Association for Scottish Literature

@asls.org.uk

Educational charity promoting the reading, writing, teaching & study of Scotland's literature & languages, past & present.

https://asls.org.uk

@ncdominie.bsky.social Oct 10, 2026, 5:04 PMReposted by @asls.org.uk

I've just had cause to reread the darkly comic bit in Orkneyinga Saga where Rognvald's dubiously pious pilgrimage captures a treasure dromund and sets it on fire as per SOP. As they're watching it burn to the waterline, it occurs to them that they should maybe have searched it for treasure _first_.

@chriscrowing.bsky.social Oct 10, 2026, 1:53 PMReposted by @asls.org.uk

...coming along to our non-con launch event at Waterstones, Sauchiehall Street.
www.waterstones.com/events/celeb...

@lenniesaurus.bsky.social Oct 10, 2026, 4:22 PMReposted by @asls.org.uk

Just found out we only have a handful of tickets left for our show at the Hackney Empire, can't thank everyone enough for their support. It's the biggest audience I've performed in front of so the nerves are out in force, but I am ready to get out there.

www.hackneyempire.co.uk/events/the-w...

@lordwoolamaloo.bsky.social Oct 10, 2026, 3:27 PMReposted by @asls.org.uk

And the statue of Hugh, inspecting a fossil specimen, in the National Museum of Scotland, caught here in light from that great, Victorian glass roof, and slanting shadows flic.kr/p/aGs2jv

@asls.org.uk Oct 10, 2026, 3:13 PM

Very few people hate books more than senior executives in international publishing houses, in my experience … way back when I worked for one, they decided to set their publishing house on fire because of CD-ROMs, but it’s the same basic brainrot in operation, I think

@asls.org.uk Oct 10, 2026, 3:05 PM

Leave, leave your well-loved nest,
Late swallow, and fly away.
Here is no rest
For hollowing heart and wearying wing…

—Edwin Muir, “The Late Swallow”
first published in One Foot in Eden (Faber, 1956)
#poem #poetry #WorldMigratoryBirdDay
www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/late-sw...

@asls.org.uk Oct 10, 2026, 3:05 PM

I want answers, but there are only the wild geese
Calling, high in the almost-dark, bearing south,
And me, stopped short, clutching a bag of groceries
On the doorstep of my not-quite home…

—Susan Mansfield, “Bearing South”
from THE ROOFTOP BUSKER (ASL, 2015)
#poetry #poem #WorldMigratoryBirdDay

Susan Mansfield
BEARING SOUTH

I want answers, but there are only the wild geese
Calling, high in the almost-dark, bearing south,
And me, stopped short, clutching a bag of groceries
On the doorstep of my not-quite home.
I feel the calm of their inner compass
And wonder if this is what we mean by certainty,
A deft arrowhead of wingbeats
In tune with the turning wind, the changing light,
A geography in their feathery breasts
Older than the names of continents.
A journey without thought of parting or arrival,
Only the press of forward motion,
The urgency and risk of it all,
A brief touch-down in stubble fields, then on,
The pulse of fellow flyers in the slipstream
And the clear voices calling in the dark:
I am here, I am alive,
I am here, I am alive.

@lostglasgow.bsky.social Oct 10, 2026, 2:59 PMReposted by @asls.org.uk

C4, tonight, 10pm, a first, I think, TV outing for Yorgos Lanthimos's adaptation of Alasdair Gray's Poor Things.

@asls.org.uk Oct 10, 2026, 2:33 PM

O whence the leaves
scuttering down Easter Road,
sycamore and rowan
desperate as refugees,
crowding against the wheels of street-side dumpsters…

—Kathleen Jamie, “Autumn”
from THE BONNIEST COMPANIE (Picador, 2015)
#BookWormSat #poem #poetry
www.panmacmillan.com/authors/kath...

Autumn
by Kathleen Jamie

O whence the leaves
scuttering down Easter Road,
sycamore and rowan
desperate as refugees,
crowding against the wheels of street-side dumpsters
– common leaves
with two-three crisp packets, like gaudy imposters
fleeing by outside the corner-shop
convenient for milk and pornography …

see the leaves hurry, Shy but Dirty –
past the Chinese nail-bar,
Mr Greg’s Tatoos –
they’re here, look:
blown into your stair
with the pizza delivery leaflets …
O whither the leaves?

@noahdidny.bsky.social Oct 10, 2026, 2:20 PMReposted by @asls.org.uk

Robert Carruthers was the Inverness editor who helped bring Miller to public attention in 1829. Carruthers encouraged Miller's literary development ...Their relationship is a fine example of how regional newspapers could help nurture major literary careers in nineteenth-century Scotland.

@asls.org.uk Oct 10, 2026, 1:58 PM

“The gentle topography and rich farmland of the Black Isle is underlain by Old Red Sandstone rocks of the Devonian ‘age of fishes’, around 416 million to 358 million years ago”

— @scottishgeology.bsky.social on the Black isle & the Hugh Miller Museum
www.scottishgeologytrust.org/geology/51-b...

Section of nodule bearing strata (1metre thick): Miller split these nodules open to find many contained fossilised fish remains.
© Bob Davidson

A series of layered rocks, mixtures of white, grey, blue, blue-grey, and small patches of purplish-red, with a tumble of orange and rust-brown pebbles beside them. All the stones are glossy with moisture.

@asls.org.uk Oct 10, 2026, 1:41 PM

“𝘔𝘺 𝘚𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘰𝘭𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘚𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘰𝘭𝘮𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘴 is […] a rare and remarkably insightful book. It is a book in which boyhood is examined and displayed with all the attention Miller devoted to his geological specimens”

—David Alston: Hugh Miller & the Crucible of Childhood
#C19
www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2023/07/hugh...

@asls.org.uk Oct 10, 2026, 1:41 PM

…the tar which used to boil in it to the heat, like resin in a fagot of moss-fir, was as strange a mixture as ever yet bubbled in witches’ caldron—blood of pterodactyle & grease of ichthyosaur…

—Hugh Miller, MY SCHOOLS & SCHOOLMASTERS (1854) – also on @gutenberg.org
#C19
gutenberg.org/ebooks/30737

Immediately beyond the granitic gneiss of the hill there is a subaqueous deposit of the Lias formation, never yet explored by geologist, because never yet laid bare by the ebb; though every heavier storm from the sea tells of its existence, by tossing ashore fragments of its dark bituminous shale. I soon ascertained that the shale is so largely charged with inflammable matter as to burn with a strong flame, as if steeped in tar or oil, and that I could repeat with it the common experiment of producing gas by means of a tobacco-pipe luted with clay. And, having read in Shakspere of a fuel termed "sea-coal," and unaware at the time that the poet merely meant coal brought to London by sea, I inferred that the inflammable shale cast up from the depths of the Firth by the waves could not be other than the veritable "sea-coal" which figured in the reminiscences of Dame Quickly; and so, assisted by Finlay, who shared in the interest which I felt in the substance, as at once classical and an original discovery, I used to collect it in large quantities and convert it into smoky and troubled fires, that ever filled our cavern with a horrible stench, and scented all the shore. Though unaware of the fact at the time, it owed its inflammability, not to vegetable, but to animal substance; the tar which used to boil in it to the heat, like resin in a fagot of moss-fir, was as strange a mixture as ever yet bubbled in witches' caldron—blood of pterodactyle and grease of ichthyosaur—eye of belemnite and hood of nautilus; and we learned to delight in its very smell, all oppressive as that was, as something wild, strange, and inexplicable. Once or twice I seemed on the eve of a discovery: in splitting the masses, I occasionally saw what appeared to be fragments of shells embedded in its substance; and at least once I laid open a mysterious-looking scroll or volute, existing on the dark surface as a cream-coloured film; but though these organisms raised a temporary wonder …

@asls.org.uk Oct 10, 2026, 1:41 PM

I picked up a nodular mass of blue limestone, and laid it open by a stroke of the hammer. Wonderful to relate, it contained inside a beautifully finished piece of sculpture…

—Hugh Miller, THE OLD RED SANDSTONE (1841)
available as a free ebook on @gutenberg.org
#C19
gutenberg.org/ebooks/63923

In the course of the first day's employment, I picked up a nodular mass of blue limestone, and laid it open by a stroke of the hammer. Wonderful to relate, it contained inside a beautifully finished piece of sculpture—one of the volutes apparently of an Ionic capital; and not the far-famed walnut of the fairy tale, had I broken the shell and found the little dog lying within, could have surprised me more. Was there another such curiosity in the whole world? I broke open a few other nodules of similar appearance,—for they lay pretty thickly on the shore,—and found that there might. In one of these there were what seemed to be the scales of fishes, and the impressions of a few minute bivalves, prettily striated; in the centre of another there was actually a piece of decayed wood. Of all Nature's riddles these seemed to me to be at once the most interesting, and the most difficult to expound. I treasured them carefully up, and was told by one of the workmen to whom I showed them, that there was a part of the shore about two miles farther to the west, where curiously shaped stones, somewhat like the heads of boarding-pikes, were occasionally picked up; and that in his father's days the country people called them thunderbolts, and deemed them of sovereign efficacy in curing bewitched cattle. Our employer, on quitting the quarry for the building on which we were to be engaged, gave all the workmen a half-holiday. I employed it in visiting the place where the thunderbolts had fallen so thickly, and found it a richer scene of wonder than I could have fancied in even my dreams.

@asls.org.uk Oct 10, 2026, 1:41 PM

Fossil hunter, folklorist, evangelist, stonemason, editor, social justice campaigner, & geologist, Hugh Miller (1802–1856) – born #OTD, 10 Oct – should be remembered in the company of Carlyle, Ruskin, Matthew Arnold & JS Mill as one of the leading moral & social thinkers of the #C19th

A 🎂🧵

Faded 19th-century sepia photograph of Hugh Miller. He is standing, dressed in workman's overalls, his shirt-sleeves rolled up. He has bushy hair and large sideburns, and his left elbow is propped up on a carved gravestone. His right hand rests on a large stonemason's maul, and he holds a chisel in his left hand.

@asls.org.uk Oct 10, 2026, 12:39 PM

Maybe mark the occasion with a wee donation to Mary’s Meals, if you’re feeling well-fed & generous …
www.marysmeals.org.uk/campaigns/wo...

@asls.org.uk Oct 10, 2026, 12:39 PM

Captain of oats, braw brose, fine gruel,
you are thi Scotsman’s constant fuel
fae New Year’s Dey till end o Yule
(we don’t do Simmer)…

—WN Herbert, “TO PORRIDGE”

Happy #WorldPorridgeDay to all who celebrate! 🥣
#poem #poetry #porridge
poetryinternationalweb.org/pi/site/poem...

Ye’re like a clood-occludit sun
that casts grey licht oan ivrywun;
thi siller ash on grieshoch; grun
ablow thi slush
that derns oat-germs that sune will wun
thru Winter’s crush.

Tho Doctir Johnson caaed ye food
fur foals – mair fulmar him – ye’ve plooed
thru Scotia’s lard-imprisoned bluid
and freed oor veins:
dae mealie puddins dae us good?
Great Oat, explain!

Hoo dae we luve ye? Some wi cream,
wi hinny, spice or jeely reamed,
while Calvin’s crew hae sauty dreams
o fare of auld,
powred in a draaer fur bothy teams
tae slice oot cauld.

‘Auld claes an parritch’ gaes thi creh
wance we hae drunk thi Daft Deys dreh
and neath a sober, saft grey skeh
we view thi year –
we’re nae whit bettir, but we’ll treh
wi sic guid gear!

Editor's Note: Fushion—wholesomeness, strength; slutz—a leap in skating; sark—shirt; grieshoch—red-hot embers; dern–hide.

@asls.org.uk Oct 10, 2026, 9:41 AM

“We are lucky to have a form that will tell us… what the anything & the everything of living in a time of Trump & a time of Brexit are, & in a form… laced with the possibility of transformation”

—Listen to Ali Smith’s @goldsmithsprize.bsky.social lecture from 2017
💙📚
shows.acast.com/thebackhalf/...

@asls.org.uk Oct 10, 2026, 9:41 AM

AUTUMN, by Ali Smith (2016)

“Autumn 2016… the UK is in pieces, divided by a historic once-in-a-generation summer. Love is won, love is lost. Hope is hand in hand with hopelessness… Here is time, ever-changing, ever cyclical. Here comes Autumn”
#BookWormSat #Booksky
www.penguin.co.uk/books/285171...

@linanderson.bsky.social Oct 10, 2026, 9:25 AMReposted by @asls.org.uk

★★★★★ REVIEW - TORCH - 'Truly great read. A really great series with a really great protagonist. https://bit.ly/43RYTtd #Mystery #Thriller #LinAnderson #CSI #Edinburgh #BloodyScotland #KU

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