Friday, June 04, 2010

Interviewed at UnBound / BitchBuzz

The wonderful Adele over at the fabulous book review (and more) blog, UnBound has interviewed me and wormed many secrets out of me :-) and that's me laughing at the noodle restaurant the week before. It was such a pleasure getting to know in real life someone I had got to know over the 'net. I love the internet! So many friends and opportunities I would not have had but for it.

Yesterday I dawdled along the Thames near Millbank mudlarking. There was the usual assortment of glass and pottery shards, but I also found odd things like the front part of a telelvision set (no screen of course), a camera, a set of rusty keys with a Galapagos diving fob, which amused me (surviving all that diving and then losing your keys in the river? Then again maybe it was all a pose anyway). I went to the Tate Britain afterward. I'm still amazed at how much I love the new Turner section, mostly for his unfinished paintings which seem like precursors of the Impressionists. There's a new room of early Bacon works that include a painted screen and three rugs (!) from his interior design business in the 30s.

And my latest column is up, too, at BitchBuzz: a mad mash-up of the Stoppard matineƩ, the guy behind me on the bus, random musings about the Middle Ages and the usual weird stuff in my head. Enjoy!

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

mmmmm bacon.

C. Margery Kempe said...

Indeed -- especially traditional English bacon! The best.

Todd Mason said...

A good interview...the relationship between your MK and the older name-inspiration is Indeed tenuous...I also enjoyed the fact that you two had to triumph over "Easy Lover," one of the most anti-female pop hits of the '80s, toward the end of the i/v. (Catchy tune till you listen to what they're blathering about.)

Too much splintering by pseud seems like it would be counterproductive, but for every Kate Wilhelm or Joyce Carol Oates writing whatever they damned well please, and even Oates hiding behind Pilcher, there's at least one Salvatore Lombino/Evan Hunter/Ed McBain/Richard Marsten/etc.

Anonymous said...

bacon?... aloysius draws very prettily, too, but of course he's rather more modern.
r

C. Margery Kempe said...

@Robert: Mmmm, bacon.

@Todd: I've always liked the idea of multiple identities, perhaps because my own seems so boring and dull. Pseudonyms have the advantage of being easy to put away when you're tired of them as well. If I had the success and respect Oates does, things might be different. Alas.

Todd Mason said...

K.A. Laity isn't a dull name (as I thought in listening to the i/v, too). But, greener grass. A. A. Attanasio once told me he wished he had as brief a name as mine, which is pretty generic in an Anglophone context leaning stuffy (though I've enjoyed its eldritch connotations), and Lombino eventually changed his legally to Hunter because he was haunted by anti-Italian bigotry of his youth.

And Attanasio did employ "Adam Lee" briefly, but his publishers outed him because Attanasio sold so much better.