusk.
Cool, ten years his junior, she smells of musk

and ‘Madame Rochas’. Two small spots of anger
high on her cheekbones linger.

When Mister says it’s done enough
the guests spread ketchup on the fatted calf.
The night hots up. Liquor flows. Listless
couples come alive. A bit apart, restless,
Missiz sways gently on her own
to Glen Miller on the gramophone.
All eyes are on the soignee cling
of this year’s leisure favourite, velvety stretch towelling
for patio-party wear. Those purples and electric pinks
‘Just far too hectic altogether,’ Nancy thinks.

(Ten years with Missiz, Nancy’s face
is quite professional, impervious.)

Ice melts in the Martini tray. Midges
drown. The whole night edges
to a thunderstorm. Maybugs big as golfballs thud
as screendoors bounce them. But, after our blood,
divebombing mosquitoes dodge the mesh and slide
in down their own thin whine.
They bite despite insecticide.

All at sea,
white and dayglo orange fins spinnaker the bay.
Music blares
from the jazzed-up clubhouse round the Cape, Cotuit way.
The whole damn town is two thirds empty after Labour Day.
These summer people
migrate to Florida, lock, stock and barrel.
Tonight their parked cars sprawl the drive and trail

behind those his-and-hers coupled custom Cadillacs
like a comet tail.

(Oh I can see it all quite clearly, feeling small
and stone-cold sober. But I do not count at all.)

Out on the lawn the sprinklers, oddly luminous,
sputter like Roman Candles, ominous
as the sudden snap of queer clear light
from one weird streak unzips the dark.
The German Shepherd guard dogs bark.
A wind gets up. These beach-house boards
are flimsier than playing cards.

(Over the bay, like flares
odd rockets go up with a shock of stars.)

Mister drags off his box of fireworks to the shore.
Missiz drains her drink and hits the floor
with someone half her age. His snake-arms slur
around her waist. Eyes glaze. Sentence endings blur.
Missiz (‘mutton dressed as lamb’)
comes in slowly as the false-calm
lead-slow sea that slicks the beach. Sinatra sings.
The tide ravels up slowly, shelving things.

Raindrops big as bullets dent the roof we all stand under,
watching Canute’s fireworks outrage the storm,
try to steal its thunder.

#ScottishLabour chief #Sarwar is still being protected by the #media re; questions about his #Labour lord and master in #westminster...

#Sarwar is #supposed to be looking after the interests of the #Scottish People... He doesn't... and never will...

QUOTE BY #SCOTTISH #WRITER & #NOVELIST Robert Louis Stevenson.

"Everyone lives by selling something" 💰

QUOTE BY #SCOTTISH #WRITER & #NOVELIST Robert Louis Stevenson.

"Everyone lives by selling something" 💰

Views sought on proposals for protecting Scotland’s environment | Scottish Government

Draft plan to tackle nature loss, climate change and pollution Members of the public are being asked to…
#Environment #action #background #bill #cabinet #Climate #consultation #Continuity #deputy #Draft #Economy #émission #EU #ey #Government #ministers #Scotland #scottish #secretary #Strategy
https://www.europesays.com/2214600/

!THIS! from Andy Wightman on the current #Scottish #LandReform
process

Nothing in this bill nor in policy proposals does anything to deal with:

-the ludicrous tax system whereby some landowners pay more land tax to foreign countries than to Scotland

-the growing external extraction of wealth from Scotland’s land for external capital incl. state investment banks

-the lack of control communities have over common good land & its ongoing expropriation

https://andywightman.scot/2025/07/land-reform-25-years-of-performance-politics/

Nuala Watt performs her poem “Pregnant & Squint” ☝️ for LOOP (BBC Scotland)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oq0eIAY2YT0

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #disability #pregnant #pregancy #motherhood

I had a holiday from awkwardness. Can you have sex? was solved. Most people have been or known a doubled self like us…

—Nuala Watt, “Pregnant & Squint”
from The Department of Work & Pensions Assesses a Jade Fish (Blue Diode, 2024)

1/2

https://www.bluediode.co.uk/product-page/the-department-of-work-and-pensions-assesses-a-jade-fish-by-nuala-watt

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #disability #pregnant #pregnancy #motherhood

Nuala Watt
Pregnant and Squint

I had a holiday from awkwardness. Can you have sex? was solved. Most people have been or known a doubled self like us. Briefly my conditions were disabled.

Test to term I never had to console a passer-by spooked by my movement. People knew what to say. When are you due? Do you know what you’re having? Yes, a break.

We were disconcertingly well. Nothing Abnormal Detected said midwives’ scribbles. Just before childbirth, everyone’s disabled. For me, same old, same old. I had cohabited with fatigue for years; my balance was dreadful; I already leaked.

Suddenly I had twice the rights on buses. I could be the belly, if I liked, or the girl balanced on a semi-circle. I qualified for both the reserved seats.

I liked the quaint but truthful phrase ‘with child’.

The government forced me to list what I couldn’t do. I had to excise you from my answers. Whilst I described the most disastrous days, the falls, the fits, the faff, the time I collapsed while trying to use a tampon, my oddly capable body made your kidneys.

Transmission #28 – From the Head of Sericulture
Transmission from: Briony Ash, Head of Sericulture, Luxembourg Base, Copernicus D Crater, Moon
Earth Received Time: 12 June 2045, 10:13:49 UT

The latest report from Project Abeona, a small group of poets living off-world in a speculative future

(Transmission #28 by Pippa Goldschmidt)

https://projectabeonapoetry.substack.com/p/transmission-28-from-the-head-of

#Scottish #literature #poem #prosepoem #scifi #sciencefiction #speculativefiction

Some contemporary Scottish piping from Brighid Caimbeul.

I like it very much.

https://youtu.be/4KImkTRY4iM

#music #musik #scottish

It's hilarious to see tourist here who believe that simply because it's summer in Scotland then it will be warm. There are a bunch of people wearing shorts and t-shirts shivering with wooly hats and scarves on 😂😂😂

This isn't Spain people; if you live in the north of Scotland then you may own a pair of shorts, these may be used once every couple of years (and that's only because we're Scottish and like to get some value for money 🤑).

#Scotland #Scottish #Holidays

"#Scottish" Labour MPs/MSP's will never put the interests of the #Scottishpeople first.

They all support #RuleBritannia...

James Hogg & Mikhail Bulgakov

In the latest London Review of Books podcast, Marina Warner & Adam Thirlwell look at how James Hogg’s JUSTIFIED SINNER & Bulgakov’s THE MASTER & MARGARITA represent fanaticism, be it Calvinism or Bolshevism, & consider why both writers used the fantastical to test reality

@litstudies

https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/the-lrb-podcast/close-readings-james-hogg-and-mikhail-bulgakov

#Scottish #Russian #Soviet #literature #JamesHogg #MikhailBulgakov #gothic #horror #fanaticism #Calvinism #Bolshevism #fantasy

It clamps itself to a rock, like a limpet,
And creeps up and down in a tide of people,
Hardly ever stranded in a tideless sabbath:
A pilgrimage place where all hymns are jubilant…

—Norman MacCaig, “A.K.’s Summer Hut”
published in THE POEMS OF NORMAN MACCAIG (Birlinn, 2009)

https://birlinn.co.uk/product/the-poems-of-norman-maccaig/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #NormanMacCaig

A.K.’s summer hut
Norman MacCaig

It clamps itself to a rock, like a limpet,
And creeps up and down in a tide of people,
Hardly ever stranded in a tideless sabbath:
A pilgrimage place where all hymns are jubilant.

The starry revolutions around it,
The deer circling in new foundations
Of old worlds, the immortal noise
Of the river ghosted with salmon - these

Are a bloodstream it’s a blood-drop in.
Such sharing. Such giving. See, at the window,
That silly chaffinch, practically talking Gaelic,
And the eiders domestic as farmyard ducks

And the lady gull yacking for her breakfast.
If I were a bethlehemish star I’d stand fixed
Over that roof, knowing there’d be born there
No wars, no tortures, no savage crucifixions.

But a rare, an extraordinary thing –
An exhilaration of peace, a sounding
Grace with trinities galore – if only
Those three collared doves in the rowan tree.

A Blether and a Bevvy – Denise Mina
29 July, Aberdour. Tickets £8.83.

Aberdour Festival will feature Denise Mina in the week her latest novel THE GOOD LIAR is published. Mina will give a sneak preview of her new book, share where she finds her inspiration for her best-selling crime novels, & reveal how her Glasgow University Law degree helps with fiendishly complex plot lines.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/a-blether-and-a-bevvy-denise-mina-tickets-1390633495219

#Scottish #literature #crimefiction

Gah shit, accidentally blocked the Scottish mastodon when I was trying to block Alex Gallagher. Any #Scottish or #Independence folk seeing this, feel free to follow.

The First Battle of the Somme began #OTD, 1 July, 1916. Violet Jacob’s only child, Harry, was killed in action in the battle. Jacob’s war poems are some of the most poignant & affecting works from the Home Front.

“To A.H.J.”, from MORE SONGS OF ANGUS & OTHERS (1918)

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #warpoem #warpoetry #Somme #WW1 #FirstWorldwar

Violet Jacob
“To A.H.J.”

Past life, past tears, far past the grave,‍‍
‍‍‍‍The tryst is set for me,
Since, for our all, your all you gave‍‍
‍‍‍‍On the slopes of Picardy.

On Angus, in the autumn nights,‍‍
‍‍‍‍The ice-green light shall lie.
Beyond the trees the Northern Lights‍‍
‍‍‍‍Slant on the belts of sky.

But miles on miles from Scottish soil‍‍
‍‍‍‍You sleep, past war and scaith,
Your country’s freedman, loosed from toil.‍‍
‍‍‍‍In honour and in faith.

For Angus held you in her spell,
‍‍‍‍Her Grampians, faint and blue,
Her ways, the speech you knew so well,
‍‍‍‍Were half the world to you.

Yet rest, my son; our souls are those‍‍
‍‍‍‍Nor time nor death can part,
And lie you proudly, folded close‍‍
‍‍‍‍To France’s deathless heart.

John Yorke discusses Muriel Spark’s “riveting yet disconcerting” THE GIRLS OF SLENDER MEANS, published in 1963. With contributions from writer AL Kennedy, John explores the pleasures of this short yet wonderfully satisfying novella.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002f6p4

#Scottish #literature #20thcentury #MurielSpark #WomenWriters #novella

Summer 1945, just after VE Day: a group of young women brace for the future as the shattered world is put back into place. Neither they, nor Britain, will ever be the same again.

—currently on BBC Sounds: a new dramatisation of Muriel Spark’s THE GIRLS OF SLENDER MEANS

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002f6p6

#Scottish #literature #MurielSpark #drama #radiodrama #audiodrama

#Scottish

Client Info