Alasdair Gray&#8217;s new book, Independence: An Argument for Home Rule, pragmatically yet problematically emphasises Scotland&#8217;s polity over Scottish identity in the bid for independence 
 
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On the night of the USA’s 2008 presidential election, I bunkered in my carrel in Bucknell University’s Bertrand Library. It was the best shelter I had from the inconclusive battle cries lobbed on the quad outside: students in support of then-Senator Barack Obama squared against students rallying for Republican Senator John McCain. Change, both sides claimed, was imminent; this election, both camps asserted, was a pivotal moment in American history. From the safety of my carrel, I followed the returns online and panicked: what if this election isn’t the dawn of change but another hour in the long day of the status quo? I opened a new tab in my web browser and booked my flight away from American uncertainty. 
I resolved on Scotland, that myth-steeped and rugged land of my own ancestors, that cradle of philosophy and literature. I would fly out after the semester ended and determine my fate, then, when I set foot on Scottish soil. Scotland would be — for the duration of at least two weeks — my site of intellectual and spiritual refuge. 
My return to the United States was too hopeful by half; a half decade of the Obama Administration’s drone wars and feeble domestic policy are stark indicators that the 2008 election was not the epoch-shifting moment prophesied by his campaign. Regardless of the outcome, the same cannot be said for the 18 September 2014 referendum on Scottish independence, which will affirm Scotland’s identity — as an independent nationstate or a constituent nation in the United Kingdom — for the foreseeable future. 
As an avid reader of independence-minded Scots writers including Robert Burns, Catherine Carswell, Hugh MacDiarmid, and Alasdair Gray, I sympathise with the #YesScotland cause. But, as Gray is quick to remind the readers of his latest polemic Independence: An Argument for Home Rule (Edinburgh, Scotland: Canongate, 2014), this isn’t my vote. “This book,” Gray pronounces, “is written for Scots, by whom I mean anyone in Scotland who will vote in the September referendum to make Scotland a more or less independent nation.” The broader discussion of global Scots culture is of no import here, nor are the millions who self-identify as Scot, despite the accidents of geography, temporality and birth that keep us from our ancestral homeland. Gray remarks that he “will not waste time by discussing Scottish identity, as vague a ghost as the identity of any other millions of people.” 
This tactic is wise, yet ideologically fraught. Gray abandons the political expedient of Scottish identity so as to prioritise the question of how a hypothetical, neutral Scottish polity would operate in opposition to the Orwellian modus operandi of Barack Obama’s America and David Cameron’s Great Britain. Indeed, Gray’s disapproval of the Anglo-American military-industrial complex recurs throughout this slender volume. 
In the first chapter, Gray elegantly stages this confrontation in the confined space of his doctor’s waiting room, where he and the waiting room’s magazines serve as proxies for Scotland and Britain respectively. Gray cringes at the militaristic implications of adverts and job postings in these magazines: “That is how Big Brother now tells smart youngsters: ‘WAR IS PEACE! JOIN US! THE MONEY’S GOOD!” Because we are inured to these subtexts, Gray concludes that the current generation is “a docile lot,” unaware of the human costs of the military-industrial complex. Gray concludes that an independent Scotland is “[o]n my horizon the ray of hope” against the Anglo-American war machines. 
Independence progresses from this waiting-room vignette through a “a brief history in twelve brisk verses” of Britain’s military conquests, before evaluating a legion of explanations for Scotland’s difference from England: geography, intellectual history, political corruption, British bureaucracy and the rejection of prominent Scots (i.e., Sir Sean Connery and Burns expert Elspeth King) from Scottish arts advocacy. Gray’s Independence is a time capsule of Scottish grievances, a scant collection suggesting a more extensive pattern of wrongs. 
However, this volume reaches its emotional apex not in Gray’s glosses of Scottish woes, but in an open letter to Paddington Station’s unknown soldier. This letter stands as a civilian counterpart to Wilfred Owen’s essential Great War poem Dulce Et Decorum Est. Bagpipe music stirs Gray to an epiphany during a remembrance service: “the men named on the monument had been fooled into thinking they were fighting for a better Britain, while those who had died in World War II had certainly fought a wicked system of government.” Such manipulation of soldiers is a manipulation of the electorate. Gray’s forlorn letter to the unknown soldier is a tacit promise that a neutral, liberated Scotland will oppose any injustice. 
Gray readily avows his utopian agenda, which he packages in a wild yet elegant collision of personal essay, lyric poem, national biography, revisionist history, letters, and party platforms. These different façades represent Gray’s strategy for resolving the nascent Scottish nation’s identity crisis: “The problem of every nation,” Gray concludes, “is being governed by folk with a completely different perspective — a different view of life — from those who elect them.” The book’s 13 sections, multiple subgenres, and assimilated voices practice this sensibility. Yet, this experimentation only represents the many guises of Scotland’s electorate, not the visage of a polity. 
So, what is the political face of Gray’s utopian Scotland, this creature in potentia? Gray’s vision is a rough beast left unformed as the country slouches toward the referendum. We cannot acquit Gray for this oversight: Scottish nationalist writings commonly articulate programs for expanding Scots’ influence at home and abroad, as when MacDiarmid advocated for “a rising tide of Scottish national consciousness” through “a thorough-going reconcentration, in our schools and universities and elsewhere, of Scottish literature.” The consequence is that Independence re-deploys the empty rhetoric of party banter: it is a glittering hoard of hoped-for results, without the treasure map of policy. 
Gray admits that he, “a semi-alcoholic, octogenarian invalid[,] was not the kind of politican Scotland needed,” and he advocates for young politicians with “imaginative, independent minds.” Gray does not identify any of these “brave minds,” leaving Scots with First Minister Alex Salmond’s problem-riddled plans for Scotland’s financial system, its stakes in North Sea oil and national security. These gaps shift the spotlight to the polemic’s further inconsistences. Exemplifying this is Gray’s disavowal of Sir Walter Scott’s invented stereotype, “that most Scots were mountaineers who wore tartan plaids” — even as Independence proposes a rigidly masculine history of Scotland that celebrates its great men. With the notable exception of novelist Naomi Mitchison and a glancing reference to his own wife, Gray — like America’s John Adams — has forgotten the women, an unwitting reenactment of Sir Walter at his most misogynistic. 
Gray’s Scotland is defined by its potential, by its difference from America and England. It’s this strange otherness that first drew me to Scotland in 2008, and that entices me still. Like Gray, I too believe in the possibilities still buried in the Scottish earth. But neither this optimism nor Gray’s utopian vision resolves the central question at stake in the referendum: what is Scotland’s identity? The referendum is the first premise in that answer.
<pre>Image from: http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4517/new_blow_to_scottish_independence_bid_as_catalan_leader_admits_secession_from_spain_could_mean_eu_exclusion</pre>

The Scottish Question: #YesScotland or #YesUnion?

Reflections on the Time War, Doctor Who at 50, and Why the Doctor Will Survive 
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In the crucible of the Time War, when the Gallifreyan city of Arcadia fell to the Daleks, the Time Lord known as the Doctor lands his TARDIS in a firestorm to announce his intention of ending the centuries-long conflagration. The TARDIS materializes in its iconic police box shape, startling a Gallifreyan soldier retreating from the Daleks. The Doctor (John Hurt) steps from the TARDIS, his shadow projected onto a wall by the flames ravaging Arcadia. In his gravelly baritone, the Doctor says, “Soldier, I’m going to need your gun.” As the Daleks massacre Gallifreyan civilians en masse, the Doctor blasts a message into the concrete wall: “No more.” Their sensors detecting the Doctor, the Daleks halt and shift course, to convene on the Doctor’s location. The Daleks advance and chant—“The Doctor is detected! Seek! Locate! Destroy!”—moments before the TARDIS hurtles through a wall and twirls, rips, through the advancing Daleks. 
This scene from Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary special, which aired on 23 November 2013, finally dramatizes a mysterious plotline from Russell T Davies’s 2005 re-launch of the series: the Time War. In the Doctor Who mythos, the Doctor shoulders the devastating burden of ending this war (which threatened to shred the universe itself to tatters) by expunging the combatants (the Daleks and the Time Lords) alike from the fabric of reality. The lingering trauma of this choice has haunted each of the Doctor’s regenerations in the revived Doctor Who: Christopher Eccleston’s 9th Doctor—a regeneration forged in the Time War’s flames—smoldered as he attempted to bury the coals of war in his memory, while David Tennant’s and Matt Smith’s Doctors temper their regret with (for Tennant’s 10th) a fawning fascination with humanity and (for Smith’s 11th) a penchant for zanily gesturing whilst speaking at a breakneck rate. The 50th anniversary pits Tennant’s and Smith’s Doctors against Hurt’s War Doctor, the regeneration held responsible for the genocidal acts that finished the Time War. 
In the Whoniverse, as Doctor Who fandom has termed the show’s in-story history, the events of the Time War were allegedly “time locked,” meaning that the war’s history remains forever sealed; as such, even the Doctor and his TARDIS could not re-enter the war’s timeline. But the series has broached the Time War before, most notably during Tennant’s tenure as the Doctor. The 2008 episode “The Stolen Earth” features a Dalek who penetrated the time-locked events and subsequently went insane, while Tennant’s two-episode swansong (2009-2010’s “The End of Time”) featured the Time Lords breaching the time lock to re-integrate war-torn Gallifrey in the universe, at the significant cost of hauling the Daleks back with them. 
So, it was inevitable that show-runner and head writer Steven Moffat would risk encountering those twin specters of every franchise—melodramatic solemnity and nostalgic kitsch—by introducing viewers to the Time War in a global simulcast. After all, John Hurt’s War Doctor is a brusque and wry tragic hero, a warrior struggling to save his wit, his soul, and his sensibility in the face of an impossible decision. Likewise, the special featured numerous salutes to the show’s fifty-year run, hazarding a saccharine display of nostalgia. Here are several of the episode’s Easter eggs: the episode’s title sequence is the rippling vortex from the first 1963 series with William Hartnell as the Doctor, immediately followed by the first episode’s opening frames in black and white; the episode’s three Doctors occasionally utter their predecessors’ catchphrases, such as 3rd Doctor Jon Pertwee’s famous “Reverse the polarity”; Tom Baker, the 4th Doctor, has a cameo opposite Smith’s Doctor; and the special concludes with a tableau featuring all the Doctors, including the War Doctor. 
But it’s the somberness of Hurt’s Doctor, opposite the spunky demeanors of Tennant and Smith’s Doctors, that balance this celebration on the ledge that Doctor Who has always trod: that perilous ridge between bleak drama and garish camp. This is where the Daily Mail’s Jim Shelley gets it wrong, in a spasmodic and bitter review that misreads Doctor Who as if the programme sought the intensity of, say, period drama Downton Abbey or crime thrillers like Luther and Broadchurch. Shelley pans the special as “neither scary nor funny enough,” “far too zany,” and “delusional”—while praising only the wisdom that Hurt brought to the role. 
Shelley’s review smacks of high seriousness, a snobbish concept lifted from eminent Victorian Matthew Arnold’s The Study of Poetry and anachronistically plopped into the twenty-first century. This high seriousness blinds Shelley to what has made Doctor Who thrive for five decades: the belief that seriousness and fun need one another. Part of Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary celebrations, the one-off movie An Adventure in Time and Space dramatizes this melding of somberness and soul in the programme’s dawn. In rehearsing the pilot episode, William Hartnell (David Bradley) grills Verity Lambert (Jessica Raine) about when the TARDIS set will arrive. Hartnell says, 
&#8220;I need time to plot out the buttons, you see. […] I need to know what they all do. What if I press something to open the doors, and then the next week I use it to blow us all up? […] The children will spot it, you see, if we try and fudge it.&#8221; 
Hartnell set a trend that the show would follow: Doctor Who is fun, but a fun bound by its own conventions. And this is what makes the show thrive—serious production values that embrace the Whoniverse’s lead, whether a regeneration should lead to the dour demeanor of a Hartnell or a Hurt, or the campiness of Tom Baker’s 15-foot-long scarf or Colin Baker’s Technicolor plaid blazer or Smith’s penchant for donning any fez he encounters. 
It was never Daleks nor Time Lords nor Time Wars alone that launched Doctor Who on its fifty-year voyage, but the show’s embrace of its protagonist’s morality, its narrative conventions, and—most importantly—fun for the audience. If the Doctor remains a man who can oscillate between manic energy, the otherworldly reality of the Whoniverse, and his serious promise to be “never cowardly or cruel,” Doctor Who will carry us through time and space for decades more.
<pre>Image from: <a href="http://www.bbcamerica.com/doctor-who/guide/50th-specials/">http://www.bbcamerica.com/doctor-who/guide/50th-specials/</a></pre>

Gallifrey Falls No More: A Letter from the Time War

The Big Apple proves a palimpsest of history and literary culture, haunted by ghosts of its past and populated by the vibrancy of the present 
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I had once vowed to never be a writer who waxes poetic about New York City, or who recounts travel to the Big Apple as if its crammed streets and its subway system’s rank exhaust were more pastoral than so many lines of Wordsworth. Perhaps, there is a spark of jealousy or envy to my oath. New York writers, after all, take their city in their stride. One can traverse the poised and melodramatic New York of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence or Henry James’Washington Square, the same New York that devolves into the soap-operatic entanglements of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Other writers chart the city as an elaborate metaphor; I think, here, of Paul Auster, whose New York is the stuff of potboilers, its congested streets and alleys as inscrutable as noir novels’ suspects. 
Literary as they are, I have never inhabited these fictional, alternative New Yorks. I had arrived in New York for a weekend in early January to meet with a novelists’ group that I had founded with several of my peers from the MFA program at Rutgers-Newark. The BoltBus from Washington unloaded us, without a shred of pomp, at the Sbarro on the corner of 7th Avenue and 33rd Street. Outside, the air was sweet, heavy with Sbarro’s smell of baking dough—reminiscent of both homey comforts and hectic kitchens. I was able to snatch my suitcase from the bus’s cargo hold, before a mob of exhausted passengers grabbled around me. I escaped, wheeled my suitcase behind me, and jogged to the intersection. 
I was standing a stone’s toss from Penn Station, Madison Square Gardens, and a vacant building advertising “Prime Retail Space on One of Manhattan’s Busiest Corners.” Several years ago, that space housed a multi-level Borders, until that bookstore chain collapsed from. . . . Choose your own natural disaster: e-books, Barnes &amp; Noble, YouTube, LOLcats. I had purchased Christmas presents at that Borders during December 2010, when the company’s death throes slashed prices. A pall descended on me, as my gaze drifted from the once-Borders, to the Madison Square Gardens, to Penn Station. I thought of trains, rambling rides back to the Newark of my MFA years, or to my native Pennsylvania. I studied the crowded stairwell that descended into the Hades-hot furnace of Penn Station: a portal to my previous lives. I was being haunted by my own ghosts. 
This is the city’s function: a spiritual fusion that collides particles of identity into new compounds. My unintended rendezvous with history at the corner of 7th Avenue and 33rd Street charted past onto present—but who else saw this compression of timelines? I trudged away to Union Square, passing en route many incarcerated in traumatic encounters with their histories: a girl who asked her mother why the pretty dress wasn’t in the store window anymore; a man who secreted himself in a phone booth’s gutted carapace and, after snorting something off the booth’s shelf, muttered he needed more. He needed more. 
I left them to their devices (or, more aptly, to my literary ones). New York does not tell you, “Writers are terrible voyeurs, and Patrick, the worst of the lot: feigning decorum by lowering his head and soldiering on, but really leeching content from these soliloquies.” But isn’t this New York? “Hidden identities everywhere,” as Porochista Khakpour writes. 
The next morning I was photographing the lion statues outside the New York Public Library until security opened the doors, welcoming the public. Two facsimiles of the lions, built from Legos, stood sentry inside the library’s doors and opposed the Christmas tree. I stroked the lions’ snouts, and then toured the marble corridors. Even the library’s water fountains were lions, fiercely gilded and salivating crystalline drinking water at the turn of a knob. I passed tourists giggling at the fountains as I navigated my way to the main reading room. There, I passed through an antechamber and into the grand hall, with vaulted ceilings and rows of writing tables. I set up my laptop and worked at a novella-in-progress. A security guard, with hands clasped behind his back, moseyed through the aisles and hissed to patrons: put that camera away, no phone calls, mute that laptop, no recording devices. (In noiseless retaliation I snapped a self-portrait with my MacBook’s camera.) The security guard policing the silence of our public privacy: this, too, was New York. 
After a few hours of writing, I packed my things. When I returned to the foyer, workers were unspooling garlands from the Christmas tree. Epiphany had ended, marking a return to ordinary time, the season when, as New York poet Marie Howe writes, “what happened did not occur in public view.” 
But those obscured happenings—what the city compresses into each person’s mind—become visible in the wares of New York’s bookstores. The thriving independent booksellers (including The Strand, Housing Works, and McNally Jackson) host literary events most nights of the week, often celebrating the poets, essayists, and fiction writers invisible to the bestseller lists—but critical to our literary imagination. After my writing stint in the library and literary shoptalk over coffee with a friend, I attended a reading by George Saunders and Deborah Eisenberg at The Strand. To a standing-room-only crowd, these celebrated short story writers shared from their work and discussed how the short story achieves its effect through compressing information so that, concentrated, we might comprehend the piece. 
I left The Strand and stepped out to a rainy night, and I thought ahead to my novelists’ meeting the next day. Colliding in mind were the lives I had glimpsed in New York, smashing against Saunders’ and Eisenberg’s preference for the short story. I thought of E.B. White, who claimed that New York “is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines.” Compression, consolidation, spiritual fusion: poetry, short stories, and New York City shared these compositional techniques. So, avoid the tourist traps, expensive tours, and pricey restaurants: these are not the city. New York exists only in the hidden identities inhabiting its streets, its libraries, its bookstores, and every isolated cranny.
<pre>Image from: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/save-new-york-public-library-article-1.1103518</pre>

Patrick Thomas Henry