Just one plug for a book, if it's allowed. For a fascinating and entertaining take on the questions being discussed concerning literature, madness and drugs and addiction check out Avital Ronell's delightful experiment called *Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania* (Univ. of Nebraska P, 1992). Ronell also speculates on addiction as a dominant metaphor for our times and more and she uses as her case study another famous literary creation: Emma Bovary (who was, of course addicted to many things, including the Romance novels of her youth, and who had her own pyschological problems). This isn't yet another psychoanalytic reading of a novel (my day job is filled with them, from Shakespeare all the way through to this month's releases) but rather a fascinating piece of speculation about the patterns of addiction and Emma as a modern product and a collage of related sources and citations. It's fun. Anyway, dinner's approaching and I need a drink. --John