Scottish? English? Library thinks twice

Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, January 15, 2008; Page C05

EDINBURGH, Scotland

The stroke of a pen at the Library of Congress -- which rebranded 700 years of Scottish literary tradition as "English literature" -- has in recent weeks generated a spluttering uproar here. And last week, faced with Celtic fury, the American institution made an undignified U-turn.

The decision by the library's Cataloguing Policy and Support Office to abandon 40 headings and subheadings for Scottish writing meant every author in Scotland would be categorized under predominantly "English" categories. In a country whose domestic policy is run by a minority Scottish Nationalist government, the "English" labels caused disbelief.

Not even the national bard, Robert Burns, was exempt from the new Library of Congress rules. Despite penning the indisputably Scottish line "Wee, sleekit cow'rin, tim'rous beastie," he stood to be reclassified from the heading "Scottish Poetry" to "English Poetry, Scottish authors," under the system.

The reclassification took place in 2006 but wasn't noticed until the London Times called attention to it just before Christmas.

Then, after weeks of protest from "appalled" government ministers, writers and academics, Washington relented. In an apologetic letter to the National Library of Scotland here and the British Library in London, Librarian of Congress James Billington said the institution would return writers to their former Scottish status.

"The letters acknowledge that it was their interest and concerns over the issues created for them that led to the reversal," said Matt Raymond, a library spokesman.

The letter to the British institutions states: "After reviewing thoughtful comments received from several correspondents, the Cataloguing Policy and Support Office of the Library of Congress will be reinstating headings for Scottish literature, Scottish poetry and similar headings. . . . Bibliographic records will also be updated to restore former subject entries."

It is hard to overestimate reaction to the Library of Congress policy. Many Scots believe the country is enjoying a literary renaissance with writers such as Irvine Welsh, A.L. Kennedy, Ian Rankin and Christopher Brookmyre selling millions of books worldwide. The country's literary tradition is founded on authors such as Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, who strongly asserted their sense of Scottish identity.

The effect of the recent Library of Congress system had meant that works by John Buchan, a Scottish aristocrat, would be found under "Adventure Stories -- English," rather than "Adventure Stories -- Scottish." The same was true in other categories, from science fiction to gay literature.

The absurdity aside, the change was likely to have dramatic consequences. Library of Congress subject headings are adopted by libraries, publishers and retailers throughout the world, raising fears in Scotland that its proud literary heritage would be buried.

"The Library of Congress did not make a logical decision," said Cairns Craig, professor of Scottish and Irish studies at the University of Aberdeen. "If you are going to have national literatures in English, then Scottish literature ought to be one of them since it is the oldest national literature in English other than English itself."

Craig was one of a number of Scottish delegates at last month's American Modern Language Association conference in Chicago, which agreed to lobby to have the policy reversed.

Rankin, who has sold 20 million books worldwide, had also bitterly opposed the Library of Congress decision and said he was delighted by the reconsideration. His Inspector Rebus series was written and set in Edinburgh but would have been filed under "Detective and Mystery stories, English" had the library policy continued.

"If you talk to Scottish crime writers and ask, 'What are your influences?,' instead of answering Raymond Chandler or Agatha Christie, they will tend to say 'Confessions of a Justified Sinner' or 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,' James Hogg and Robert Louis Stevenson, or John Buchan's 'Thirty-Nine Steps.' We have grown up reading different books and grown up in a different culture," Rankin said.

Linda Fabiani, the minister of culture in Edinburgh, played a leading role in seeking to have the policy overturned, lobbying Rep. Mike McIntyre (D-N.C.), who then raised the issue in Washington. "I am very pleased," he said, "that the U.S. Library of Congress has made the proper decision to recognize Scottish identity for Scottish literature. This is a very important issue to the Scottish people, Scottish heritage and to Scotland-U.S. relations."

Scotland's resistance to English rule goes back centuries. Responsibility for domestic government in Scotland was given over to the Scottish parliament in Edinburgh in 1999 by British Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labor Party administration. In last year's Scottish election, the National Party, which favors complete independence for the country, won the biggest share of the vote.

There's more of this Scottish literature story further down the page. You can link to the Washington Post here: Washington Post

The story has also been picked up by the Scottish media website, allmediascotland. Read about it here: Mike Wades in - to the rescue

Last glimpse of a St Kildan's way of life

The Times, January 15, 2008


For most people, St Kilda is remote and mysterious, a windswept outcrop in the North Atlantic which against all odds supported human habitation for more than 4,000 years. But for Norman John Gillies, the last survivor of its tiny population, a new edition of a black-and-white film offers a glimpse of a lost way of life that was once familiar to him.

Britain’s Loneliest Isle was shot in summer, 1928, two years before St Kilda island was evacuated. This unique 16-minute documentary has been incorporated in The Island Tapes, a DVD which mixes archive footage with music in an evocation of Hebridean life.

When the original film was made, the islanders still clung to the hope that St Kilda – cut off from the Scottish mainland for nine months a year - had a viable future, eked from their few cattle, and the woollen goods the islanders made. Most movingly, for Mr Gillies, 82, it includes footage of his own mother at a spinning wheel, her shawl wrapped around her head against the fierce wind.

Mary Gillies’s death, in February 1930, would be the catalyst for the departure of the last 36 inhabitants. She fell ill while she was pregnant but storms prevented her leaving for a few days, and by the time she was finally taken from St Kilda her fate was sealed. She and her baby daughter died at Glasgow’s Stobhill hospital.

“I remember that well, as if it happened yesterday. Me standing down at the seashore and waving to her as she was rowed out in a boat with her shawl on and her waving back,” said Mr Gillies, who has lived with his wife in a village near Ipswich for the last 60 years.

His mother’s death had far-reaching consequences for the islanders. “They realised that they were in a hopeless position if anybody took really ill. That was one of the things. All households had to sign that they would leave St Kilda. That happened on 29 August, 1930,” said Mr Gillies.

“For the younger people it was an opportunity to do things which would help their entire lives. To the older inhabitants it was almost as if they had cut off their right hands, to have left their island home. I remember being on the boat and recall some of the older ones at the rear of HMS Hairbell, which took us of. Them waving to the island, until is was out of sight.”

Though only five when the island was evacuated, the last St Kildan still has evocative memories. “I can remember when I used to go into the church with my parents and how I used to be carried by my grandmother on her back when she went milking in the glen. One of my most treasured memories is of my mother calling me home to dinner, when I was playing at one end of the island or the other,” he said.

Mr Gillies left Morvern to join the Royal Navy in 1943, serving on torpedo boats which were based at Felixstowe. One Sunday, he accepted the invitation of a Free Church minister to attend a service in a nearby village. It was there he met his wife, Ivy: "That’s how I came to settle here, a St Kildan in Suffolk."

In the film a series of images show women with weather-beaten faces staring into the camera, children hiding behind a rowing boat and men plucking sea birds from the cliffs to eat.

The original silent movie is scripted through a series of cards which adopt an ever more patronising tone as the Glaswegian filmmakers take in the realities of St Kildan life. In one sequence after a make shift picture house is installed in one of the cottages the film describes the villager’s reactions. “We showed the St Kildans their first moving pictures”, “The show was free, but the girls were shy”, “The machine puzzled them”.

After they left, many of the islanders settled near Lochaline, Morvern. “It was very hard and difficult for the older people. St Kilda had been their way of life. They’d found it hard – but everyone had to knuckle down and get on with it,” said Mr Gillies.

* The Island Tapes is launched on January 21, at Celtic Connections in Glasgow.

How Scottish literature was saved

Well, it was saved here, in a manner of speaking. Following my page 3 report in the Times on 22 December, which revealed how the Library of Congress had effectively abolished Scottish literature, this Saturday the Times published the follow-up: in the face of fierce opposition from Scotland, the Library of Congress had backed down on its proposal to abolish around 40 category headings and sub-headings.

This story ran as the page one splash in the Scottish edition of Times, with a page five lead. This is the link to the Times splash in Scotland which ran on an inside page of the national edition.

Times splash

I also wrote up a piece for the Washington Post, which appears in today's edition. You can read it here:

Washington Post

The story in the entry below is the long Page 5 piece from the Times Scottish edition.

The original Times story, which revealed the Library of Congress decision to abandon its Scottish literature headings is here:

Scottish authors are 'English'

The excellent illustration above is by Jonathan Williams, and is used as the cover for Scotland's Books, Robert Crawford's history of Scottish literature, published by Penguin. I will issue a beer token to the first person to name all the pictured writers. For more of Jonathan's work, go here:

Blazing fruit

Great Scots written back into history

The Times, January 12, 2008

When cataloguing staff at the world’s most powerful library consigned a 700-year-old literary tradition to history, they little realised the storm they would release on the other side of the Atlantic. But now, just weeks after the revelation that it had abolished its Scottish literature headings, the American Library of Congress has been forced to climb down.

Last month, The Times revealed that a decision of the library’s Cataloguing and Support Office in Washington had effectively reclassified authors such as Sir Walter Scott and Irvine Welsh as ‘English’. The policy cause outrage, prompting an intervention from the country’s culture minister and drawing an unprecedented condemnation from the National Library of Scotland, which accused its American counterpart of “a gross inaccuracy” in its cataloguing system.

Under pressure from the authors, academics and politicians, the library has reinstated around 40 Scottish headings and sub-headings. It turns out that Scottish literature – whether is the medieval epic poetry of John Barbour, the doggerel of William Topaz McGonagall, or the modern ‘Tartan Noir’ school of crime writing - is not English after all.

The Library of Congress confirmed its revised policy in an e-mail to the National Library of Scotland and the British Library yesterday. The text reads: “After reviewing thoughtful comments received from several correspondents, the … Library of Congress will be reinstating headings for Scottish literature, Scottish poetry, and similar headings. The reinstatement will appear on a future weekly list of subject headings issued by the Cataloguing Policy and Support Office. Bibliographic records will also be updated to restore former subject entries.”

The move was met with delight in Scotland. Ian Rankin, whose works are quintessentially Scottish, said: "If you talked to a lot of Scottish crime writers and asked, ‘What are your influences?’ instead of answering Raymond Chandler or Agatha Christie, they will tend to say Confessions of a Justified Sinner or Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, James Hogg and Robert Louis Stevenson, or John Buchan’s Thirty-nine Steps. We have grown up reading different books and grown up in a different culture.”

Under the system which had been proposed Library of Congress, the heading “Scottish Literature”, and sub-headings ranging from “Erotic poetry, Scottish” to “television plays, Scottish” had been removed and re-categorised under English headings.

The object had been to introduce “conformity” in cataloguing practice, by removing “redundant” headings, explained a policy document. The aim was not “to imply that such authors are ethnically English”, but that their works formed a “subset” of the totality of English literature.

The effect of the new system meant that John Buchan’s works were filed under “Adventure Stories – English”, rather than “Adventure Stories – Scottish”, and that novels filed under “Science Fiction, Scottish,” were filed under “Science Fiction, English”.

The proposals had far-reaching consequences. Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) are used by libraries, publishers and retailers throughout the world, raising fears that modern Scottish literature would be buried under the heading “English”.

The climbdown was welcomed on both sides of the Atlantic. "I am very pleased that the Library of Congress has made the proper decision to recognise Scottish identity for Scottish literature. This is a very important issue to the Scottish people, Scottish heritage, and to Scotland-U.S. relations,” said Congressman Mitchell. The Scottish culutre minister, Linda Fabiani, said she was delighted that there had been a change of heart.

Cairns Craig, professor of Irish and Scottish studies at Aberdeen University, said that the issue was a matter of logic. “This is part of the old difficulty about whether the literature is a function of the language, or whether the literature is the function of the nation. If you are going to have national literatures in English, then Scottish literature ought to be one of them, since it is the oldest national literature in English other than English itself,” said Professor Craig.

Alasdair Gray, author of Lanark said it was important that libraries were accurate. “If a library is allocating literature to national areas then it ought to do it accurately. If you put all the authors who wrote in German under the heading ‘German literature’, Kafka would become a German, along with umpteen others, he said. "And by God! If they are going to put Scottish authors into English literature, I insist they put the Americans there too.”

The author Allan Massie said: “English is both a country and a language and the language has a wide application. Most Scottish writers write in English, so there is a grey area, but then so do most American, Australian and many Indian authors. My novels are not set in Scotland, but I think of myself as a Scottish writer. “

Not everyone was celebrating. Gregory Burke, who wrote the hit play Black Watch, said Scottish literature headings were unimportant. “Someone once said: ‘A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.’ It [Scottish literature] is a dialect of English. I don’t care about things like that – you can file me under anything you want. There are bigger things to worry about.”

Taking the bull by the horns

In the piece below you'll find an interview with Douglas Gordon, a Scottish artist with a huge international reputation. Douglas is as nice a guy as you could ever meet, but the world's least convincing Partick Thistle fan. The article appears today in the Scottish edition of Times.

Eighteen months ago, Douglas mounted a huge retrospective of his work in Edinburgh. For another interview with him, which appeared at that time in the Sunday Times, just click here: The beautiful game

The image immediately below is of Philippe Parreno (left) and Douglas Gordon, the co-directors of Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait. In the article below are pictures of José Tomás, caught at a bad moment on his return to bullfightiing in Barcelona, Zinedine Zidane, and an engraving of Martin Luther, by Lucas Cranach the elder.

Art, sport and the history of IPA

The Times, January 7, 2008

The problem with a five-star success, as any Hollywood producer knows, is how to follow it up. It is conundrum the artist Douglas Gordon has been wrestling with since 2006 when rave reviews for his film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, spilled out of the arts pages into the sports supplements. This brilliant production, said one critic, was ideal if your “idea of a perfect Saturday is a morning at the Tate Modern followed by an afternoon at the match.”

Now at last, Gordon and his co-director Philippe Parreno have settled on the sequel. Ratcheting up the testosterone levels, they are shifting focus from football to bullfighting, from the enigma of Zinedine Zidane, the great French player, to José Tomás, Spain’s most famous matador.

Gordon is a Turner Prize winner, breathes the rarefied air of contemporary art. But he is a disarmingly unpretentious man, who chuckles as he describes how he was swept up in the cult of Tomás.

Last summer the bullfighter returned to the ring in Barcelona after a self-imposed exile from the sport of five years. Expectation was high and the stadium packed. Tomás did not disappoint, producing a brilliantly mannered performance and – despite being knocked to the ground - was carried out of the arena shoulder high in triumph. Gordon was agog.

“It was the most astonishing bullfight I’d seen. He is an amazing character who has obviously gone against the grain in that very macho culture and Philippe and I are interested in him as a matador. But we can also see things from the point of view of the animal, this beautiful beast,” recalls the artist. He envisages his film as “a game between the matador and the bull,” which will employ all the artfulness and technology which created Zidane – 16 cameras were trained on the footballer throughout a full match, to achieve an astonishingly intimate portrayal “every bit as detailed as a painting or a photograph”.

Winning Tomás’s continuing support for the film which will take months to plan and execute may not be decisive – another matador could step into the limelight - but with the spectre of an EU ban hanging over bullfighting, time is of the essence.

The urgency of the project only adds to the sense of activity and optimism which surrounds the artist. Eighteen months ago during the Edinburgh retrospective of his work Gordon was still coming to terms with the break up of his relationship with Anna Gaskell, and fretting over how he might maintain a closeness with his young son in New York.

Now he is relaxed and assured and in the throes of moving back to Glasgow, which hasn’t been his permanent base since 2000. Gordon is looking forward to playing golf and watching Scotland’s efforts in football’s World Cup qualifiers. And he has any number of artistic projects on the go.

The last “astonishing summer” convinced him to return to Europe. It wasn’t just Barcelona. Gordon participated in the ‘artists’ opera’, which was part of the Manchester Festival and spent enough “fallow time” in Scotland to make him realise that he had been a “bit too cranked up” In New York. He will keep a flat in Manhattan, and probably buy another in Berlin, but he already has two places in Glasgow, one of which, near Park Circus, is being converted into a non-profit-making gallery. Gaskell is likely to be one of the first artists to exhibit there.

The notion of an exhibition space in his house was dreamt up with Katrina Brown, an old friend who is the former director of Dundee Contemporary Arts. Over dinner, she told Gordon about her Common Guild foundation which is dedicated to mounting public programmes of contemporary art. “I said, ‘I have a big town house in Glasgow, but I only ever live in the kitchen. Why don’t we try to run it as an art space?’ “

The homecoming is enticing to an artist who feels both Scottish and European. “It made sense to get back to a context in which I was challenged in a different way. And people didn’t keep saying to me, ‘O your accent is so cute’, and I didn’t have to predicate everything I said with subtitles.”

Gordon was born the eldest of four children in Maryhill, Glasgow, where he absorbed all the obsessions which beset many Scottish men growing up in 1970s: sex, death, football and religion. When he was four, his mother became a Jehovah’s Witness; at nine, Gordon was giving Bible readings to audiences of 200 at the Kingdom Hall.

He would have studied literature and history and university if his guidance teacher hadn’t persuaded him to apply for Glasgow School of Art. Now at 42, he intends to right that decision and will apply to study the Reformation at St Andrews University. It should help, he says, in one of his current projects, “to rewrite the Bible”.

“I was in Germany recently looking at works by Cranach. There is a beautiful portrait of Martin Luther, and I thought, ‘Douglas, you just don’t know half as much as you should. Maybe it’s time to go back to school. You can be one of those cool, mature students for once.’”

Luther he admires for his “attempt at inevitable failure”, his 1517 protest. “I think what interests me in it – it’s very tricky - is that aspect of Protestantism which is the introduction of choice as oppose to dogma. We know that a few hundred years later it became dogmatic, but in those days …”

He lets that thought drift off. “If I study in St Andrews and have a flat in Berlin, I can go and see a lot of the paintings and go to Wittenburg.”

And you can study religion and have fun, he reckons. As if to prove the point, his most recent experiences in Berlin – absorbing the art of Cranach and Durer – were leavened by his new career as restaurant reviewer for the French edition of Playboy. He calls his column 24 Hours Gastronomy, echoing the title of arguably his best known work, 24 Hour Psycho. It first ran last October with a despatch from St Andrews.

“I thought I should start it off with a little patriotic nod. ‘Dear Reader’, it began, ‘I’m sitting aboard an Airbus, coming in from Charles De Gaulle to Edinburgh airport … Don’t go directly to St Andews. Stop off at the Oxford Bar in Edinburgh and have a pint of IPA.’ I give them a wee history of India Pale Ale. Then we stopped off in Crail for a lobster, we played golf, we went to St Monans for dinner. The French Playboy people loved it.”

He even takes his own photographs on his camera phone and e-mails them into the office. Now wonder Yan Ceh, the editor-in-chief of the magazine, lists Gordon as one of his heroes on his YouTube website.

In Berlin he wanted to dine in an exclusive restaurant, frequented by Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. “I called the concierge and asked him to book. He said ‘Zees is not possible.” I said: ‘I am the food and drink editor of French Playboy magazine and I’d like to check the place out.’ I had a table in five minutes.”

Not bad, he laughs, for a man from Maryhill.

Screen but not heard

IT SOUNDS like the worst kind of joke. There are these two blokes arguing in a pub. One man, his face growing redder and redder, insists that the proliferation of television screens is destroying the traditional Scottish bar by killing the art of conversation. The other - in the person of Ian Rankin, the Edinburgh crime writer who plots his novels through a glass, darkly - says mildly that his companion is spouting much hot air.

To help advance his view, Rankin has theorised that his companion is possibly a little paranoid. Perhaps, Rankin suggests with a snigger, whenever his red-faced friend walks into a bar, someone switches on a telly just to annoy him: "Or maybe you're just a jinx."

Maybe. But I am that red-faced man and a graduate of the hard-drinking school of journalism. Years of observation and a heavy use of alcohol have convinced me that pubs - to be specific, traditional one-room Scottish bars - are spiralling into decline

A return to my one-man crusade against tellies in pubs, this time in the Sunday Herald. The images shows Ian Rankin pouring a pint and, below, an image of the interior the Oxford Bar, one of around ten on Ian's list of "great traditional Edinburgh pubs which don't have a telly". Keen-eyed readers may observe a television in the back row, second from the left. Read more at: Screen but not heard

You can visit one of Edinburgh's best bars (two tellies notwithstanding) at: Oxford Bar