The Circumflex

Shuttlebus – Fairmont St. Andrews hotel to St. Andrews Cathedral (ruin).  On the in-car muzak – The Corries ‘sing’ Rise and Follow Charlie with the energy and pep of two geriatric convicts filing through a giant redwood with a blunt two-man saw.  For the toorists I suspect.  Eventually the boys (now long gone from the [...]

Spent last weekend, somewhat peripatetically, around the 10th St. Andrews Poetry festival – StAnZa – billed as Scotland’s poetry festival.  Having managed to avoid St. Andrews for the first 49 years of my life I find myself visiting the town twice in a month [In the discourse no-one can hear you scream]. St. Andrew’s, particularly [...]

Noted with interest the flurry of enthusiasm for things Baudrillardian as Jean grabs the cultural headlines one last time by shuffling off his mortal coil.  Excellent summary of diverse Anglophone and Francophone responses to the same ‘objective’ events – Baudrillard’s death and Baudrillard’s work – in Click opera.  Ignoring the side altar to Baudelaire – [...]

N is for Nabokov. I started out on Invitation to a Beheading.  I found the first 2 pages interesting.  The nowhere/notime setting was a bit alarming but the immediate seizure of the reader – our protagonist already tried and sentenced – beginning at the end.  I was disposed to take an interest (at least for [...]

In a frenzy of enthusiasm I added a string of posts to this blog over the last 24 hours [ In the Discourse- No-one can hear you scream] presenting various takes on the speakers and behaviours at last weekend’s Crime Fiction Masterclass at St. Andrews University.  Now…I am still struggling with all this meta-tagging, blogbot, [...]

As I remarked below,[In the Discourse - No-one can hear you scream] the final segment of the recent ‘State of the Genre’ Crime Fiction Masterclass consisted of an impassioned jeremiad by Julie Wallis Martin (Edgar nominee and ex-commissioning editor) explaining how none of the aspirant writers in the audience would ever be published ever by anyone [...]

OK – here’s the pitch.  The appropriation of the standard ‘detective’ tropes – whether golden age ‘clue puzzles’ or hard boiled/noir forms by resistant affinity groups provides an accessible mechanism for the fabrication/nurture of solidarity within emergent subcultures e.g. lesbian crime fiction, Scottish crime fiction etc. [Prof. Stephen Knight]   By appropriating ‘the detective’ as grail [...]

At the recent,  ‘State of the Genre’ – Crime Fiction Masterclass organised by the School of English at the University of St. Andrews (Saturday 3rd March 2007), Ian Rankin and Denise Mina both contributed to discussions and shared their views and experience of crime writing in Scotland.  The discussion spilled over into related forms – [...]

People subjected to my views of reading, writing and genre will insist I have a rather snooty attitude to genre writing.  Why would you read that stuff?  I mean it’s all the same?! And – alas – I have grounds.  So much of genre writing seems to be telling me stuff I don’t need to [...]

Still struggling to get back in harness with ‘Line of Sight’ - my new novel in Scots.  Got about 2k written today but the voice – the voice struggles – partly due to the point of view – which I won’t go into here – the voice is a demonic (sic) Scots borrowing Doric, Central belt [...]