Berkley Center

In a pub, a Glaswegian student asked me incredulously, “You could have gone on exchange anywhere you wanted, and you picked Glasgow? Why?”

“I thought it’d be good for studying the types of literature here,” I said—which didn’t much convince him. Granted, whenever I attempted to explain to anyone my Comparative Literature major or the idea of distinguishing “specific” types of literature to compare, I could sense how vague it all was.

“And how do you like Glasgow?” I asked. He tilted his head from side to side. “It’s alright, I guess.”

After someone else cut in with a joke about the crime rate, he insisted, “It’s fine... but, you know, there’s the weather.”

I’d found by then that weather jokes were made very frequently. In my first "Scottish Literature" class, the professor joked about the “tartan-flavored” stereotypes of Scotland: “You’ve all probably heard of the Scottish highlands and seen the beautiful green pictures, and then you arrived in Glasgow where everything is…gray. Lots and lots of gray.”

In a warning against such generalizations, he added, “Do not make the mistake of thinking that Scottish literature expresses an authentic ‘Scottishness.’ It does not express the people.”

Screens at the front of the room then lit up with projected excerpts from The Brus, a medieval Scots poem by John Barbour, and Trainspotting, a contemporary novel by Irvine Welsh.

The Brus, converted to a standardized English dialect, contains words such as: “Freedom all solace to man gives / He lives at ease that freely lives.” Trainspotting contains words such as: “Choose…rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home.” The professor spread his arm between the two passages. “We’ve got quite a few similarities here. Let’s see—both are about freedom. Importantly, both were written by Scottish writers.”

He lowered his arm and smiled. “So, nothing really links them. I was just making stuff up.”

In light of this, I’d say that the city is about as equally cohesive and “authentically Scottish”: almost all of the music I hear being played in pubs, clubs, restaurants, and on the radio are American. I can hear French, Mandarin, German, Spanish, and Japanese spoken over the sounds of construction. None of my professors speak with the same accent. There is an old building I always pass by near Kelvingrove Park, which holds a new plastic sign beneath chipped Roman sculptures. It is a Hindu temple.

And I’m also here, somewhere in this patchwork dance of old and new people tumbling through the city—first looking right instead of left before crossing the street, taking full advantage of the fact that there is no such thing as jaywalking here—and not feeling tartan-flavored in the slightest. Just as with literature, places don’t exist for the sake of particularly representing anyone or anything; they’re moved through and lived in.

On a particular day when the sky was gray and dripping on our heads, another student and I were dodging pothole puddles along the streets I’d already come to memorize. She wrinkled her nose and laughed when I said I was an exchange student. “And you decided to study in Glasgow? Why?”

I smiled under my dripping hair. “Well…I do like rain."