coldI was reading Mind Fields last night, because Harlan sent me a copy this week, and came across this marvelous quote at the beginning of the book:
"Only he is an artist who can make a riddle out of a solution." — Karl Kraus (1874-1936)
I've spent long, circuitous paragraphs trying to say what is here said with such beautiful and precise brevity. So I will only add yes, exactly.
And here's an odd thing that occurred to me after yesterday's post. May one be both an iconoclast and an icon? Here this new review of Daughter of Hounds labels me an iconoclast. Yet, many times in the past, in various contexts, I have been called an icon. For example, in his introduction to Tales of Pain and Wonder, Doug Winter called me an icon of Gothic literature. So perhaps icon and iconoclast are entirely context dependent terms, completely relative, subjective. Based upon one's point of view. One woman's icon may be another man's iconoclast, etc. In fact, this seems rather obvious. Besides, I have long grown used to existing as a contradiction.
All the new Sirenia Digest subscribers who are due signed copies of the Silk trade paperback, the books went into the mail yesterday evening. You should have them sometime next week.
Despite his poor showing early on, Raven Blue has now taken the lead in the Ravens Four auction and has spent the morning gloating and casting all sorts of perfectly pointless charms. Raven Red is livid. Raven Green is sulking. I guess this is what I get for telling them popularity contests are for the birds.
Last night we had a truly bizarre double feature: John Shiban's Rest Stop and Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep (La Science des rêves). The former was dull, artless, and as entirely devoid of imagination as any film could hope to be. I'm tempted to say that Australian filmmakers need to step away from this sort of thing, but then someone will immediately cite a good recent Australian thriller to prove me wrong. Anyway, The Science of Sleep was in all ways brilliant and delightful, and I loved it pretty much unreservedly. It tread very near the dreaded subject of dreamsickness. Afterwards, I went to bed and read chapters three and four of Joan Druett's In the Wake of Madness. And that was yesterday.
