A few interesting links for August 21st through August 22nd:
- Anne Trubek on Why We Should not Still Be Learning Catcher in the Rye – "If Salinger needed to acknowledge Dickens in 1951, today any new adolescent coming-of-age tale must go through all that Holden Caulfield crap. In the 19th century, a bildungsroman showed the growing maturity and self-awareness of a young person. That remains more or less true, but now the equation for the modern bildungsroman is more like, as a friend puts it: Horny plus bored minus transportation divided by the whole of ones interior life, multiplied by an inverse ratio of miles to a city or a place where there is anything at all to do."
- Hacker: Gymnast He is 14, not 16 – Salon Olympics Daily – Salon – Close readers of our blog already saw this story, but now national press has sniffed something is not right in IOC-land.
"Stryde found some Excel spreadsheets hosted on Chinese government Web sites that contain He's name and the birth date 1-1-94. During the two-day process, these spreadsheets have had a habit of disappearing as fast as Stryde can find them, but readers are downloading and saving the files as fast as they can." - PKD's Obscure 18th Century Philosophical Allusion of the Day – After finding a mysterious strip of paper that reads SOFT-DRINK STAND instead of an actual Soft-Drink Stand in one of Dick's most amazing scenes ever, Time Out of Joint's protagonist Ragle Gumm expresses an interest in studying philosophy, saying to his brother-in-law Vic, "I've read some [philosophy], in my time. I was thinking of Bishop Berkeley. The Idealist. For instance -"…
Bishop George Berkeley was a 18th century philosopher/metaphysic who developed a very complex notion of subjective reality, dubbed by him as 'immaterialism' and later termed by others subjective idealism, which contends, in part, that no object exists without someone perceiving it. In other words when a tree falls in the woods and no one's around to hear it, it doesn't make a sound [although that's a simplification since the tree falling in the woods riddle is basically a vocabulary problem that depends on the definition of the word 'sound'].