> For the uninitiated, do you think you could tell about the Language Wars?
>
> Mark
Do you know, Mark, I thought this would be easy to answer?
... but it's not.
The quick&easy (and pretentious) answer would be that it was to do with the
use of urban speech in literature.
But that begs at least five separate questions.
(Like, why didn't they break-out earlier, why at the start it was
specifically *Glasgow* +poetry+ that we fought over, was "The Coming of the
Wee Malkies" written before "Six Glasgow Poems", and at the worst, the
Serious Question of the nature of Dundee speech in The Broons ...
... oh god, ask Carlos, he's there, I'm not.
And that's even before we get to to issues of censorship and how the major
nexus of new wave cyberpunk SF managed to locate itself in Glasgow (ask Doug
Barbour) and the howls of outrage over the refusal of the School of Scottish
Studies to index urban speech.
But the quick&dirty answer was Tom Leonard read "The Good Thief" on the
third story of a tenement in Hillhead Street in 1966, and after that, it was
history.
R.
{This was Way Back When, and the terms "liminal" and barrio poetry hadn't
then been coined, otherwise we'd have used them.}
Look, Mark, we'd have used bloody *anything* to win.
And we did.
What did it get us? "Trainspotting" and Ian Rankin and sodding Edinburgh
noir detective novels.
Angels weep.
Robin
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