Alasdair Gray mainly

[Joel S. Berson]

At 1/18/2010 10:31 PM, Robin Hamilton wrote:
>>(Re misnumbered centuries:  I am just browsing in Alisdair Gray's
>>"The Book of Prefaces", and find that he places Raleigh and James I's
>>coronation in England at 1803.)
>>
>>Joel
>
>Hm ...  As a good paid-up Scot, I'd be more offended (and surprised) at
>Alasdair referring to the Man as James I.  He was, after all, James the VI
>and I, in that order.

But Alasdair Gray Mainly would have been even
even more incorrect if he had referred to the
coronation of James VI in 1803.  (To be fair to
Mr. Gray, he does say that James was VI before
I.  And he's Mainly only on the title page.)


>I don't have "The Book of Prefaces" to hand, but might this not be an
>instance of Alasdair Gray's rather outré sense of humour?  There a strange
>engagement with time running throughout all his books, from _Lanark_ on.

In "The Book of Prefaces" Gray has running
commentaries on the prefaces, plus post-scripts
to his various periods.  The British history
narrated there sounds eccentric, or at least
idiocentric, to me, but I am not sufficiently knowledgeable to object to it.

[Is "idiocentric" in any authoritative
dictionary?  It's not in the OED, nor in my
Webster's New World 3rd College (1989),]

Joel

>Or
>before, even, if we count by pre-composition rather than pre-publication,
>since after _Lanark_, Alasdair was simultaneously writing new material and
>publishing (or re-publishing) earlier material.
>
>Come to that, the composition of _Lanark_ spread across a twenty year
>period.
>
>Robin
>
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