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 Carr?e, and you can

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 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 …

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.