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On the occasion of the publication of the Contemporary Scottish Urban Literature CJES Special Issue, this interview to Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, one of the last he gave, aims to celebrate Gray’s work and to emphasise his role as a crucial influence for the contemporary Scottish writers whose work features in this special issue. In a very personal manner, Gray strings together reflections on contemporary politics, discusses the role of the local and the national in his work and addresses questions on the construction of his male characters in a discourse which ultimately highlights the determining role of Gray’s socio-political and cultural environment plays his art. Moreover, Gray talks about the artists he was exposed to as a kid and the manner in which these were influential. Considering its wide scope, this interview may serve as a guide to better understand Gray’s work, the reasons why he merges fantasy and reality  in his novels and short stories, and the socio-political breeding ground of his socialist and civic nationalist political agenda.  

Alasdair Gray's writing, and in particular his great novel Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981), is often read as a paradigm of postmodern practice. This study challenges that view by presenting an analysis that is at once more conventional and more strongly radical. By reading Gray in his cultural and intellectual context, and by placing him within the tradition of a Scottish history of ideas that has been largely neglected in contemporary critical writing, Gavin Miller re-opens contact between this highly individualistic artist and those Scottish and European philosophers and psychologists who helped shape his literary vision of personal and national identity. Scottish social anthropology and psychiatry (including the work of W. Robertson Smith, J.G. Frazer and R.D. Laing) can be seen as formative influences on Gray's anti-essentialist vision of Scotland as a mosaic of communities, and of our social need for recognition, acknowledgement and the common life.

Background Provenance is a critical ingredient for establishing trust of published scientific content. This is true whether we are considering a data set, a computational workflow, a peer-reviewed publication or a simple scientific claim with supportive evidence. Existing vocabularies such as Dublin Core Terms (DC Terms) and the W3C Provenance Ontology (PROV-O) are domain-independent and general-purpose and they allow and encourage for extensions to cover more specific needs. In particular, to track authoring and versioning information of web resources, PROV-O provides a basic methodology but not any specific classes and properties for identifying or distinguishing between the various roles assumed by agents manipulating digital artifacts, such as author, contributor and curator. Results We present the Provenance, Authoring and Versioning ontology (PAV, namespace http://purl.org/pav/ ): a lightweight ontology for capturing “just enough” descriptions essential for tracking the provenance, authoring and versioning of web resources. We argue that such descriptions are essential for digital scientific content. PAV distinguishes between contributors, authors and curators of content and creators of representations in addition to the provenance of originating resources that have been accessed, transformed and consumed. We explore five projects (and communities) that have adopted PAV illustrating their usage through concrete examples. Moreover, we present mappings that show how PAV extends the W3C PROV-O ontology to support broader interoperability. Method The initial design of the PAV ontology was driven by requirements from the AlzSWAN project with further requirements incorporated later from other projects detailed in this paper. The authors strived to keep PAV lightweight and compact by including only those terms that have demonstrated to be pragmatically useful in existing applications, and by recommending terms from existing ontologies when plausible. Discussion We analyze and compare PAV with related approaches, namely Provenance Vocabulary (PRV), DC Terms and BIBFRAME. We identify similarities and analyze differences between those vocabularies and PAV, outlining strengths and weaknesses of our proposed model. We specify SKOS mappings that align PAV with DC Terms. We conclude the paper with general remarks on the applicability of PAV.

The popular, especially British, imaginary casts Scotland as a drunken nation, just as Thatcherite political discourse presents Scotland as welfare-addicted at an individual and national level, apparently drunk on English money. In this article, I argue that Scottish literary culture has written back through a 'moderated' alcohol dependency, wherein alcohol provides emergency psychotherapy for a neoliberal professional class. I examine four novels featuring alcohol-dependent focalisers which date from the mid-1980s through to peak British alcohol consumption in 2004, namely Alasdair Gray's 1982, Janine (1984), Ron Butlin's The Sound of My Voice (1987), Janice Galloway's The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1989) and A. L. Kennedy's Paradise (2004). All of these texts look past the stereotypical immiseration of unemployed men in urban peripheral housing estates and towards a different constituency of alcohol addicts: qualified, productive, responsibilised, and self-modulating. In so doing, the works renegotiate physical, economic and constitutional dependency in Britain. But in a larger frame, they establish alcohol toxicomania in the context: of the psychopathological economy - in which productivity can only be sustained through the palliation of neoliberalism's mental health crises - and in late capitalism's reordering of social relations, or what Bernard Stiegler calls a 'liquidation of relations of fidelity'.

Joe Murray's \"A Short Tale of Woe!\" (2002) appears to take place in Hell, or some similarly Kafkaesque setting, and concerns the plight of a poor soul who has just been assigned the task of emptying the River Clyde with a bucket whose bottom has rusted through. When he complains that the job will be impossible, an anonymous hand snatches back the bucket and pushes a pile of papers toward him: The Book of Prefaces by Alasdair Gray: for typesetting within the next millennium. Here, King and Lee examine the bibliographic metafiction of Gray.

The popular, especially British, imaginary casts Scotland as a drunken nation, just as Thatcherite political discourse presents Scotland as welfare-addicted at an individual and national level, apparently drunk on English money. In this article, I argue that Scottish literary culture has written back through a 'moderated' alcohol dependency, wherein alcohol provides emergency psychotherapy for a neoliberal professional class. I examine four novels featuring alcohol-dependent focalisers which date from the mid-1980s through to peak British alcohol consumption in 2004, namely Alasdair Gray's 1982, Janine (1984), Ron Butlin's The Sound of My Voice (1987), Janice Galloway's The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1989) and A. L. Kennedy's Paradise (2004). All of these texts look past the stereotypical immiseration of unemployed men in urban peripheral housing estates and towards a different constituency of alcohol addicts: qualified, productive, responsibilised, and self-modulating. In so doing, the works renegotiate physical, economic and constitutional dependency in Britain. But in a larger frame, they establish alcohol toxicomania in the context: of the psychopathological economy - in which productivity can only be sustained through the palliation of neoliberalism's mental health crises - and in late capitalism's reordering of social relations, or what Bernard Stiegler calls a 'liquidation of relations of fidelity'.

Alasdair Gray's prize-winning novel Poor Things, postmodern in its game-playing with literary conventions, critiques, within a neo-Victorian historical frame, oppressive institutions and ideologies, but not without subjecting its own social agenda to contestation. Through this process it enacts a form of education that replaces corrupted religion with socially responsible science.