Hubert Dreyfus and Existentialism in Film and Literature course

Hubert Dreyfus’s excellent course, “Existentialism in Film and Literature” is up again for another go-round on UC Berkeley’s iTunes U site. I listened and read my way through this course the last time around in 2006 and I’m going to again. Professor Dreyfus is a bit scatter-brained at times, but aren’t all the best college professors just a bit off the wall?

You can subscribe to the course here

note: The link above will open your iTunes. You need to have iTunes to view iTunes U sites, just like the iTunes Music Store

Michael Chabon’s Unitard Theory and the Silly Singularity

Michael Chabon’s essay on the New Yorker web page is a must read for anyone who ever donned a towel or blanky and imagined their own origin story. He talks about what the minimum requirements are for an outfit to qualify as a superhero costume (hint: the answer is absolutely nothing i.e. naked ), and how each superhero’s costume, in an effort to conceal his or her identity only serves to project their often fractured human identity. Thus:

In theory, the costume forms part of the strategy of concealment. But in fact the superhero’s costume often functions as a kind of magic screen onto which the repressed narrative may be projected. No matter how well he or she hides its traces, the secret narrative of transformation, of rebirth, is given up by the costume.

…and we, as mere mortals, do the same thing when we build our own costumes every day:

We…adopt a series of cloaking strategies to preserve [our secret identity], but what we are actually trying to conceal is a narrative: not who we are but the story of how we got that way—and, by implication, of all that we lacked, and all that we were not, before the spider bit us.

Beautiful…

And, I can’t resist his characterization of the Silly Singularity:

The graphic purity of the superhero costume means that the more effort and money you lavish on fine textiles, metal grommets, and leather trim the deeper your costume will be sucked into the silliness singularity that swallowed, for example, Joel Schumacker’s Batman and Robin and their four nipples.

There is also an audio interview with Chabon that is just as enlightening.

Jason Fried of 37Signals on the iPhone SDK

You know, I was having very similar thoughts last night. I think the iPhone will go down as perhaps the most influential device of the early part of this century. Everything mobile will from now on be built on the foundation of the iPhone and the SDK announced today.

Jason Fried of 37Signals says this

What we saw today was the beginning of two-decades of mobile domination by Apple. What Microsoft and Windows was to the desktop, Apple and Touch will be to mobile.

Read his full blog post here

Numfar!!!