Why is it that so many artistic wonders were mad? These people could never function in most contexts, but as musicians, painters, writers, they thrived. There’s another bio out now, on one of my favorite writers, Philip K. Dick. It’s called I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick, by Emmanuel Carrère, and you can read a review here. Looks good.
Month: September 2004
On Essay-writing
As we trade links and debate the importance of blogging to journalism, or who’s influenced who, tons of trash is posted online. Nobody seems to know how to write. Well, not nobody. But you know what? I think this essay on writing essays would do a lot of the blogosphere some good. Makes me wonder what essay-writing looks like when my Korean students do it in Korean. I wonder…
Bonjour paresse
Bonjour paresse is a newish book in France that is apparently selling like mad. It’s basically a kind of satirical attack on the private sector and of course the bureaucracy (oops, I originally typed bureaucrazy, and it might be closer to the truth) of France, but also the whole philosophy of business and working for companies. The author, one Corinne Maier who works for the French Electricity Company (a state-owned operation), seems to have struck oil. The book is a craze in France, and understandably. Jo Johnson writes about the book thus: You sit next to idiots, loathe office bonhomie …
Walking Back To Genesis
Via Arts & Letters Daily, this is a taste of Dawkins’ new book Walking back to genesis. It looks like a fascinating piece, exploring the path of our evolution backwards to the first life on earth, conceived of as a Chaucerian pilgrimmage. And it’s probably of particular interest to SF geeks like me, who could use some help considering how aliens might look: This kind of comparative exercise, counting which things evolve often, and which seldom, might help us to predict things about life outside this planet. Which features of life are parochial, and which universal? This is a question …
A goodish poem
I found a decent poem here and I think you’ll think it’s decent too, in its dubious yet hopeful middle-class rendition of how money and capitalism apparently works.
New Agnosticism?
After a few hours of puttering about online, trying (somewhat futilely) to catch up on my blog subscriptions, I’ve found something quite worth a few minutes’ attention: an essay on “the new agnosticism” over at Killing the Buddha. Nose still a little running, head still a little cloudy, I still have the energy to disagree, but respectfully. My philosophical agnosticism is closer to Auguste Compte’s than anyone’s, in that I think taking a position on the “theist/atheist” question is simply taking a position on a rather closed, circular little binary of possibilities. Why would the universe be limited to just …
Gameplay and Fear
Though I’m somewhat sick today (bleah, ugh), I managed to produce a new bit of writing on the long-neglected New Sophists’ Almanac. It’s mainly about the kind of “game-playing” I think we engage in when we watch scary movies, and how I think this may relate to what the hell is going on when we are experiencing “art”.
Cute Factor
My sister just sent some more pics of my new nephew! Isn’t he adorable? But I was trying to figure out which side of the family he resembles, and got nowhere except that dark, dark hair seems a Pineault thing (ie, my mom’s side of the family, unless some branch of Troy’s family also has that). It’s hard to see from a couple of photos, though. He looks like a bright fellow, though, from this next pic: When Lime saw these pics, she declared that she thought he looked a little Asian, which once again made me wonder how much …
Geeks
Oh, a hot night of… reading books together! Yes, my honey came over and we sprawled on the floor, reading books together. Not the same book: she’s reading some kind of mystical adventure in Korean (퇴마록, it’s called, which I’d roughly translate as “The Exorcism Story” if you use the word exorcism in a more general sense than it has taken on since the advent of the Christian us of that word…the banishment of evil). It sounds fascinating, some kind of pitched battle between people all over the world and ancient forces of evil that they’re fighting to banish and …
Wishing Someone Would Talk Straight About Stem Cells
There’s a pretty good article over at Tech Central Station about Politics and the Debate Over Stem Cell Research. Link via Instapundit.