I kept on meaning to ask Doug Barbour this from the minute he turned me on
to Ken McLeod but somehow never got round to it, but maybe the way this
thread is going, it might be worth throwing out generally (as well as
obviously to Doug in especial) ...
... but what hit me the minute I began to read McLeod was just how *local*,
both in time and space, some of his references were -- Glasgow University in
the seventies, but. It was so detailed that it actually threw me that
McLeod's experience of the QM Union wasn't the same as mine. (Mine would
have been about ten years earlier.)
But what I wondered was just how much of this travelled -- I mean, I'm not
sure how far it would travel in Scotland even. (What would they know about
the Queen Margaret Union -- the ladies' union, physical space, not
organisation -- in Edinburgh, even?)
I'd walked much the same walk as McLeod, but even then ... It wasn't that
his politics weren't the same as mine, but given that ten year difference,
it was pretty bloody obvious that the very *nature* of student politics up
the Hill had shifted.
So anyway, I had this weird sensation that a bit of what McLeod was writing
simply wouldn't make *sense* outside a narrow range of his readers.
So anyway, if this ramble makes any sense, what do people elsewhere make of
this side of his work?
Robin
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