Careful eyes will notice the time stamp on this entry, and those of many of its forbears, and deduce that my Saturday nights are not spent partying like a pop idol. This is easy to justify to myself: the truly debauched of my acquaintance reserve the weekends as stay-at-home nights. It makes sense: by staying in of a weekend night, one avoids the suburbs-washed crowd of daytrippers into the Garden of Earthly Delights, and can recuperate in part from the damage one inflicts on one in the holy name of Pleasure.
Howevermuch I reassure myself that my odium profanorum is the primary reason that my drunken face is not leech'd to the privates of a depressed ex-software-engineer in a malodorous club bathroom (a repetitive bassline masking his enthusiastic grunting) -- or whatever else passes for a little bit of fun these days -- the fact remains I haven't actually been out, any night of the week, in a good long while, and -- worse! -- I don't think I've even noticed. I'm not ready to draw the conclusion that I'm growing old. Rather the reverse seems to be the case: I am growing young again, once again clothing myself in the cable-knit sweater of self-care and the balaclava of aloof under-stimulation in which I weathered my gloomy adolescence. I have, of course, retained my more robust vices, but I have tempered them into keen, surreptitious addictions, rather than open manifestations of the salvific and translating power of anomia. The good news I tell you my friends is that I never really enjoyed the partying lifestyle all that much: I can't bear small-talk, which is what the great dull-witted crowd want out of one, and much as I love the grain and the grape, it seems a waste to pour so much of down the throats of so many when thee, me, and a jug of claret are sufficient and more.
Current music: Jakob Lindberg's disc of Scottish and French seventeenth-century lute repertoire. At the moment it's Jacques Gallot's setting of the folies d'Espagne, but the CD also features I longe for thy virginitie from the Straloch lute book (ca. 1628), which is a pretty damn'd direct way of putting it. Other marvels of bluntness include I wish I were where Helen lyes and my personal favorite, Sweet Willie.
OK: here's a fascinating topic to get me started on, although few are the drug-soaked rock-and-roll orgies where I can wax eloquent on such a topic. Scottish national identity during the eighteenth century began to model itself around the musical and poetic culture which had been repackaged for export to the English bourgeoisie. I might even say (if you get me high enough) that "Auld Scots Tune" was an early experiment in 'branding' a national cultural identity for a ready foreign market. It was quite simple: Jocky and Moggie would meet at a fair (in jig or reel tempo) and make salacious comments at one another in braw Scots. There would be six or twenty verses and an accompaniment for traditional Scottish basso continuo. By the early eighteenth century, as much 'Scottish' music was being churned out of English publishing firms and their folds of starveling hack poets as had ever graced the banks of Spey: [Perversely, the English musical public's almost total lack of regard for English folk music traditions preserved much of it more or less untouched until the ballad-collecting expeditions of the 'teens and 'twenties.] But then, curiously, Scotland began to produce its own folk-music.
As in the folk revival of the nineteen-fifties and -sixties, the ramparts of authenticity stood un-guarded: it was of the people no matter who wrote it, or how recently. The best-known example of this patchwork patrimony is Robert Burns's collection, revision and extension of fragments of traditional verse -- are they, therefore, truly folk-poetry? Among other places, his efforts in the last decade of the eighteenth century went to a project of one George Thomson, Enlightened citizen of Edinburgh and clerk of the Trustees for the Encouragement of Art and Manufactures in Scotland: namely, The Scots Musical Museum, which in addition to its intended aim of preserving a beautiful and moribund folk-tradition, also unintentionally made it popular, marketable, and infinitely reproducible.
Thus it was at Thomson's expense that dozens of Auld Authentic Scots Sangs were pieced together by Burns and dispatched by ferry to the continent to be dressed in Viennese-Classical sweet-wrappers -- among the contributors to this monument of Scots folk culture were Franz Joseph Haydn, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Carl Maria von Weber. With the right dotted eighth notes, a hint of Dorian mode, and a few quaint spellings, anything could be Scottish -- Wordsworth's solitary highland lass notwithstanding. [My favorite story: in 1788, Mr. Charles Miller wished to write an "authentic Scots air," and a friend advised him, "keep to the black keys of the harpsichord and maintain some kind of rhythm." -- what he generated is the "traditional folk song" Ye Banks and Braes o' Bonnie Doon.] Forty years later, Sir Walter Scott (tm) was making a comfortable living and a baronetcy out of Scotland (tm); forty years thereafter, Victoria's preference for Balmoral and its nativizing upholstery opened the sluice for the woolen mills to start mass-producing 'ancient' setts for clan tartans almost as fast as they did yards of cloth.
The re-creation of Scots folk culture for the foreign market touched off a genuine revival of that culture, I suppose, and as cagey as I get about misattribution, falsification, nationalism, and insecure historicity ... well, it's lovely music. I just wish people wouldn't go around believing it was as old as the hills. (Don't even get me started about the related blasphemy that a coat of arms can belong to a whole family. Ugh.)
All of which goes to explain the tremendous amount of tartan made-in-Scotland kitsch my grandmother *rsk*n* amassed in the sixty years since her emigration from a mining town in Ayrshire. I suppose every folk tradition of the industrialized West has gone through the alchemical phases of orality, kitschosity, and back into living folk-memory -- It is a point of national pride (for me, sporting my unpronounceable name) that the Scots wha ha'e wi' Wallace bled did it first, did it best, and skimmed the tidiest profit off it (and I still have the echt folk-music memories of learning Coulter's Candy and Ghille Callum on an old woman's knee). Oh, damn: I still haven't talked about the Kilt and Scottish Alterity: sexing the Scots. Perhaps next time, if I'm not distracted by anything shiny.
Just think: if I'd gone out tonight, you wouldn't have had to plough through all that.