Flashspec Reviews

Not sure how I managed not to do this before, but the Flashspec Anthology -- which includes my story The Shark God, has garnered two reviews: the generally positive and the dismally negative. Now I have no quibble with Deniz's review, as being his honest opinion. In fact, I quite enthusiastically agree with him in that Shark God is "horror at its absolute worst;" well, I should say that I 'would' agree if Shark God actually constituted "horror". Umm, supernatural fantasy, anyone? Still, I will admit wholeheartedly that I have no idea how to make you scared.

Illustration group blog

Here an interesting site with lots of good content. http://drawn.ca/ The best thing is that it's a group blog of illustrators, so you get a wide variety of art that they thing is good, cool, cutting edge, whatever.

Romancing the Rational

Go here, read this, tell me it does not make you doubt . . .
http://notesfromthegeekshow.blogspot.com/2007/03/eternal-moment-of-modernity.html

And obviously the emotion of duality resonates within me, blood and ideation, flesh and spirit, hunger and indifference -- the beginning and the end. But the one thing that Duncan misses, so far as I can see, is the paradox, the unity of the dual, the lie of separateness.

Or perhaps he comes close, alluding to the unity here,

The Modernist looking up into the heavens today sees the stars and planets, sun and moon, cycles of seasons, months and days measured in time that warps and twists, sees cycles of centuries, precessions of equinoxes, processions of arcane symbols still alive in the imagination, symbols of ancient civilisations now in ruins, the whole cosmos not as clock and calendar but as a new deep, a new abyss, a new wilderness where the only real frame is the edge of the watering hole we stand outside of, children of kings and animals, leaning down to be surprised at our own reflection, seeing ourselves against that backdrop, looking for the eternal moment where essence and existence collide and collude in a Rational Romanticism, a Romantic Rationalism.

Yes, that eternal moment, the only moment ever here and ever now where essence and existence are one. The thorn, after all, has its rose.