What Scotsman was caught up in a civil war before the age of twenty? Wrote a book that became the inspiration for an Oscar-winning film? Met a runaway teenager in Paris and married her against the wishes of his family? Lost his ranch to raiding Apaches?
Mastodon, I need your help. I'm looking to relocate to a new instance to start off the new year but there's so many to choose from. What's a good fit for me? I'm a #scottish expat, currently living in #Seattle. I toot about #politics, #music, #poetry, running a #smallbusiness, and the occasional #meme. I am a member of the #lgbtq community, and a proud #trans woman. I have two #cats and a #husband who I love dearly and in very different ways. I tend to post with a heavy dose of #wit &/or #snark.
Question to #scottish and northern #Irish fedinauts: you guys have your own bank notes, don't you? How does this actually work if you bring that stuff to England? I remember when some friends tried to pay with NI pounds in London people got a bit pissy about it.
(I mostly encountered it when I lived in the Republic of Ireland and passed over into the North a few times)
(It kind of feels weird because money issued by private banks isn't a thing in the rest of Europe afaik)
James Leslie Mitchell (1901–1935), better known as Lewis Grassic Gibbon, was born #OTD, 13 Feb. Author of SUNSET SONG – & many other titles from #HistoricalFiction to #ScienceFiction – he is one of the most important #Scottish writers of the #20thcentury
THAT PROMETHEAN SPARK
THE BOTTLE IMP – Muriel Spark Special Issue
“With a writing career that included biography, criticism, drama and short fiction as well as novels, Muriel Spark was never one to do things by halves…”
Robert Louis Stevenson’s #shortstory “The Bottle Imp” was first published (in English) #OTD, 8 Feb 1891, in the New York Herald. It was originally published in #Samoan translation as “O le Fagu Aitu” in the missionary magazine O le sulu Samoa (The Samoan Torch)
Nan Shepherd (1893–1981) was born #OTD, 11 Feb. Recently her nature writing, & her memoir THE LIVING MOUNTAIN, has gained attention—but she was also an important #modernist novelist. Charlotte Peacock weighs her contribution to Scotland’s literary renaissance
INTERVIEWER: When somebody asks you to describe your book LANARK, what do you say to them?
ALASDAIR GRAY: I say it is a Scottish petit bourgeois model of the universe.
INTERVIEWER: Just like that?
ALASDAIR GRAY: Yes, I’ve rehearsed it and honed it down to as few words as possible.
From 25 Feb 2021 – the first ever #GrayDay, marking the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Alasdair Gray’s novel LANARK
George MacDonald Fraser (1925–2008) – author, historian, journalist, screenwriter – was born #OTD, 2 April, 1925
“His dedication to strongly researched stories, built firmly on a bedrock of historical fact, but always with an eye to the humour of a situation, was the core of what appealed to me”
Historical novelist Michael Jecks discusses George MacDonald Fraser’s writing for the Royal Literary Fund:
“The film is based on the 1992 novel of the same name by the Glaswegian Alasdair Gray. […] Like watching Lanthimos’s gorgeous spectacle, reading Gray is a wild & unsettling ride. His work is full of progressive imagination, wry impropriety & intricate literary form.”
Discover Alasdair Gray – the radical Scottish polymath & author of POOR THINGS
The fachan (athach) is a #Scottish folkloric figure. This one-legged, one-eyed monster haunted the wilder districts of #Scotland. In its one hand, which grew from its chest, it held a flail covered with iron apples, with which it struck out at passersby while hopping about on its single leg.
Source: P. Monaghan Encyclopedia of #Celtic #Mythology and #Folklore
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RT @oldweirdbritain #Fachan = ugly Scottish fairy with a single hard hairy hand emerging from its chest, one veiny thick-soled leg, and a tuft of coarse hair.
I never felt so much
Since I have felt at all
The tingling smell and touch
Of dogrose and sweet briar,
Nettles against the wall,
All sours and sweets that grow
Together or apart
In hedge or marsh or ditch…
There’s an old joke in Scotland that the best Christmas songs are Songs of the Stone – about the recovery, on Christmas Day 1950, of Scotland’s Stone of Destiny from Westminster Abbey.
Let me share with you the story and some of these songs 🧵
Elspeth Barker (1940–2022) was born #OTD, 16 November
Maggie O’Farrell called Barker’s classic O CALEDONIA
“one of those books you proselytize about; you want to beckon others aboard its glorious train. … I once decided to become friends with someone on the sole basis that she named O CALEDONIA as her favourite book”
George MacDonald (1824–1905) was born #OTD, 10 Dec. Seen by many as the forefather of modern #fantasy fiction, he was a huge influence on later writers including JRR #Tolkien & #CSLewis
“The sheer imaginative force of LILITH makes nonsense of our everyday notions of ‘good writing’. MacDonald aims not to make us read, but to make us dream”
David Melville Wingrove on LILITH, MacDonald’s last – & very strange – major work