Saturday, November 05, 2005



Living in (Sydney or) New York is like being at some terrible late-night party. You’re tired, you’ve had a headache since you arrived, but you can’t leave because then you’d miss the party.
-Simon Hoggart, America: A User's Guide

Random House has announced another big step beyond traditional publishing with the creation of long-term "creative and strategic filmmaking partnership" with Focus Features, the division of NBC Universal run by David Linde and James Schamus. Together the companies will develop, co-finance and co-produce "a substantial slate of feature films for theatrical release" based on books published by Random House, where "rights are available and can be acquired." The films will be jointly owned by the two companies, with Focus controlling worldwide sales and distribution rights Random House Enters Film Business

Art of Living & Literature Across Frontiers:
I’m very interested in the interface between philosophy and psychiatry. For me, a lot of the great writers and philosophers that I’ve read, including people like Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, people who’ve straddled philosophy and psychology like Sartre and Camus have a lot to teach us about that

Literature meets philosophy meets psychotherapy when Ramona Koval speaks with Irvin Yalom, the author of The Schopenhauer Cure. As well as being a novelist, Irvin Yalom is emeritus professor of psychiatry at Stanford University. His latest book, like his previous titles When Nietzsche Wept and Lying On The Couch, reflects his day job and interest in marrying the ideas of great philosophers with those of psychiatry


• Thanks to G The Schopenhauer Cure [Deep in The Goebbels Diaries A little light reading with Joseph Goebbels ; My old Daddy used to say: You walk around a horse once It’s about the same with a man or a woman ]
• · The first thing they did when we came was to put us in refugee camps and ... Do me a favour, will you, everybody ? Find a little crazy streak in you. Think up a trauma or two if need be. I don't want to lose my job The Ministry of Pain ; False Maps
• · · New Orleans’s civic shame is not racism or poverty but a culture of murder so vicious that it terrorizes and numbs the whole city Who’s Killing New Orleans? ; A world becoming more peaceful?
• · · · PDF version: Rewire your head: learning to navigate the future ; Arthur Koestler was a lone wolf, better at annoying and offending people than making and keeping friends Arthur Koestler
• · · · · The man who invented album covers Make 'em sing; A mighty voice from the past
• · · · · · The other good thing about sex We need sex ; Amazon.com has previewed a service to sell just a few pages or chapters of a Cold River Amazon takes page out of iTunes book ; Unattached, sober and working like a navvy, the wild child of Brit art has even discovered moisturiser. Stephanie Bunbury meets Tracey Emin Bad girl brought to book