K.A. Laity's Blog, page 158

Slipping into the Ether

Good-bye, Jack. If there were to be a heaven, would that it were full of books and nothing but time to read.



Farewell to Thee! But not farewell

To all my fondest thoughts of Thee;

Within my heart they still shall dwell

And they shall cheer and comfort me.



Life seems more sweet that Thou didst live

And men more true Thou wert one;

Nothing is lost that Thou didst give,

Nothing destroyed that Thou hast done.



Anne Brontë

Picking up the Chalk Again

I have to be on campus early to teach today and I'm still playing catch up, so here's a "golden oldie" and a couple of bits of news:



There's still two more days to vote for my voodoo zombie western "High Plains Lazarus" as best horror short of 2010 in the Predators & Editors poll.



Keep your fingers crossed: I may soon have some good news to announce regarding a non-fiction project that has been in the works for a while.



Kit Marlowe and I are both doing guest blogs tomorrow! More later on that. I have a Tuesday's Overlooked Film, too.



And the certificate in Women's and Gender Studies received state approval! Hurrah, it's official.



The re-run is my essay "Picking Up the Chalk Again" which was written when I was teaching in Houston. Although it's written about returning to teaching after the summer, in some ways the return for the spring semester is even harder (and that's without the subzero temperatures predicted for tonight). The break is just too short and usually full of events that don't help with getting work done. By the end of it I'd been feeling so exhausted that I just wasn't being effective any way. I have to remind myself that my brain needs rest and refilling, too. So as I type this Sunday night, feeling dissatisfied with my work this weekend, I remind myself of Emerson's wise words:





Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.



Let it be so; let today be a day of high spirit and some satisfaction.

Jane Quiet 2.0

[image error] Welcome to the relaunch of Jane Quiet , the continuing adventures of the occult investigator Elena Steier and I created. We're happy to be relaunching the comic after some delays. We have all kinds of exciting things in store for you, beginning with a wild trip to Egypt that will include a certain cat-headed goddess as well as some wild demonic mayhem.



We're starting out with a blast from the past for Jane: one of her friends from grad school in Edinburgh has phoned her up, reminding her of one of their adventures there (see the prologue!) before asking for Jane's help with some strange phenomena that are happening in her hometown. A clash between the past and the present, mysterious murders, and ancient Egyptian gods will all come together in this arc.



We'll be making use of our trip to the John Hay Library and its occult collection in the near future, and we hope to have the adventures up on a comics distribution site soon (details to follow). We hope you're as excited about this as we are -- it's been a lot of fun getting up to speed once more. It certainly looks like webcomics are the way to go, so we hope Jane finds a lot of readers.



If you're on Facebook , be sure to "like" our fan page! We'll be giving away a unique prize there.





I don't know if JQ qualifies as a "Forgotten Book" but if you're looking for other reading suggestions, you'll find the list at Evan Lewis' blog (Patti's off celebrating her anniversary: congratulations!).

BitchBuzz: Technology and Temperance + Jane Quiet

My column today springs from my annoyance with paternalistic colleagues who keep giving people the impression that academics are stuffy know-it-alls who pontificate from their position of privilege. I realise I can also be a bit unreasonable about it: on President's Day a colleague in the midst of his "technology: bad" talk (thank goodness there was also a "technology: good" talk by the fabulous Kim Middleton) made several references to The Matrix which made me want to break something.



The Matrix?! This is your idea of technology: a twelve year old film? Made when almost NONE of the tech things we're talking about existed as more than an idea? Academics who would never have the chutzpah to offer public opinions on other disciplines have not trouble at all pontificating about things in popular culture that they have at most heard of--they've certainly never participated. It irritates me. But enough bile--I have things to do:



Does Tech Actually Distract from Real Life?By K.A. Laity We could all use a little time away from technology, right?



Colleagues of mine forwarded a link on Facebook today to a piece by William Major at the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled "Thoreau's Cellphone Experiment." In it Major tells of offering an extra credit project to his students: giving up their cell phones to him for five whole days, the better to reach a more "real" experience of life, unencumbered by the "distractions" of their palm-sized technology.



Setting aside the privileged and paternalistic tone of the piece for a moment and setting aside the dubiousness of Thoreau's withdrawal to the "wilderness" of Walden Pond (which did not keep him from frequent, almost daily visits to the village of Concord, or from getting female family members to feed him and do his laundry), the whole aim of this article misunderstands the role of technology in our lives...

Read the rest at BBHQ: http://tech.bitchbuzz.com/does-social-media-actually-distract-from-real.html#ixzz1Bai2nins



In more pleasant news JANE QUIET! Have you been reading the prologue? Do you like Elena's new style? What amazing color, eh? Tomorrow the big re-launch: Jane Quiet 2.0 -- yes, there will be prizes!

It Begins

The semester, that is. Actually it began yesterday, but I teach Mondays and Wednesdays so I all I had to do was, well -- get ready to teach today. And deal with all the administrative things I had ignored over the break.



Allons-y!



I'm teaching the freshman medieval course, Writing for New Media and Masculinities & Medieval Film (probably for the last time for a while). I always know when it's starting, yet every time the term creeps upon me without me feeling prepared. So, no time to be witty today (assuming that is possible on other days) and before you even ask, Bertie -- no, I will not make my students stand on their desks.







If you need something to do, please consider voting for my novelette "High Plains Lazarus" in the Predators & Editors Best of 2010 poll over at Critters.

Tuesday's Overlooked Films: Straight to Hell

I blame Todd. Well, I often blame Todd -- he is uniquely blame-worthy for any number of things -- but this time I blame him for getting me to participate in a new (regular) meme. But it's better than doing the work I really need to be doing (then again, after a snowy and slushy and now icy start, they've cancelled classes for the afternoon, so there it is).



[image error] So my first offering for Tuesday's Overlooked Films: Alex Cox's Straight to Hell . Yes, it's true: some films are overlooked for a reason. It's not really a good film, to be honest. But it's a fascinating one. I know it looks like a bunch of mates went to Spain for their holidays to drink, make music and play cowboys --- well, it kind of is.



But what friends! There's the Pogues first off; the reason I went to see it and got the tape and soundtrack and eventually the DVD despite that criminally ugly cover. Shane MacGowan with most of his teeth and that insane laugh, the fabulous Spider, the lovely Jimmy Fearnley, Phil being sweet and the rest playing bad guys with all their hearts.



Then there's Elvis, too, playing a butler and the incomparable Joe Strummer repeating my second-favourite line in the film. Eddie Tudorpole! Cameos by Jim Jarmusch, Dennis Hopper and Grace Jones. All the usual stalwarts of Cox's films like Xander Berkeley, Zander Schloss and the poor man's Samuel L. Jackson, Sy Richardson. Dick Rude! Catchy songs!



Kathy Burke as a psychotic caretaker. Genius.



Although it was her first starring role, for some reason Courtney Love never lists this on her resumé. Huh. It's got the ambling humour of Repo Man and the punk sensibilities of Sid & Nancy, but it's totally loopy and silly and a loving (if dissolute) tribute to the spaghetti westerns they all love.



Well, I recommend watching it with lots of beer and friends -- in Spain if you can swing it. You can just watch it on YouTube, but what's the fun in that? Prove to me I'm not the only fan of this film, folks!



See all the overlooked films over at Todd's blog.

How I Came to Write this Book

I'm hosted over at Patti Abbott's blog where I reveal:



"How I Came To Write This Book" How I Came to Write this Book, K. A. Laity THE MANGROVE LEGACYKit Marlowe, Tease Publishing, Dec 2010, ISBN 9781607671275, $5.99

In 2002, I moved to Houston, Texas with my husband. I hadn't quite got around to finishing my dissertation, but I had finished a novel, which came out the following year months prior to my dissertation defence. Nonetheless I had managed to get that pearl of academic ambitions, a tenure-track job in my field, as had my husband. Reason to celebrate, surely. People told us, "You can never leave these jobs. Lightning will not strike twice."

My apologies to those who love Texas, but we hated it with a passion. First there was the humidity. I thought 100% humidity meant it was raining, but it just means you wish you would die. The whole of Houston seems to be paved from one end to the other, the better to facilitate the flooding that happens every time it rains, let alone in hurricanes. Enron, far from being an anomaly, is just "the way we do things here" I was told. In no time I had my fill of Texas chauvinism: apparently they invented everything first, then made it bigger and better than everyone else. I've never seen anyone with a Connecticut tattoo.

In all fairness, I must admit the food was good, so was the theatre and opera. We made some terrific friends, too.

But we were miserable.... [read the rest]





I'm in my office today, working on syllabuses. The price of my neglect.

Friday's Forgotten Books: Bend Sinister

It's a bit cheeky suggesting that a Nabokov book could be "forgotten" but I think I can make a case here. After all, Amazon lists the most recent edition as the one from 1990. But first let me mention this fabulous design by Carol Carson for the Nabokov Specimen Box Project, a fantastic design project: check out the slides.



I chose this of course because of the overlap with another obsession, The Fall, who have an album also called Bend Sinister. I haven't seen much to suggest any lyrical overlap with the novel, but since MES reads both Gogol and Dostoevsky, it's not much of a stretch to think he'd find Nabokov appealing -- though it may just be the heraldry term.



I was actually reading Pale Fire when I decided to switch to Bend Sinister, mostly because I decided I would probably have to buy my own copy of Pale Fire because I was making too many notes and it would be easier to just put them in the book and that wouldn't be good to do with the library's copy.



I learn all my new words from Nabokov.



I had already written down tons of new words from Pale Fire, but I found myself writing quotes from Bend Sinister instead. I alluded in my Hamlet review to Ember's theory about the play: fascinating and fun. The playfulness is what makes Nabokov's work attractive. Krug's observation of Ember's engravings sets the scene visually but also working toward the revelations. The legend on one: "Ink, a Drug." Followed by pencil marks which "numbered the letters so as to spell Grudinka which means 'bacon' in several Slavic languages." Ham-let, as he points out.



Mmmm, bacon.



Bend Sinister focuses on the dislocation of grief; initially it's Krug's grief for his wife, observed by the self-conscious "I" of the author who soon disappears, though reappearing in time for the end. Nabokov uses structure and authorial voice to explore the limits of empathy: "The square root of I is I" (7). All writers know the observer within us: "In every mask I tried on, there were slits for his eyes."



I have a nub of an idea comparing Ekwilism (the philosophical movement of the new fascist regime in the book) and Vonnegut's world in "Harrison Bergeron" -- but that's too ambitious for here. You can read a summary anywhere. I'm going to give you some bon mots:



"Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form" (46).



"Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds" (69) -- a key to phenomenal wealth if you know how to employ it, I suspect.



"We live in a stocking which is in the process of being turned inside out, without our ever knowing for sure to what phase of the process our moment of consciousness corresponds" (193).



"To each, or about each, of his colleagues he had said at one time or other, something... something impossible to recall in this or that case and difficult to define in general terms -- some careless bright and harsh trifle that had grazed a stretch of raw flesh" (48).



"I esteem my colleagues as I do my own self, I esteem them for two things: because they are able to find perfect felicity in specialized knowledge and because they are not apt to commit physical murder" (58).



Yeah.

BitchBuzz: Take a Letter

Today's column owes a tip of the pen to Miss Wendy, my pen pal:

Why Not Write a Handwritten Letter?By K.A. Laity In the rush of post-holiday depression and intense workouts, whether required by your resolutions or the amount of snow piling up around your home, you're bound to need a bit of a break. Some sort of Zen-like activity would be perfect, wouldn't it? Even if you're not in the midst of a country beset by madmen and flying bullets, you probably want something peaceful to take your mind off those things about now.



Write a letter.



No, not an email: a real letter. There's bound to be someone you know who would appreciate a real honest-to-goodness letter or at least a card in the mail. It doesn't take that long and it's surprisingly satisfying...

Read more: http://life.bitchbuzz.com/why-not-write-a-handwritten-letter.html#ixzz1AyELXBFz



So when's the last time you wrote a letter? Holiday cards don't count.



Oh, and as I parked the car tonight, I looked down and saw this:

Jane Quiet RETURNS!

Go to our web jam now for the news! Whoo hoo -- I can't tell you how happy this makes me :-)