chris
@yrpalchris.bsky.social
530 followers
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just leave the fish tank light on babe and crank the mothеrfucking Für Elise
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chris
@yrpalchris.bsky.social
· 18h
chris
@yrpalchris.bsky.social
· 19h
chris
@yrpalchris.bsky.social
· 19h
![As though whispering aloud what I had always assumed a local secret, Gray spoke using the words, syntax and places of home, yet he did it without the tang of apology or rude-mechanical humour, the Brigadoon tartanry or long-dead warrior chieftain stuff I had grown used to thinking were the options for how my nation appeared in print. Neither had he chosen the heather-strewn hills, the dank glens, the isles or the fishing communities as his location. With its Royal Infirmary cupolas and Victorian Great Western road, its Blackhill kids and the Clyde widening out to the sea, the place in which this epic would reveal itself was Glasgow, a breathing, many-layered Glasgow that was not just an industrial warehouse for ships, but a resonant and fully-claimed city that could stand for the nation entire.
"Glasgow is a magnificent city," said McAlpin. "Why do we hardly ever notice that?" "Because nobody imagines living here," said Thaw... "Think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he's already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn't been used by an artist, not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively."
A city imagined at length into being itself. I had fleetingly encountered so-called "magic realism" in translated Spanish, swallowed whole some oddball 19th-century Russians, a few American books that contained depictions of very "ordinary" lives told with grandeur and depth, but nothing of the kind about, well, home. I had barely encountered any of my country's writers at all, let alone one this engaged with the present tense, this bravely alive. Scotland, my schooling had at times implied, at times openly professed, was a small, cold, bitter place that had no political clout, not much cultural heritage, joyless people and writers who were all male and all dead [...] Not so, this book said: on a number of levels, not so.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:dei7f7zh74xr3hoghei6ke3d/bafkreidtp6zyuxxjumtxdoolxvk5q4hsrwpg7kyepe4kerypjiorqskemq@jpeg)
chris
@yrpalchris.bsky.social
· 20h
chris
@yrpalchris.bsky.social
· 20h
chris
@yrpalchris.bsky.social
· 21h
Reposted by chris
