A question of identity
Back in August, I interviewed Scottish writer and critic Stuart Kelly about Scottish literature for a podcast from the Edinburgh international book festival. Is it useful to talk about "Scottish" literature, I asked, given that there are so many Scotlands, so many experiences of Scottishness? Kelly replied by quoting Milan Kundera's statement that an attempt to make nationalism a part of literature is "small-scale terrorism" – "removing it", he said, "from the literary grand narrative and making it something specific, and quiet, and small". He added that the immigrant experience of Scotland has not yet been fully expressed in its fiction (no Scottish Zadie Smith), and was anxious about young Scottish writers imitating, rather than overturning, the literary models of the 1980s and 90s.
In the Scottish Review this month came a rebuttal of Kelly's views by novelist Sophie Cooke, which has blown into a full-scale literary row. Cooke accused Kelly of denationalising Scottish literature, and went on to pursue the frankly bizarre view that the Scots have a shared inheritance of the Highland clearances – "a deep underlying motor" – that is comparable to the Jewish inheritance of the Holocaust. She also cited the "distinct Scottish literary influence" of Gaelic storytelling and Icelandic saga.
Kelly struck back, driving, as one correspondent to the Review said, "a coach and horses through Cooke's argument". He was then accused of misogyny (a charge that was withdrawn), while the founder of the Scottish Poetry Library, Tessa Ransford, aimed a low blow at Kelly for having been "clever enough" to go to Oxford. Novelist James Robertson joined the fray: the whole row was a "terrible indictment of the general low esteem in which our literary and linguistic culture is still held", he wrote.
I suggest some of the combatants have a look at their colleagues in visual art. Glasgow-based figures such as Richard Wright, Karla Black, Nathan Coley and Martin Boyce are artists making work on an international stage. I've never heard them worrying about whether their practice is sufficiently, or insufficiently, "Scottish".
How to yell at an orchestra
Last Wednesday night, a member of the audience at the Royal Festival Hall in London stomped out of the London Philharmonic Orchestra's performance of Bruckner's Fourth Symphony, angrily shouting that it was "rubbish". The man was Alex Verney-Elliott, and he wrote to blogger Norman Lebrecht to explain why, expressing his incredulity that audiences "supinely accept" below-par performances. He has a point, even if not everyone would agree with his means of expression. Playwright Neil LaBute said on Radio 4's Front Row recently that he liked his audience to be half-reaching for their coats during a performance, then perhaps persuaded to stay: in other words actually moved, or angered, but certainly reacting, to what is happening on stage. Personally, I'd far rather someone left a concert shouting than spent an entire performance coughing or rustling their programme out of sheer boredom.
• This article was amended on 24 November 2011 to correct the spelling of the name of the Scottish Poetry Library founder, Tessa Ransford, from Ranford.
