When he started writing short stories in the mid-1950s, by which time he had married Mary Matthews, he felt that realism was not capacious enough to contain his "overlit" imagination. "I needed something more charged. I embraced surrealism - like a lover - and psychoanalysis, which closely abutted surrealism. Together, they represented what I wanted to do."

In March 2008, a team of American scientists announced a method they had devised for guessing what someone is looking at, just by analysing a scan of their brain as they look at it. The scans were taken on an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) machine, the likes of which is found in hospitals everywhere, and their announcement prompted a discussion about whether scientists will soon be able to watch people's dreams and memories like movies - and of all the privacy issues that prospect raises.

Take the notion of time: while all studied human societies use a spatial analogy to describe time, not all of them think of the future as in front of them and the past behind. A few of them, the Aymara of the Andes, for example, look forward to the past.

"We think we are making a choice when, in fact, our brain has already made that choice. Our experience of making a choice at that moment is therefore an illusion. And if we are deluded in thinking that we are making choices, then we are also deluded in thinking that we have free will."

The Brain and Beyond

"There have been seven disasters since humans came on the earth, very similar to the one that's just about to happen. I think these events keep separating the wheat from the chaff. And eventually we'll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That's the source of my optimism."

What would Lovelock do now, I ask, if he were me? He smiles and says: "Enjoy life while you can. Because if you're lucky it's going to be 20 years before it hits the fan."

"A hundred times I wanted to kill myself, but I was still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our most sinister tendencies. For is there anything more foolish than to insist on carrying a burden that one can drop at any moment? To live in constant fear, and yet still hold on to life? To caress the serpent that is devouring you until it has eaten your heart?

In the countries through which fate made me wander, and in the inns where I worked, I have seen an inordinate number of people who detested their existence. And yet I saw only twelve who voluntarily put an end to their misery [...] You see, Mademoiselle, I have experience, I know the world. To pass the time, why don't you ask every passenger to tell you his life's story? And if there is a single one among them who has never cursed his life, who has not often told himself that he was the unhappiest of men, then you may throw me overboard, headfirst!"

Voltaire: Candide, or Optimism ("The continuation of the old woman's misfortunes")

DON'T LET DEDALUS DIE CAMPAIGN

As most of you must know by now Arts Council England East have stopped
our funding on 31/1/08. There are various things you can do to help
us.

1.Sign our online petition at http://www.gopetition.co.uk/online/16111.html. For online petition novices like me the security code are the letters or symbols next to the box.

2.Please write to The Arts Council on behalf of Dedalus. Even though we have lost our funding our campaign goes on. Please email alan.davey@artscouncil.org.uk and ask him to accept the Dedalus challenge and compare Dedalus to 4 other Regularly Funded Publishers. If he will not accept the challenge ask him to reinsert Dedalus's funding as he has already conceded the argument.

DON'T LET DEDALUS DIE

The Arts Council priorities for Literature include translation, new writing and international partnerships and supporting publishers and other arts organisations, which deliver these objectives. Dedalus translates fiction from 14 Modern European languages and publishes original English language fiction, which it has sold into 23 different languages, 28 territories. It has won many prizes and accolades.

19 European cultural institutions have formed partnerships with Dedalus to help it put British publishing at the heart of Europe. Why won't The Arts Council join them in funding Dedalus?

England does not possess many independent literary publishers so we can't afford to destroy one that will celebrate 25 years of literary publishing on 30 November 2008.

3 .Buy our books! We have £24,958 to find to replace The Arts Council money. It would be good if we could turn February and March into bumper months.

Books about death on our list are particularly appropriate.

Bruges-la-Morte-Rodenbach ( The Guardian paperback of the week) and
Exquisite Corpse-Robert Irwin spring to mind.

New titles in February

The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides-Lachman
The Dream Maker –Haugaard
Magnus –Sylvie Germain
Pleading Guilty- Paul Genney returns at the end of the month, a good book for lawyers and ACE employees.

4.Bookshops display our books and advertise our petition

5. Reviewers please review our new titles. Make us visible so we won't
become invisible and die.

PLEASE SEND THIS EMAIL TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW.

Alain Robbe-Grillet, French Pioneer of 'New Novel,' Dies at 85
By James Pressley

Feb. 18 (Bloomberg) -- Alain Robbe-Grillet, the French author and theoretician of the 1950s "new novel'' genre, died today, the Academie Francaise reported. He was 85.

Seeking to overturn conventional fiction, Robbe-Grillet attempted to write novels that avoided psychological or ideological commentary, as he explained in his 1963 book, "Pour un Nouveau Roman'' ("Toward a New Novel'').

In place of plot and character, Robbe-Grillet focused on meticulous descriptions of things and events as seen by an objective eye. With their timetables of people coming and going, Robbe-Grillet's novels can resemble noir detective stories.

His 1953 novel, "Les Gommes'' ("The Erasers''), addresses a murder committed by the man who's investigating the crime. "Le Voyeur'' of 1955 describes a stranger who kills a young girl.

Two years later, Robbe-Grillet published "La Jalousie'' ("Jealousy''), in which a jealous husband spies on his wife and her suspected lover through the shutters of a blind, or "jalousie.'' Time and again, his work explores the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity.

Born in Brest, Brittany, on Aug. 18, 1922, Robbe-Grillet trained as a statistician and agronomist before turning his hand to fiction. He wrote more than 10 novels, including last year's "Un Roman Sentimental'' ("A Sentimental Novel''), a book about pedophilia that he called a "fairy tale for adults.''

Robbe-Grillet also directed motion pictures, including "L'Immortelle'' ("The Immortal,'' 1963) and "L'Homme Qui Ment'' ("The Man Who Lies,'' 1968). His best-known work in film was his screenplay for Alain Resnais' "L'Annee Derniere a Marienbad'' ("Last Year at Marienbad,'' 1961).

He was elected to the Academie Francaise in 2004.

Steel City Review 2007

Stories by Claudia Smith, Marc Lowe, Steve Fellner, Vanessa Gebbie, Sharon Knauer, Donna Vitucci, Matt Briggs, Ejner Fulsang, Maggie Shearon, Barbara Jacksha, GK Wuori, Tania Hershman, Margot Miller, Mark Spencer, Tom Barlow, JP Briggs, Erik Evenson, Dixon Hearne, Guy Hogan, Scott Roberts, D. Harlan Wilson, Debra M. Fair, William Reese Hamilton, Seth Harwood, Cindy Kelly, Nathan Leslie, & Roman Skaskiw.

The first three songs are something like you'd expect from a new Portishead album. They're kind of the same, but different - like arriving at the airport and having to carry your toothpaste through passport control in a plastic bag. But then the record really takes off, and suddenly it's taking you somewhere you've never been before.

Filth and Wisdom is a morality tale whose message appears to be that in order to be good and wise, we all need a bit of filth in our lives. Hutz stars as a philosophising S&M escort, beating up grateful clients and spanking a schoolboy-outfitted Guardian reader. Other characters include a thieving chemist's shop worker and a ballet dancer forced to lap dance.

In her programme notes Madonna says: "When the film was finished I realised that they [the three main characters] were all aspects of me so the whole experience was both artistic and therapeutic.

"I have always been inspired by the films of Goddard [sic], Visconti, Passolini [sic] and Fellini and hope that I may one day make something that comes close to their genius."