The 2012 Olympics are over. If you weren’t in the UK you might not have been aware of just how transformative these two weeks were. That I’m even talking about it is evidence enough. Like many of my geek and writer friends I’ve often found myself in the position of fighting against the popular attention…
Category: literature
History Witch: Anglo-Saxon Death
I think the impulse that defines an academic nature is that one responds to difficult moments by turning to the past to see how others have coped with similar times. So still reeling from unexpected grief, I turn to history as I contemplate the ways we deal with the inevitability of parting from those we…
Reviews: Guerilla Blues & Beowulf
Guerrilla BluesAlessandra Bava People tend to think writers give their friends good reviews because they’re pals; the truth is you become friends with people who write stories or poems that inspire you to be better, to do more, to aim for dizzying heights. My jester — the poet of Rome — Alessandra’s new collection offers…
London with Four Essex Lads, Alan Moore, and Ruth
Because no one would want to travel ruthlessly, surely: I zipped off to London this weekend because I could. Is there any better reason? Well, I suppose fun and a couple of Alan Moore performances were also a good reason. I got in rather late, so Friday also got a late start but my pal…
BitchBuzz: Panopticon
Happy Birthday, Alan Moore, who doesn’t use the intarwubs, so he’ll never see this, but he’ll know somehow 😉 Here’s my column for the day which risks disrupting the space/time continuum by discussing French literary theory with a popular audience: Welcome to the Panopticon! How an 18th century social theorist foresaw the wretched state in…
Review: The Road
I should insert two warnings: first, that I will be discussing some definite SPOILERS to the film, though I will try to keep the worst ones to a comment to follow immediately upon this, so casual readers won’t be surprised. Second, that this more or less constitutes a rant. One final caveat: I have not…
BitchBuzz: Jane Austen Writes
My BB column this week revisits the Jane Austen exhibit at the Morgan which I enjoyed so much last week (and yes, the William Blake exhibit is still on for a few more weeks). It’s such a delight to see Jane’s own handwriting and little pieces of her life gathered together for this exhibit, which…
Review: Bright Star
I headed off to see Jane Campion’s latest film, Bright Star, with my intrepid fellow film reviewer, Peg, on Friday. Yes, it was another afternoon matinée, or what we have come to call the blue hair screening. It was also a particularly packed one, so there was nowhere to go to get away from the…
Publication: Wixey
My flash humor piece “Wixey” is now available at the literary magazine Wild Violet. Drop by and check out all their stories, poems, essays, interviews and artwork. I wrote this piece last summer while reading Nabokov, which accounts for the sometimes baroque vocabulary. Nabokov has great words.
Self-Reliance
“There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his…
K. A. Laity 