Stuart Kelly

1 day ago | scotsman.com | Stuart Kelly

When I had finished reading this tremendous biography, I was so exhilarated and intrigued that I started to look for archive footage of Gertrude Stein. Although I found some, far more gobsmacking was a clip from a 1978 Swedish film (in ten languages) with none other than Bernard Cribbins as Gertude Stein and Wilfrid Brambell (Steptoe Snr.) as her life-partner, gatekeeper and muse, Alice B Toklas. It is absurd, unsettling, wry and provocative, much like the real Stein.

1 week ago | scotsman.com | Stuart Kelly

If you’re ever lucky enough to be in a church meeting, there is a fun game you can play: betting with yourself on how long it will be before someone says “young people”. Bemoaning their lack is mandatory and never, ever say “why don’t we not do whatever we did to their parents’ generation, or their parents’ parents’ generation, because whatever it was we did do, it quite evidently didn’t work”. I say that as, at fifty-two, I am often the youngest in the congregation.

2 weeks ago | scotsman.com | Stuart Kelly

The provocative title of Robert Macfarlane’s new book brought to mind a favourite couplet by the ingenious, wry Scottish poet Frank Kuppner: “God is real, but not as we use the word ‘real’. / Or, for that matter, as we use the word ‘God’.” The semantic hair-splitting evaporates if we invoke the German philosopher Hans Vaihinger’s concept of “Als Ob” or “as if”.Macfarlane is less concerned with the metaphysics of rivers than with the ethics.

3 weeks ago | scotsman.com | Stuart Kelly

Alice Mah grew up in British Columbia and is now Professor of Urban and Environmental Studies at Glasgow University, and this work, encompassing memoir, polemic, migration and climate science, is subtitled “an offering”; though it might as easily have been glossed as “an exercise in hauntology”. At the end, looking from the Necropolis towards the UK’s largest onshore windfarm, she sees the turbines as “emblems of a promised future, yet already it feels post-apocalyptic”.

3 weeks ago | scotsman.com | Stuart Kelly

Very occasionally with a novel, I get the sense while reading it that it is going to linger in some manner. It is not due to anything particularly dramatic or shocking or extravagant, in fact, quite the opposite: a premonition of something nagging and unresolved. The first time I encountered such an unsettling response to a book was The Sacred Fount, a late novel by Henry James, which I’ve subsequently re-read and never quite caught its sublime out-of-kilter-ness.