K.A. Laity's Blog, page 175

Branding Redux

One outcome of this weekend that was mostly frittered away in drinking and laughing with friends (fair enough, eh?) and eating bacon (mmmmm, bacon) was that I had a brain storm of an idea for the elusive branding concept. As I have mentioned before here, the concept of branding your work to establish a clear identity for what you do (no one has any doubt what Nora Roberts' name on a book means, or Stephen King's) has proved challenging for me. So, my latest idea for the apparently 'essential'...

Road Trip

After my students give their final presentations this morning, I'll be heading off to Connecticut to see the gang. Bittersweet because Miss Wendy has a new job in Mississippi and soon she won't be just a short drive away -- waah! I'm sure it will be a fun time -- after all we have Bernie's birthday to celebrate at the Aloha Alcohula tomorrow night, so it should be an action-packed weekend. Just picture this:

BitchBuzz: Tubes

I had tried to call my latest column for BitchBuzz "Strong Men Also Cry" because it's always good to make a Lebowski reference, but from the start, it was really all about the tubes:



What is it with men and tubes? Particularly when they're men who hold powerful offices and feel the need to wield that power in a grandstanding gesture so everyone knows just what they have in their hands—it can be an embarrassing display.



It's Mad Men in a kind of perverse wish fulfillment for a time that...

Pelzmantel: Cover Art

Oh my!



Is this gorgeous or what?! I am so pleased with the cover art for my book -- squee! When Storm told me they were going to be putting out this new edition of Pelzmantel, she asked if I had any preference for the cover artist. I immediately said Ruby, please!



Ruby does the covers for most of Storm's own books and has a real love for fairytales. I knew she would be perfect.



Am I right?



First, I love the colors. Somehow the orange tones of the fox match so well with the midnight purple...

Reviewed (Two Years Later)

Okay, so the Google search doesn't necessarily catch everything. In looking for something else, I ran across a reference to a review in The Lion and the Unicorn 32.3 by David Russell of Tove Jansson Rediscovered , for which I wrote the essay, "Roses, Beads and Bones: Gender, Borders and Slippage in Tove Jansson's Moomin Comic-Strips":



K. A. Laity's exploration of Jansson's cartoon series executed for the London Evening News in 1957 is likewise fairly narrowly focused, but Laity offers...

Review: Lucky Him

Oh, Mr Amis...



This picture shows up in both Lucky Him and in the Letters of Philip Larkin. It just makes me laugh. The goofy expression of someone caught by surprise and making a funny face to cover it up. The two of them, Amis and Larkin, were close friends and correspondents, as I've mentioned before. A wonderful CD of Robin Hardy and Alan Bennett reading some of the letters remains criminally out of print.



I got Lucky Him: The Biography of Kingsley Amis

as a gift recently because I have...

BitchBuzz: Little Earthquakes

My latest column for BitchBuzz touches on the laughable comment by an Islamic cleric that women's provocative dressing and sexual desire causes earthquakes. Ridiculous because even small children who look for logical answers to natural phenomena know about fault lines But just another depressing indication of the scapegoating of women that goes on. Until my friend Byron turned my head around:



Dust kicked up across the net this week when a Iranian cleric, Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi, claimed ...

Serially Yours

Have you checked out The Mangrove Legacy recently? I only ask because I am thinking about the end of it. It will take some weeks yet, of course, but I can see the resolution now and I am also contemplating polishing it up to send off to one or two places. Like everything I do (apparently) it doesn't quite fit into a neat marketing niche. But who knows? The lazy way of novel writing -- for those of you who say you want to write but just can't find the time -- this story is up over 90,000 words...

A Wet Weekend

Too many late nights; too little sleep. Far too much rain driving back from Massachusetts.



Last night it was Neil Innes at the Iron Horse in Northampton, MA. Here he is wearing his moustache in order to sing in French (okay, mostly in a French accent). Yeah, phone pic so the quality isn't good. But we had a good time. I went with my pal Peg and we had a nice Thai dinner before the show and then laughed and sang a lot. Innes had the crowd in the palm of his hand from the start. getting folks ...

BitchBuzz: Women Filming Women

My latest column for BitchBuzz incorporates some of my review of The Runaways. The Queen and I had an interesting discussion on Facebook about it -- I was a bit more critical of it, mostly because I found it choppy and too often given to clichés, but on the whole I liked it and would recommend it. Among the reasons:

The recently released Runaways movie, directed by Floria Sigismondi, gives an inside view of the ways women are exploited and manufactured for display in the glitzy world of...