Forgive me, o founders of the internet, it has been more than seven years since my last blog. For longer than that, I have failed to interact with social media, 'smart' phones, mobile devices, or any data-gathering and extraction apps, generally. During all of this time, I have paid no tithe in data to the new media priests or church...
'Ye see your state wi theirs compared
And shudder at the niffer;
But cast a moment's fair regard,
What maks the mighty differ;
Discount what scant occasion gave,
That purity ye pride in:
And (what's aft mair than a' the lave),
Your better art o' hidin'
'Address To The Unco Guid' (1786) - Robert Burns
Thurs nae standart othography fur contemporary Scots screivin, at least no wan thit lits ye screive the same across the kintra an read it in yer ain accent. Its a travesty o' wur cultural heritage.
Ah'm writin this furst bit in a standart mix o' accent (deepest, darkest West Fife, if ye maun ken), roughly standart Scots (see below) and contemporary Scots English (see also below), whit maist lowlanders speak in a semi-formal situation, style drifting, as linguists wid hae it, intae mair formal standard English, if or when needs be, or intae accent when among freends whae aw blether the same. In mony weys, thon style driftin' is a blessin, for sure in terms o' literary or poetic expression, nae a curse.
Ah've stertit here in this mish-mash o' styles coz its whit comes easiest tae me an ah wish it wis unersteed bi aw thit hearkent tae it. Bit its no, ken?
Mibby some o' thae linguists wid disagree wi me, say 'sure thurs a standart orthography fur Scots, check the Scots dictionary', an ah widnae conter thum. Bit thurs precious few o' us speak it, aw the time, especially doon bye, ablow the Heilan' Line, aft above tae noo.
Ah'm a Fifer, bidin fur a while noo in the Angus glens. Whan furst oot an aboot, thur wur only a few fowk, ifn ah driftit intae ma maist natrul accent, kent whit wis speirt an ah wis the same wi how they speirt. Ah've faimly fae roonaboot here, sae ah kin tune ma lugs tae it, huv done, ower time.
'Cross aw thi pairts o' wur kintra though, we drift an speir a hale mishmash noo. Wisny ay thon wey.
Sae whit wur speirin has the kennin o' aw the fowk, we drift tae whit the linguists, o' certain ilks, cry 'Standard Scottish English', or SSE (no the lectric wan!) as the 'characteristic speech of the professional class and the accepted norm in schools'. Maist fowk, coz o' the schools an, ken, fur cultural reasons, screive in sumhing like it tae, 'Standard English', or 'the variety of English that has undergone substantial regularisation and is associated with formal schooling, language assessment, and official print publications', wi a smatterin o' Scots drappit in noo an then.
Thurs mair bonnie fechters than me haudin the line wi Scots (an ah'll hae sumhing tae speir aboot hoo we hae tae huv a communin among wursels, seemilar tae the wan Norwegians hud, eftir gittin thur ane kintra tae thumsels again, aboot Nynorsk or Bokmål, eftir), ah'm jist speirin this the noo as context fur why 'unco'. Ah'll git mair involved wi thon eftir tae, forbye.
Coz maist o' us wid hae heard unco only fae Rabbie, if we heard it at aw, ah shoudna lit ye hink ah'm hinkin ah'm like the bard hissel, heaven forfend an haud yer forflitten an yer wheest an aw! Ah've screivit whit ah huv here tae git at hoo words shift, urny fixit doon. Whit ah'm gittin it wi yaise o' unco (an ah'll rap this pish the noo, jist haud oan!) is in the banners here. Some o't is hoo ah hink Rabbie meant, some isnae.
Ah jist liked the associations, the mind twist, o' the contemporary, slow living assocations tae. Ken, co bein short fur corporation, so uncorporate. As in nuhing tae dae wi 'late-stage' or latest iterations o' capital and mindsets tae go wi it. Braw.
If it wis fixit, a standart orthography, ah hink its mair likely tae be hoo oor ither bard hud it. Christopher, Chris, Hugh, hooever ye hink o' MacDiarmid, or hooever he thocht o' hissel. Ah'm nae MacDiarmid either, probly mair Trocchi, ifn ah wis tae pcik a side in ony flytin, bit...
'I'll hae nae hauf-way hoose, but aye be whaur
Extremes meet - it's the only way I ken
To dodge the curst conceit o' bein richt
That damns the vast majority o' men.'
'A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle' (1926) - Hugh MacDiarmid
For aw his ambitious literary and cultural plans, centred oan a modernist impetus tae revive the leid, and reinvigorate a literature sufferin fae sentimentality, some o' which he deponit wis doon tae Rabbie an the ilk, drawin deep fae memory an guid books, as weel as the rhythms an idioms o' his Borders speirin, an tae capture a distinct Scots sensibility forbye, he driftit tae, in his wark. No lang eftir a nervous breakdoon in 1935, his radical advocacy o' Scots cheynged intae mair didactic wark, intae mair politics, philosophy, linguistics an science, written in SSE.
If its guid eneuch fur Chris, thons the road ah'm heidit noo tae, if fur nuhain else, so onybody kin ken whit ah'm speirin at ye...
...For those who knew it (and those who might want to check it out fresh), 'unco', as a blog, is the return of tumshieheid, fae 'Tumshie Heid's Lament', ken him?. The 'Lament' was for many things, among them the demise of the excellent Scottish-based micro-blogging platform Kiltr (RIP!), where I first posted my ramblings and tangential musings.
When Kiltr was to become no more, I used the most expedient means then at my disposal to copy over and publish what I thought (and what some Kiltr readers and followers appeared to concur) were the most important or engaged with pieces. There was, way back then, something of a Scottish focussed blogosphere over on Blogger, so there it went.
The nature of my neurodiversity (more on that from personal and general perpspectives to follow in future posts) and other concerns, as well as now being far post-reading the magisterial treatise 'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power' by the 'true prophet' of data captialism and how it has 'hacked' and will continue to hack humanity, Shoshana Zuboff, means I don't do 'socials' or 'smart' phones/tech, so you can only find me here. Or, you know, if you have any spare change guv'nor, to support anything you like about what I do, at the one or two places mentioned below.
Zuboff's work, among a myriad of other related things (including data-guilt related to having started a Scottish focussed digital/social media marketing & SEO/web design company, in the digital innocence days of 2011 - yes working for the dark side, who knew the evil galactic empire had a depot in Fife!), not least my darkest, deep held fears over where the nexus of 'smart' technology, the internet and social media have been heading for quite some time confirmed by it, robbed me of any lingering optimism leftover from the heady days of an emerging internet, technology and its nerdy pioneers.
They're still trying to move fast and break things, all the things. Including your attention and cognitive capacity.
I'll be posting more on my reflections around all that muss and fuss later, skulking in a wee quiet, hidden corner of virtuality, of the interwebs. For now (if you've stumbled in, welcome!), I'm still gonna sneak around and hijack a piggy-back on their evil algorithms where I can, so other weary souls may chance to find their way here, for at least some of the right reasons.
In the meantime, here's a link or two, or three; one for those reasons, t'others by way of a bio, a semi-tragic backstory, if you like and if you like that sort of thing, to original tumshieheid/Kiltr posts, as a primer to posting updated shenanigans for your (dubious) delight and delectation:
'the invisible insurrection of a million lies'
'the politics of sleeping pt1'
'the politics of sleeping pt 2'
Next new and shiny post to follow soon - c. 28th September - and at least once a month (probably way more, but you know, managing expectations, under-promise, over-deliver etc etc, if anyone has any, hello?) thereafter. Not meaning to witter on but whilst avoidng as much datafication and social media nonsense as possible, a blogger/artist/musican's gotta eat, or you know have folks buy me a coffee...maybe even consider patronising me...sorry, Patreon-ising
me, or come at me direct, right here, well, on my wares page, wolf nipple chips (or related doodlings, splashings and wailings, as they're otherwise known), get 'em while they're hot, they're lovely!
In the beginnin thur wis nuhain, then thur wis suhain...
[In the end, looks like I’ll be posting a few bloggings over the next day or two, three, four…one, two, one two, mic check, mic check…they’re all kinda interrelated. I wrote this one when I registered the domain(s) for unco, then just kinda kept writing, for three weeks or so.  With a pen, connected directly, via the fine motor control required, to areas of the brain not accessed when typing on a lit screen.
It’s also where mine has root epileptiforms lurkIng.  It can get a bit harum scarum, especially when there have been, are, bursts restricting or outside of focal awareness.  Then looking back at strange scrawls across the page, where words were assumed would appear, remain, written with intent, is a little disturbing, upsetting.
But they are there amidst, framed by, other perfectly legible and understood words, and the trains of thought, lost in irregular electrical discharges, can be rejoined. Â Like the journey could only be completed by changing at a particularly surreal looking station. Â And it always gets completed, even if it connects to a much wider travel itinerary, a destination in it is reached, regardless.
In many ways its been an element of other recent prodigious output, creatively and professionally.  But, jings, to write as much as I’ll be posting in short measure, would take some doing.  And now there’s typing, so much typing…tap, tap, tap it in, just a little tap, tap, taperoo…jeez, how did you get in here Sandler?
I came back to this cairry-oan as a means of instilling a bit of self-discipline around writing.  I only recently became aware that automatic writing, of the kind I’ve favoured throughout, now long ago, young adult into this ‘grown-up’ life, kicked off, as so much is, by precocious early teenage discovery of and engagement with the beat writers, by way of romantic vernal impulses and aw that tae, is a common feature of at least one way in which I am neurodivergent.
What I call ‘automatic writing’ isn’t exactly beat style ‘stream of consciousness’ but its in the vicinity.  Gimme a topic, let me read and absorb some of the writings on or around it, distil the ideas and point me at a pen.
Choosing what to do that with, finding a place for it, here, is part of a bigger project for me.  Way back, pre and post-first-degree (yeah there’s a few, graduate and post-graduate, turns out academia, in some areas, were, is, has been one of my ‘special interests’, go figure!) graduation, from the School of Scottish Studies, with honours in Scottish Ethnology (thats cultural anthropology for Scottishness, if you must know) and Scottish Literature, I’d started compiling some more creative writings, on and around my study focus, I’d had for a few years, into, yup, a novel goddamit!
The editing process, making it all what I thought would be expected, from what it was and was about, turns out, in hindsight and post diagnosis of at least two types of neurodivergence, to have been a particularly impactful kind of masking. Â Not only was it ultimately disabling (oh, some time I may list the ways, a shell, discarded, for someone else to use) but it also led to all sorts of other exposing and impactful othering, in all other sorts of odd areas in my life, my lived experience.
It was also rooted in self-recriminatory, self-sabotage, setting myself up to fail, by the standards of editing for a neurotypical world.  I’d set out to write a story, based in folk-tales learned in my granny’s kitchen.
I also wanted it to describe both a pantheon of archetypes, given form and understanding in my own brain via Emily Lyle’s ‘god-pack’(learned directly from the great scholar, professor, balladeer, aided and abetted by ‘Archaic Cosmos: Polarity, Space and Time’, a life changing read if it hits yer noggin right; sadly difficult to find beyond campus’ and I won’t sully its content with links to sites, colonies of tech empire, responsible for widespread death, or at least a need for life support, of the independent bookshop - and in some regards independent traders generally - you know who you are, whose fault it is, with your relentlessness, cowboy hat and cock rocket!) and an analogy of Jungian psycho-dynamic analyses of individual mind.
They, gods in the land, legends and folkways, folk they were integral to, also had to be given collective expression through a cultural anthropological lens, in many ways also ethnographic, turned on the whole of what might be called Scottish culture and literature and its place in wider European and Western culture generally, as well as how that fit into an even wider world culture - everything, ever, is interconnected, isn’t it?  But most of all, it had to be a good story.
It was all so easy when I just wrote, not so much when I edited.  So now, nearly thirty years, and at least five lost or destroyed, digitally and in analogue form, almost ‘complete’ manuscripts, all the dramas and catastrophising, around them and the circumstances leading to their demise, all the vowing to give it up, all the starting again anyway, later, I find myself far more aware of the whys, at least neurologically speaking (neurologically speaking, we all wear masks, right Jim?) and starting again anyway.  With much less editing, at least for a neurotypical world.  It can suck it up.
If you swing by my Patreon, you’ll get an inkling of how it’s shaping up, in novel and graphic novel (or comic book, if you fancy, and I sometimes do) forms.  Maybe you can pitch in, or buy me a coffee if you like the cut of its jib.]