The Literate Kitty

Working, working, working. Meh. Blarg. Argh! Reading, absorbing, thinking, processing, formulating. Woo-hoo! Hmmm... Oh my stars, yes!! Whuh? Whoa! And some of this... (Just because. :)) Something new, and good, soon. Yes, a review. Patience.

There’s plenty of uncertainty in this thing we can “life”, but there's one thing we can always count on: time is gonna keep right on doin’ its thing, marching along at its own pace. No matter how much we might want to stop it, or at least to slow it down a bit, that’s just not gonna happen. It’s not always bad, that passage of time; some things actually improve with it. Wines and whiskies become smoother and mellower. A favorite t-shirt or pair of jeans grows softer and more comfortable. Trees stretch taller and fill out to provide more shade and beauty. (Okay, I'm sure there's more, but that's all that springs to mind.)    Most things don't have such a positive relationship with time, of course. The cycle of life as we know it is such that, after a particular point, all living things cease growing or regenerating and begin the gradual process of decline, leading, inexorably, to... well, a last hurrah, if you will. Generally speaking, animals (including humans) go t...

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past several years, you’re no doubt aware that Urban Fantasy fiction has virtually exploded during that time, in terms of both popularity and the number of new releases. That doesn’t mean it’s some newfangled genre, however; the fact is that there has always been a certain segment of readers devoted to the macabre, the mystical, the mythical, and the magical--and an assortment of writers more than willing to cater to such devotion.  For those of us who like to dream of a different place—not necessarily better, mind you, just different than where we are right now—UF offers a chance to escape, to explore new worlds and new realities... while retaining at least some semblance to the world in which we live. New-to-the-genre Nancy Holzner’s Deadtown is an example of one of the best new UF series out there. Deadtown is set in Boston, in an uneasy world in which supernatural creatures are "out"... but not really trusted or respected...

Aside from a few dozen or so songs--the unremittingly-cheery sort of dreck I can only charitably term “uplifting”--there seems to be something of a universal consensus that life can be pretty awful. Sound overly harsh? Let’s look to some experts then, shall we? Consider that the first of Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths is that “life means suffering”. Think back to John Hobbes, who concluded in his 1651 book Leviathan that life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. “  Of course, if you prefer your proof to be of the less-erudite variety, there’s always that late-20th-century classic, “Life sucks, and then you die”. ( Lacks a bit in the eloquence department, but it gets the same point across, in inimical Bill-&-Ted fashion. ) With such depressing thoughts bearing down on us like so many dark, angry stormclouds--and the fact that most of us have just seen too much bad to fall for the false promises in those sappy songs--it's no wonder a lot of people look for ways to escap...