Words
Arthur’s Seat
Andrew McCallum Crawford
The Scorpion
Wes Henricksen
Malcolm Boyd on Michael Kearns
Saint Andrew
Andrew McCallum
The Mall Project
Ewan Morrison
One Absorbent Parasite Per Song
Andrew McCallum Crawford
Teeth
Andrew McCallum Crawford
“He couldn’t stop thinking about her. He could see her now – in the picture he carried around in his head she was happy, smiling. What a smile. The girl with the perfect teeth, that’s what he’d started calling her. She seemed to like it, it made her laugh. He wanted to talk to her, but there was no phone in his dad’s house. There never had been”…
The Boy At The Door
Allan Massie
“…The boy who presented himself at the door of the house in Key West was tall and gangling. He had hitched and ridden on the roofs of freight cars from Minneapolis where he had worked sometimes as a labourer on construction sites, and sometimes on a local paper…”
Neophyte
Short story: Kathleen Rocksvage
Yin Eye
Short story: Andrew McCallum Crawford
Mac & Wills
Short story: Andrew McCallum Crawford
Animal Talk: Hearing John Berger
Allan Harkness
“The first was a hare,” he began, in what felt like a parable of migration and separation, making listeners imagine the scene by opening its metaphorical nature. Images of startled runners, a chased animal, an unseen traveller crossing the border led me to muse upon the residue of hare images: ancient Zhou bronzes, Durer’s drawing, Beuys ‘explaining’ his pictures, to name just a few in art’s great archive…
Inspiration, creation and quotation
Géraldine Garcia
Reading the French newspapers last week, it would appear there is a new literary skill being discussed: how fair is it to copy someone else and how far can you go? When a student is caught regurgitating sentences that don’t come from his or her own pen, it’s called plagiarism. Well, language purists will say that plagiarism and copying aren’t exactly the same but most of the time, “forgetting” to declare or acknowledge sources is a sufficient reason to be excluded from an examination or worse….
Rentrée Littéraire
Géraldine Garcia
Every year, in France, at the end of the summer, tons of books invade the book shops. The publishers are tense, the writers desperate to get noticed among their numerous rivals. It is the “rentrée littéraire”, a curious phenomenon our country is most proud of, consisting of the launch of the biggest “coup” titles of the year in a time-frame running from the end of August until the end of the autumn. In all, 701 novels (among which almost 500 French) will be published this year, an amazing number that is increasing for the first time in three years, to the frustration of the poor reader (overwhelmed), the book seller (inundated with new titles) and the critic (obliged to become insomniac during the summer holidays to hammer those reviews out)…
Bookshop Profiles
Re: History: The Borderlands
Andrew Faraday Giles
This month, we have heard from two British writers, Pat Neil and Allan Massie, discussing two sites that retain traces of reality and metaphor; that are removed from us by history and made close by memory – Massie on di Chirico’s Rome, and Neil on Franco’s Madrid. These sites remain real – the cities exist. Although it is hard to say if they exist as Massie and Neil perceive them, if they ever did, or if they only ever have. Thus, they also are imbued with heavy symbolism and metaphor, through our understanding of history (Neil’s ‘stranger in a strange land’ storyboard, Massie’s art-as-social-historian motif) that recreate and reconstruct our understanding of place and memory. Certainly, Madrid and Rome are physically (and temporally, in this case) removed from the writers’ current places of home. Both writers reside in the Borders of Scotland, itself a boundary-land between Scotland and England. But in these recent pieces for New Linear Perspectives, Massie and Neil have created a new border-land – an in-between space that does not heed time or place but rather exists as a crucible for our understanding of both writer and subject…
New Linear Perspectives 