“The task of painting the picture of life, however often poets and philosophers may pose it, is nonetheless senseless: even under the hands of the greatest of painter-thinkers all that has ever eventuated is pictures and miniatures out of one life, namely their own–and nothing else is even possible. Something in course of becoming cannot be reflected as a firm and lasting image, as a ‘the’, in something else in course of becoming.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (emphasis in original; trans. Hollingdale)
alice blue twenty is published today. It includes my story, “The Tellings.” Here’s a link to the main site:
http://www.alicebluereview.org/main.html
“The twentieth century, with its scores of millions of supernumerary dead, has been called the age of ideology. And the age of ideology, clearly, was a mere hiatus in the age of religion, which shows little sign of expiry. Since it is no longer permissible to disparage any single faith or creed, let us start disparaging all of them. To be clear: an ideology is a belief system with an inadequate basis in reality; a religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful. It is straightforward—and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion.” – Martin Amis, The Second Plane