I did virtually no specific research for The Godless World, but things are a bit different now. The Edinburgh Dead requires me to drag myself away from the computer now and again, and do some proper work. There is, incredible as it might seem, some stuff that - as far as I can tell, anyway - the internet does not yet know, which suits me just fine because I seriously like a bit of research: digging around in old books (courtesy of the excellent National Library of Scotland) or, as I was doing yesterday morning, descending into the bowels of Edinburgh City Chambers in search of the City Archives. And once I got there I spent a very happy couple of hours perusing an unpublished phD thesis from 1996 on the subject of the 19th century beginnings of Edinburgh's police force. Now and again this writing lark is very cool. (this depends, obviously on your definition of cool: and yes, mine does include discovering and reading vaguely obscure documents in slightly strange places. I'm funny like that.)
It's a strange feeling, making fiction - and fantastical, dark fiction at that - out of bits of real history. It's trespassing in the lives of real people, and putting words into their mouths and deeds - sometimes downright villainous ones - into their hands. It feels like taking a liberty with their memory, even the ones who were downright disreputable and murderous in reality. The city itself, though, is a much easier subject to work with. Edinburgh's soaked to its rocky bones in history, much of it darker and stranger than anything a mere writer could come up with, and using it as the stage for a drama feels entirely natural and appropriate.
I've got the perfect excuse, now, to wander around Edinburgh's Old Town, tracking down ancient alleyways that have been the scenes of murder, debauchery and mystery for hundreds of years. Even now, in the midst of the Festival(s), when the main streets are so full of tourists you can hardly move, the canyon-like closes are still and quiet and full of atmosphere. They feel old, and patient. Perfect venues for fictions.
And while I'm wandering around with my head in the 19th century, searching out the bits of the past that have survived, pondering the dastardly deeds - real and invented - that I'll populate these byways with, everyone else is milling about in a crazy, Festival-fuelled present in which mermaids pose beside statues of great philosophers (David Hume, famous son of Edinburgh, in this case)
I went to a musical this week. This is, to say the least, not something that happens very often. You could count the number of musicals I've seen in a theatre on the fingers of one hand; a hand that's suffered some unfortunate partial de-fingering accident, come to that. So what came over me?
Short answer is that this isn't just any musical, it's a particularly Scottish one - an Edinburgh one, in fact. It's called Sunshine on Leith, and is based on the music of Edinburgh's best known pop exports The Proclaimers. (Actually, to be precise they're Leith's best known pop exports: Leith is a formerly separate town that got absorbed into Edinburgh over time and became the city's docks area, but has always had its own distinctive character.)
Now the musical was quite good fun - especially for a Christmas crowd many of whom had stopped off for a wee drink or several on their way to the theatre. More specifically, though, it reminded me how much I like some of The Proclaimers' songs. So I decided to declare (or should that be proclaim?) today to be Proclaimers Day on the blog. Look away now if you dislike simple but catchy Scottish pop tunes.
First off, anyone who knows anything about The Proclaimers will know exactly which song inevitably forms the climax to the musical. And unsurprisingly, as show-ending songs go, this one gets quite a response from a thousand or more mildly intoxicated Edinburgh folk who've been waiting for it to turn up for a couple of hours:
I don't know what proportion of the audience had actually come up from Leith to see the show, but some sure had. So the song that gave the show its name also went down quite well:
And what I think is probably the song with the best (if not always the easiest to actually hear) lyrics - at least if you're Scottish or descended from those who were part of the great Scottish diaspora:
With merry inevitability, Festival seasonhas 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 anniversaryof 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'.
... 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:
And it has an important connection to the sf/f world too, being the direct inspiration for The Bridge by Iain Banks, as can be seen from the cover of this edition. That was one of his earliest non-M books, and very good it is too: it was marketed as more or less mainstream fiction, but it's got more than a hint of industrial magic realism about it. A precursor of the New Weird, before anyone had even thought of the term.
As anyone paying attention will know, Mr. Banks, in his M incarnation, is big news at the moment, with the imminent release of the first Culture novel in years. Sometimes the hype for a new release runs way ahead of what's reasonable, but this is one of those occasions when the author's earned every single iota of the anticipation and more.
The Forth Rail Bridge also, coincidentally, lives up to the all the hype when you see it in the steel and brick flesh. Awesome.
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:
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.
I did virtually no specific research for The Godless World, but things are a bit different now. The Edinburgh Dead requires me to drag myself away from the computer now and again, and do some proper work. There is, incredible as it might seem, some stuff that - as far as I can tell, anyway - the internet does not yet know, which suits me just fine because I seriously like a bit of research: digging around in old books (courtesy of the excellent National Library of Scotland) or, as I was doing yesterday morning, descending into the bowels of Edinburgh City Chambers in search of the City Archives. And once I got there I spent a very happy couple of hours perusing an unpublished phD thesis from 1996 on the subject of the 19th century beginnings of Edinburgh's police force. Now and again this writing lark is very cool. (this depends, obviously on your definition of cool: and yes, mine does include discovering and reading vaguely obscure documents in slightly strange places. I'm funny like that.)
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.
