Drouth Weekly
24th April 2021
What would the introduction of control on the border between Scotland and England mean for those two jurisdictions? What would a politically independent Scotland's controlled borders mean for its relations with the rest of Europe? Giovanna Guidicini looks at the history of the frontier which set Scotland apart and marked out its national territorial integrity. How and why did it come about, and what were the Scots' and outsiders' reaction to it.
17th April 2021
The fever is high, but public engagement seems, as yet to lag... Scottish politics is running a factionalist temperature from the 'Manky Jaiket' so-called greens to the Alba blues. New parties have appeared suddenly in the fray and schisms, nastiness, invective, small hatreds and big ugly prejudices seem the order of the day. Owen Dudley Edwards attempts a dispassionate round-up, and counsels an end to self-harm.
9th April 2021
Lorna Miller’s incisive work for The Drouth here brilliantly demonstrates how the lightning-fast flare of phantasmagorical developments in Scottish politics at the minute can only be truly grasped and conceived of in its bizarre momentum through a visual medium.
26th March 2021
THIS IS NOT AN ALLEGORY -A charismatic male political leader who gathers his support around his powerful personality, is revealed as a dodgy bully, who uses his power to prey sexually on women, is taken to court -nay takes the whole nation to court himself -twice!- is publicly disgraced, but sets himself up in a show at the Edinburgh Fringe, and in Russian media, sets up his own new political party, full of sycophantic followers ... and ... WE MAKE NO EXCUSES FOR REPUBLISHING THIS REVIEW FROM SEVERAL YEARS AGO (from New Left Project 2012) - will we never learn ? It's enough to make us recommend never voting for a man to lead your country ...
12th March 2021
Expansive and exclusive is the paradoxical mentality of the frontier from Trump's Wall to Offa's Dyke. Can anybody live on a non-existent border, and how have they done it? Owen Dudley Edwards looks deep into a line of no breadth
23rd February 2021
What, if anything, does the end of land, or of territory, have to do with the end of language? Is there ever an end of language, even of a particular speaking? Noah Rose is an artist working on the intersection between place and minority language.
26th January 2021
What happens when a cataclysm brings about the loss of a city's populations and of its historic buildings and neighbourhoods? Can they be rebuilt in reality, or refound in fragments of memory, in art, in history, in literature in documentation? There is something strangely unsettling about reproductions of historical realities, and the relationship of disappeared history to current day realities. Pippa Goldschmidt examines the case with the help of Freud's notion of the Uncanny.
14th January 2021
January 6th, Epiphany in the Christian calendar, is most commonly marked here by the taking down of the pagan midwinter decorations. This year, on the day that gifts were brought from the east for the baby Jesus, some strange kings and magicians visited the home of the American Republic. Owen Dudley Edwards tells us all we need to know, and more, about that 2020 election, and then, the Epiphany at the Capitol.
The Greenock Industrial and the Greenock Pastoral in ‘Just A Boys’ Game’ and ‘The Elephants’ Graveyard’ by David Archibald