Thoughtland

Map of Thoughtland: Bella Caledonia

One more place to visit for today in the Thoughtland - Bella Caledonia, edited by Kevin Wiliamson and Mike Small. Left-nationalist with a lot of green, and some serious back-up thinking - Small is a scholar of Patrick Geddes and was a student of the American anarchist Murray Bookchin, and Williamson was the publisher of the Rebel Inc. press (associated with Canongate Press), which published Irvine Welsh, Knut Hamson, Alexander Trocchi, among others.

Map of Thoughtland: The Drouth

via www.thedrouth.org

More peaks in the landscape of regularly-published Scottish critical thinking - The Drouth. They sum themselves up well enough:

"Scotland's leading cultural quarterly. Publishing features and fiction, we are especially interested in literature, film and politics but also visual art, music, architecture, photography and comix. Our style and approach is eclectic but committed. There are few other magazines where Noam Chomsky might appear next to Robert Burns, or John Knox may be invited to guest edit an issue examining Fidel Castro and the current state of feminism."

Map of Thoughtland: Variant

 

...the free arts and culture magazine.
In-depth coverage in the context of broader social, political & cultural issues

via www.variant.org.uk

Beginning an on-the-run category highlighting some of the more interesting intellectual hubs in Scottish society. Variant has been going since the early 80's, representing the anarchist/left-libertarian end of Central Belt artists. Notable for many things - highly worked-out and referenced articles on cultural politics - but most notable for taking sponsorship sums from Scottish Arts Council (now Creative Scotland) and Glasgow City Council, and then vigorously biting their corporate arses with detailed anatomies of their collusion with big business, and other bureaucratic corruptions. A great spectacle, but also deeply valuable

Pat Kane's CalMerc column: The passing of Reid & Morgan is about the future, not nostalgia

Delighted to be posting my first 'notes from everywhere' column from the Caledonian Mercury and welcome to all those who've clicked through. Thoughtland will be my blog for exploring big ideas in Scottish life, and I'll be posting a combination of CalMerc columns, original pieces, clipping from other important articles and (hopefully) a regular interview podcast (time and energy permitting). If you'd like to contact me directly, mail [email protected]

* * *

It's quite a moment to be starting a weekly Scottish column again. This was a fortnight when two of our political and cultural titans succumbed to cancer, causing many to dwell on the direction of their nation and culture.

But the deaths of Jimmy Reid and Edwin Morgan shouldn't be about nostalgia for possibilities lost or past. They were two progressive futurists, who in their own ways tried to keep the options open in Scotland.

At the start of the heartfelt collective outpouring for Reid over the last week, I was phoning up Glasgow University library to find out if they had the complete text of his '72 Rectorial address. I'd read it when I was preparing for my own 1990 Rectorial: and as I tracked down the famous front-page reprint on the front of the New York Times, I noticed a section hadn't made it to publication.

Here's the passage: “If automation and technology is accompanied as it must be with full employment, then the leisure time available to man will be enormously increased. If that is so, then our whole concept of education must change.

““The whole object must be to equip and educate people for life, not solely for work or a profession. The creative use of leisure, in communion with, and in service to our fellow human beings can and must become an important element in self-fulfilment.”

Now, it'd be easy to say that all this “leisure society” stuff is even more seventies than Jimmy's famous sideburns. Look how the application of hi-tech turned out, at least in this part of the world.

Workaholism for an educated middle-class, enslaved to global schedules and now-now-now consumer expectations. Underemployment and unemployment for those whose labour became an development opportunity for India, China and elsewhere (not least in shipbuilding). Capital markets driven to hyperspeed by automatic computer exchanges, escaping the grip of any human authority.

We were promised jetpacks, indeed.

Jimmy's saving insight comes in his first clause – “accompanied as it must be with full employment”. If Reid was a young man today, he'd be thumping some tubs in Scotland about the inevitability of jobs losses across public and private sectors.

I suggest, however, that he'd have forced us to be honest about the last forty years. New technology did offer us more free time for the “creative use of leisure, in communion with and in service to our fellow human beings” – but we exchanged it for money, overwork and consumerism.

Add the financial crisis to our carbon-environmental crisis, and a grand questioning of the Scottish lifestyle is about to begin. How many working hours do we really need to put in, and how much stuff do we need to have? And can Scots be visionary about using the political “sovereignty” we have in order to answer those questions?

If we give credence to Jimmy's vision that “the flowering of each individual’s personality and talents is the pre-condition for everyone’s development”, then we couldn't find a greater exemplar of that than Edwin Morgan.

No-one should doubt the centrality of the man to Scottish popular culture. I was able to wrest my 13-year-old daughter out of the coils of Facebook with news of Morgan's death - she'd covered him for English last year. For about 30 blissful mins the boy-man Justin Bieber was forgotten, and the language of visiting Martians, Loch Ness Monsters, and the Computer's First Xmas was happily explored and remembered.

Out of many early moments of pride at the opening of the Scottish Parliament, Edwin's celebratory poem was so completely appropriate it would have made you burst: garrulous, funny, aspirational, politically savvy, elegant and demotic as it needed to be.

In touch with all the avant-garde movements of his era – particularly cybernetics – Morgan's poetry imagined the consciousness of machines, aliens, geology. He was just as interested in the possibilities of technology and science to enable a “quality of life” as any idealistic Clydeside activist. It's reported that in Morgan's final days, the best service his friends could do was to bring him regular copies of Scientific American, National Geographic and the New York Review of Books to his bedside. 

Edwin's years as an educator at Glasgow University overlapped with Reid's as a Rector there, which gives you some sense of the quality of the era. But we shouldn't just be pining for radical heydays. Between the gay modernist, and the Govan communist, there's a reservoir of possibilities for the Scottish future that shows no signs of drying up. I hope to have some fun charting them over the next while, in this fine online publication.

For more from Pat Kane on Scottish affairs, visit www.thoughtland.info

Mulling over Connery at 80

I've been asked by a man from the Scotsman to comment briefly on the general significance of Sean Connery at 80. Here's the comment I gave:

Connery is so fascinating precisely because he's the midpoint between Edwin Morgan and Jimmy Reid, in terms of Scottish masculinity and politics. As a star he's perfectly aware of how constructed a public identity can be, how much you need to morph and shape your personality to succeed - indeed, how camp the whole affair is. But as a patriotic, populist Scot he also understands that a performer can rise from those who don't have the luck or willpower to shine in that singular way - and that it's important to keep them in mind, to collectively and systemically improve their chances of success. Does it make him the most consistent and coherent of characters? No. But you have to admire the energy and determination that holds all these contradictions together.

Available out there on the web are at least two pieces I've written about him over the last decade - this one an Independent review of his curious autobiography, written with Murray Grigor: 

If nothing else, SeanConnery has always been alive to the gloomy dualities of Scottish culture, as these opening lines to his self-directed 1967 documentary, The Bowler and the Bunnet, confirm: "The country of the extremes/ Love of life/ Hatred of life/ Poets and murderers/ Rigid temperance and savage drinking/ John Knox and Johnny Walker/ Sturdy democracy and savage class hatred/ Warm hearts and idiot violence".

This quirky account of an innovative industrial initiative – which momentarily turned confrontational "Red Clydeside" shipworkers into co-operative Japanese-style "colleagues" – was made in the same year that Connery was blowing Blofeld away, astride his yellow death-dealing mini-copter in You Only Live Twice. So we should pause before wondering why one of the most celebrated movie stars should put his name to such a cerebral book as this. There's a consistency in Connery's seriousness about Scotland, which the septuagenarian wants decisively to nail to the flag-pole – particularly in these febrile times for the Union.

Yet the intriguing thing about Being A Scot – which makes it more than just an intellectual vanity project – is the definition of Scottishness it plays with. Connery's Scotland is "a country where the invention of tradition is in itself a tradition", where "fakelore and folklore" should be equally valued. From a hard-scrabble, footie-mad working-class boy who literally constructed his acting persona – through body-building, listening to his voice on tapes, and a voracious auto-didacticism – there's an even deeper consistency here. The Connery who played the role of Ian Fleming's sadistic, hyper-English super-snob James Bond is hardly unaware of the lie that tells the truth.

And in 2000, for the Observer, on his 70th. I'm a bit more dismissive again, focussing more on his movie masculinity:

But the context rarely matters these days: the performance is always the same. Connery makes his cash from peddling a kind of mid-century incorrigibility, a source-code maleness. As an off-the-shelf star property, Sean still seems to solve a lot of problems for a lot of people.

Directors looking for some anchor to their dodgy scripts; movie fans who've surfed their satellite channels and have a taste for some living memories; weary men and women who want a brief respite from the never-ending story of sexual redefinition. And when Sean pulls on that white spiky toupée he's worn for the last few action movies, trims up the beard and straps in the gut, you have to admit that he looks like a citizen with some seniority about him. But the presence of Connery on our screens has now become a bore, an automatic reflex among casting directors that they really should begin to resist. Connery is an unreconstructed male icon, at a time when the new constructions are getting more complex, and more interesting, by the day.

In Memoriam Edwin Morgan (1920-2010)

By Robert Alan Jamieson

In a life of 90 years, a degree of transformation is to be expected, as times a-change and people must respond. In Edwin Morgan’s, sheer constancy of place, work and passion is remarkable. One city, one job and one great project, he seemed to remain essentially unaltered by the tides that swung around him, the impish mischievous curious boy he must have been still evident right into his final years. But from this fixed fact of his life, there roamed the most flexible and responsive mind, a fiery intellect flickering in the breeze of any new technology or idea to pass nearby.

via bellacaledonia.org.uk

The Cuthberts savage the cuts agenda in Scotland

"The current procurement arrangements are designed as if value for money was the sole relevant consideration. Yet using so many non-Scottish firms means that the Scottish economy is not benefiting from the high-level expertise, research and development or the associated profits that should flow from such a major investment programme" 

Jim & Margaret Cuthbert in Sunday Herald, August 15th 2010 

Jimmy Reid RIP: more coverage, and unedited 1972 Rectorial address

If automation and technology is accompanied as it must be with full employment, then the leisure time available to man will be enormously increased. If that is so, then our whole concept of education must change - Jimmy Reid, full Rectorial address, Glasgow 1972

A heartwarming stramash of posts and thoughts in the public sphere about the passing of Jimmy Reid over the last few days. Beginning with worthwhile (and compendious) blog posts from Bella Caledonia and Go Lassie Go, the Google News search is a rich trove also. Pieces from Martin Kettle, Gerry Hassan and  Iain Macwhirter do the "rueful post-socialist" viewpoint very well. Brian Wilson's obituary is sensitive and moving. Bella Caledonia cites Reid as it promots new visions of self-management being raised in contemporary Glasgow.

Previous versions of this post were trying to disseminate the full text of Jimmy's Glasgow University famous address of 1972, after he was elected Lord Rector of Glasgow University (an honour we share). The Unison website has a nice little archive page of the event, and I tracked down the excerpt of the speech that was published in The New York Times op-ed page, on June 20, 1972. (Filed under his Sunday name, James Reid, so not easy to find). Click on the facsimile below, and it'll download you a PDF of the piece.

But I'm delighted that the Herald has published a full transcription of his speech (also in extended post here). When reading the NY Times piece, I was slightly annoyed that it didn't include the following visionary passage. I remember reading this in 1990 and feeling the genuine tingle of meeting a very large (and kindred) mind, excited about the human potential and transformed social relations that new technology could unleash, and even hinting at his future support for national self-determination in Scotland:

To unleash the latent potential of our people requires that we give them responsibility. The untapped resources of the North Sea are as nothing compared to the untapped resources of our people. I am convinced that the great mass of our people go through life without even a glimmer of what they could have contributed to their fellow human beings. This is a personal tragedy. It’s a social crime. The flowering of each individual’s personality and talents is the pre-condition for everyone’s development.

In this context education has a vital role to play. If automation and technology is accompanied as it must be with full employment, then the leisure time available to man will be enormously increased. If that is so, then our whole concept of education must change. The whole object must be to equip and educate people for life, not solely for work or a profession. The creative use of leisure, in communion with, and in service to our fellow human beings can and must become an important element in self-fulfilment.

Universities must be in the forefront of development, must meet social needs and not lag behind them. It is my earnest desire that this great University of Glasgow should be in the vanguard initiating changes and setting the example for others to follow.

We'll try, Jimmy.

Where do we go from here? Part One: The frustrations of British politics

n the first of a wide-ranging three part conversation, Anthony Barnett and Gerry Hassan discuss the state of British politics and democracy and how the left – weak and disorganised in the face of a resurgent neoliberalism – can propose and build alternatives to the dominant dogmas of the past thirty years.

via www.gerryhassan.com

looks like an essential conversation...

My review of Chris Harvie's 'A Floating Commonwealth'

An unrepentantly praiseworthy review of my friend Christopher Harvie's new book, A Floating Commonwealth, published in today's Independent (books section). Here's an extract:The unity and dissolution of West Britain shows how "high politics" (strategy steered by statesmen, moguls and civil servants) and "low politics" (the adaptations of civil society, artisans, local government) can interact fruitfully if they share a sense of "world" together. Harvie's current adventures - advising a Scotland government which not only aspires to the same concertation between high and low policy, but aims to do so within a "world" defined by independence within Europe - make him a remarkably consistent member of the "avocati". But as the under-resourced rail infrastructure of Wales juddered me to my coastal destination, it seemed possible that this floating commonwealth - or at least a Celtic alliance of nations and regions - might revive its linkages, for mutual benefit. For one thing, a hydrofoil down the littoral would have been an easier trip. As the break-up of Britain continues, Harvie has provided a new mental and historical map for these islands, which could have more than scholarly consquences.

via theplayethic.typepad.com

Seeing how all this works...