Drouth Weekly
27th January 2023
Published by TheDrouth
Who was Tom Nairn? One of the great political thinkers of his age, we mark his passing away with an introductory examination of his work - almost a Nairn For Beginners. These reviews/summaries of some of his most important works are excerpted from Tartan Pimps, a 2010 book by Mitch Miller and Johnny Rodger, which examined how the new Scottish politics were written into being.
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The Drouth Review
23rd January 2023
Published by TheDrouth
Billed as 'groundbreaking', the Edinburgh City Art Centre exhibition, Glean - curated by Jenny Brownrigg - gathers the work of 14 pioneering early 20th century women photographers and filmmakers. Sara Stevenson reviews it for The Drouth, and considers it an 'impressive achievement'.
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19th November 2022
Published by TheDrouth
'Sometimes it feels like all the possible takes on the independence debate have already been 'well rehearsed'. Can the debate be refreshed and also gain some new subtlety and complexity? Richard Finlay assesses Gerry Hassan's new book-length contribution and is optimistic about its possible influence.
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20th October 2022
Published by TheDrouth
Born and raised in Glasgow, the only child of a Russian emigre, painter Yusef Szafki was much influenced by literature in his visual artwork. In an endlessly creative life, he published two literary works, including one on engaging with the Russian/Ukrainian writer Nikolai Gogol (60’ N (1996) ). Arguably the bold dreamlike, exaggerated style of Szafki’s work is influenced heavily by Gogol’s character, and his writing in such famous stories as ‘Diary of a Madman’ and ‘The Nose’. Johnny Rodger reviews this retrospective as the first exhibition to attempt a survey across his life’s work, and appreciates Szafki's experimentation and his ever-developing concerns with form, tone and texture.
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3rd June 2022
Published by TheDrouth
The first book published in our 'Lost Institutions' series, it focuses on the early years of the legendary Glasgow theatre in the words of the actors who made it happen, collected and introduced by Raymond Burke. It was part of a thrilling scene says Folosa Melville in review.
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3rd June 2022
Published by TheDrouth
A new book 'Glasgow Cool of Art: 13 books of fire at the Mackintosh Library' takes a personal, artistic, intellectual and critical view of the two fires in Mackintosh's masterwork. It attempts to square the trauma that the fires caused by looking at the effect on a wide range of people -adults, children, citizens, academics, artists, architects, and as Murdo Macdonald notes in review, addresses the challenge of the international worth or otherwise of that great building.
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19th March 2022
Published by TheDrouth
Japanese Artist Tomoko Konoike brought her wonderful dialogic textile art to an event co-organised by The Drouth for Glasgow International last year. Curator Naoko Mabon first published this text on Konoike in the online version of the Japan Quality magazine (Tokyo: Fudosha Co.Ltd.) in February 2022.
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21st January 2022
Published by TheDrouth
Three new books by James Kelman have just been published by PM Press of California. This must be an exciting time for both Kelman fans and for Kelman Studies. One new novel, one collection of essays, and and a philosophical debate between Kelman and Noam Chomsky -it's a lot to chew on. So The Drouth is delighted to be producing the first reviews of these new works. The final piece in our Kelman series is a review of his new collection of essays by researcher and writer Federica Giardino.
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14th January 2022
Published by TheDrouth
Three new books by James Kelman have just been published by PM Press of California. This must be an exciting time for both Kelman fans and for Kelman Studies. One new novel, one collection of essays, and and a philosophical debate between Kelman and Noam Chomsky -it's a lot to chew on. So The Drouth is delighted to be producing the first reviews of these new works. The second up in our Kelman series is a review of his new novel by writer Gerry Hassan.
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5th January 2022
Published by TheDrouth
Three new books by James Kelman have just been published by PM Press of California. This must be an exciting time for both Kelman fans and for Kelman Studies. One new novel, one collection of essays, and and a philosophical debate between Kelman and Noam Chomsky -it's a lot to chew on. So The Drouth is delighted to be producing the first reviews of these new works. First up is literary critic and scholar Carole Jones with her reading of the decades long engagement between Kelman and Chomsky mapped out through this published collection of essays, interviews and correspondence between the two writers.
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26th October 2021
Published by TheDrouth
The loss of The Arches as a site for the eruption of anarchic creative collaborations of a generation through all forms imaginable was a shock. Did the forces of conservatism conspire to finish it off in 2015... or maybe its work was done there, and the spirit needed to move on anyway? Neil Cooper's review of Innes and Bratchpiece's history of the venue is epic and elegaic: it deserves all that and even more ...
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30th September 2021
Published by TheDrouth
The Scotto-American photographer Thomas Joshua Cooper is a titan in his field. Dana Macfarlane reviews his new show, ‘The World’s Edge – The Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity’, at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and discusses the tensions in the work which is 'unsettling' and 'subtly uncanny'.
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1st August 2021
Published by TheDrouth
Form follows Fuel -or is it, Form follows Food? -Or both? In advance of COP26 -and our own specially timed 'Climate' issue in November, Florian Urban assesses Barnabas Calder's new book. Its exposé of Architecture - and especially the production of its materials, steel and cement - as the worst of climate-change culprits is interesting, to say the least, in the light of Calder's published panegyrics on Brutalism...
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UK-SCOTTISH POLITICS
in a UK-IRISH CENTENARY
by
Owen Dudley Edwards