This Is Pretty Cool

If you're on Last.fm (and if you're not, you should be), you can use this handy little tool to generate a pretty cool visualization of your top music. It ends up looking something like this:



I like it.

That first one was my all time chart. This is the last year:



The last six months (yes Linkin Park is on there, don't hate; I loved that shit when I was 14):



Unfortunately it only lets you generate four banners at a time and I spent one dickering around, so my last three months picture will have to wait. I know you'll be waiting with bated breath.

Salinger at War

I knew J.D. Salinger fought in Europe during World War II, but I didn't know this:

"For this reader, the great achievement of Slawenski’s biography is its evocation of the horror of Salinger’s wartime experience. Despite Salinger’s reticence, Sla­wenski admirably retraces his movements and recreates the savage battles, the grueling marches and frozen bivouacs of Salinger’s war. It’s hard to think of an American writer who had more combat experience. He landed on Utah Beach on D-Day. Slawenski reports that of the 3,080 members of Salinger’s regiment who landed with him on June 6, 1944, only 1,130 survived three weeks later. Then, when the 12th Infantry Regiment tried to take the swampy, labyrinthine Hürtgen Forest, in what proved to be a huge military blunder, the statistics were even more horrific. After reinforcement, 'of the original 3,080 regimental soldiers who went into Hürtgen, only 563 were left.' Salinger escaped the deadly quagmire of Hürtgen just in time to fight in the Battle of the Bulge, and shortly thereafter, in 1945, participated in the liberation of Dachau. 'You could live a lifetime,' he later told his daughter, 'and never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose.'"

-Jay McInerney, reviewing J.D. Salinger: A Life, by Kenneth Swalenski in the February 13, 2011 edition of the New York Times Book Review

That is incredibly intense. The fact that Salinger never (well, exceedingly rarely; one short story rarely), wrote about the actual war, rather than life on the home front, says something powerful about his experiences. He was an intensely (famously) private writer, but that didn't keep him from channeling his experiences as a young college-dropout in New York City into his stories. I can only posit that the horrors of war were too horrific for him to even consider touching.