I remember sitting contentedly in a Charlotte Square deckchair a couple of months back.
Pausing at a particularly poignant point in my book, I looked up and there, through the enveloping smug, I could just about make out a handful of fellow Festival-goers. To my absolute horror, they all seemed to be quietly enjoying the midweek afternoon and not at all thinking about class struggle.
How despicably self-satisfied, I thought.
Suddenly craving authentic, untainted, workers’ air, I drained my wine glass, got up and left, vowing never to return. Until at least the following day.
You, too, perhaps, have grown jaded by the bourgeois sensibilities and faux progressivism of the Book Festival circus. If so, a radical alternative may be more your cup of lapsang souchong.
The Edinburgh Independent Radical Book Fair, now in its 20th year, takes places in Leith’s Out of the Blue Drill Hall at the end of this month from 26–30 October.
Organised by splendid indie bookshop Word Power Books, it features readings and discussions on, among other things, poetry, politics, and pimps. It is not, perhaps, for the faint-hearted.
Proceedings this year will be kicked off by Booker Prize winner James Kelman, reading from new novel Dirt Road.
Other highlights include feminist writer Kat Banyard discussing her Pimp State; Richard Murphy, Lesley Riddoch and Andy Wightman discussing land and tax; and the Guardian’s Luke Harding on Putin’s polonium plot.
And I, for one, will be ironing my red trousers in preparation for Rob Sewell’s talk on Leon Trotsky’s Stalin biography.
There will also be film screenings, and a wide range of books on sale. All events are sans entry charge (donations welcome). It promises to be both lively and left-field.
Be there or be falsely conscious.—New Town Lenin
[Image top-right: by Rafaelgr (Own work) (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons]