With merry inevitability, Festival season has descended upon Edinburgh once more. A month or so of arty (and not so arty) madness is underway. (And lo, with almost equal inevitability, the heavens did open and they did rain at considerable, if intermittent, length upon all the multitudes of tourists. I suspect no one benefits more from the Festival than Edinburgh's umbrella sellers.)

My sole dipping of toe into Festival waters so far has been two bookish things:

At the National Library of Scotland, they're marking the 500th anniversary of the first book to be printed in Scotland. It's an interesting little exhibition, but it took a little while for the causative fact to really sink in. Half a millennium of printing books.

And they actually have that first book sitting there in a glass case: someone speaking to you through the printed word from 500 years ago. It's not all that easy to read, since the language has changed a fair bit since then and, funnily enough, legibility doesn't seem to have been the most immediate priority of the first font designers. But even so, it's a nice moment to lean over and read something printed that long ago. Kind of wonderful, even. In the most literal sense of wonderful.

And that transformative, revolutionary technology of 1508 connects beautifully to our very own current transformative revolution-in-progress, because anyone anywhere in the world can, if they can access the internet, also read the very first book to be printed in Scotland, because it's online, every single page of it, here. Might not make much sense to most, since it's in pretty heavily Scottished and archaic English, but even so: that is also kind of wonderful, still in the literal sense, when you stop to think about it.

And at Edinburgh's specialist sf bookshop, Transreal Fiction, they do Festival stuff too: a rather cool little exhibition of semi-abstract images by Madeleine Shepherd, each one inspired by an sf book. The series is called 'Alien Surfaces', and there's an online gallery where you can see (and buy, for that matter) most of them. Click on an individual image there to see the passage of text that inspired it.

It's good fun. They're pleasing on the eye, particularly when paired with the relevant quotation:

'...a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of litter.' - HP Lovecraft, At The Mountains of Madness.


That Lovercraft text made me think three things, by the way:

1. the guy really was remarkably good at what he did;
2. is it actually possible for a tunnel to be evilly free of litter?; and
3. if I was thinking of starting a blog about 20th century horror fiction I would totally call it 'Crushing the Frantic Penguins'.

Labels: Books, Edinburgh

... is just outside Edinburgh: the Forth Rail Bridge. It was looking particularly fine a couple of days ago, i.e. any excuse to inflict another of my photos on the internet:

Labels: Edinburgh, Photos

Amongst other things, I was one of the 20,000-odd people carrying a torch in this little gathering:



Then, a couple of days later, with around 100,000 others, went to the New Year's Eve concert in the middle of town that ended at midnight with this:



New Year - or Hogmanay as it's properly known around these parts - has always been a big deal in Scotland, but in Edinburgh these days it's turning into a full-on Winter Fire Festival that runs over several days. There's a definitely pagan feel to it, with flaming torches, burning wicker effigies, tons of fireworks, and great hordes of friendly drunk folk.

It's so obvious why people needed this kind of thing back in ye olden days, and still respond to it today. In the midst of a cold, wet, dark winter, the light and the heat and crowds and noise are - if you're in a tolerant or an excitable kind of mood - life-affirming.

I increasingly see the whole festive period as a three-stage process, cycling from the public to the private and back again. It starts off some time in early December, when a strange sort of collective, almost unconscious delirium slowly begins to take hold. The shared consumerist frenzy slowly builds, goaded on by relentless TV advertising and the forests of Christmas decorations that sprout in shops and on our streets, until there is a great eruption of mass hysteria on or around the 23rd and 24th of December. This is an intensely public phase of the festivities, enacted by thousands upon thousands, played out on the high streets, in the malls and at the cash registers. It's all good fun, though I'm not sure you could call it harmless.

There's then a second, much quieter, and increasingly brief, phase (only loosely related to the first, as far as I can tell) in which everyone retreats into tiny little groups of friends and family, turning their backs upon the outside world for a day or two, and clusters around the TV and the food-laden platters. This is the private, quiet stage of the process, and it's kind of nice.

Then the tidal wave of New Year's Eve celebrations looms on the horizon, and the celebrations are back out onto the street, into the bars, zooming into the night sky on rocket trails.

It's good stuff, but it's all done now. There'll be another along all to soon, but in the meantime, here's hoping we all have a good 2008.

Oh, and as a bonus, to get the year off on the right foot, some of that white stuff that used to be so common when I was a kid but isn't any more shows up, and I get to make my mark on 2008 right here in it's first week:

Labels: Edinburgh

So ... Edinburgh in August. Pretty much unlike anywhere else on Earth. Festival mania reigns. You've got the Festival, the Fringe, the Book Festival, the Film Festival, the Tattoo, and one or two minor hangers-on like the no doubt well-intentioned but, if you ask me, just plain spurious Festival of Politics.

I'll be taking in some potentially interesting stuff, including Beowulf, The Bacchae (with Dionysus played by Nightcrawler!), and Stardust. Half the fun, though, you don't need a ticket for. It's in the random blizzard of activity, and the sense of semi-organised and mostly good-humoured chaos that engulfs the city. And the dedicated performers going to great lengths to promote their shows:
And that, by the way, was not the first but the second person I saw lying in a coffin on the street within a hundred yards or so. Great minds evidently think alike, though I'm not entirely sure 'great' is the operative word here.

The streets heave with tourists, performers, the famous and the not-so-famous, turning the whole city into one giant show (and, supposedly, doubling its population). I'll be looking for Albannach, who are regulars at this time of year, and put on one of the best street gigs:



All in all, it's a fun few weeks. It turns out (I discovered via the Woolamaloo Gazette) that this is the last year that the Film Festival will take place during August. They're shifting it to June from next year. I really like the concentrated insanity that results from having all the festivals going on at more or less the same time. Losing films from the August mix is a bit of a pity. Not that there's exactly a shortage of other stuff going on, I suppose.

Labels: Edinburgh, Movies, Scotland