What's For Sale - We are Waiting for Your Purchase
We are waiting breathlessly for your order, especially today. We have the books at our fingertips, ready to wrap them in sturdy wrapping paper and cardboard. We are listing books for sale at multiple sites, you can see them on the right.
We are staying indoors today. It has been raining in Central Texas, and we are like cats, we hate going out in the rain. We don't mind getting our footpads wet, as cats are not fond of getting their paws wet, we are made of sterner stuff, but rather we don't want water drops staining our books.
We have even canceled a book-buying trip today, because the water gets on the paper covers and leaves spots, we have to carefully wrap our books in plastic.
We will leap into action as soon as your order comes in. Here is some of the items we have for sale on eBay. They are also available on our own website: My-Lynx Associates as well. We have a 1949 copy of a book by Jean Paul Sartre's novel "Nausea", an early English-language edition by New Directions publishers. Another book we found recently is a literary essay on culture by the noted poet T. S. Eliot.
We have a book, a 1980s reprint, by the master of Science Fiction, Philip K. Dick - "Martian Time Slip" about a troubled repairman who flees Earth to one of the Mars Colonies, and finds himself in even more trouble. He left a comfortable conapt (Dick's futuristic term for a condominium-apartment) in Southern California because of troubling visions of people who looked like machines.
When he is unexpectedly called in to repair some teaching machines at his son's school, he sees for the first time the specialized mechanical teachers in the form of Edison, and other famous personages of history who teach history. And in a kind of mirror to our own contemporary universe (the book was started as a short story in '62 and released as a novel in '64), one of the critical teachers is a machine that does maintenance on the school, who is called "The Angry Janitor", a seeming simulacrum of the cartoon janitor "Willie", the Groundskeeper on the Simpsons television cartoon series, who appeared in the 1991 TV for the first time. Was it coincidence or just a stereotype of school janitors in general? P. K. Dick describes the janitor dryly as a combination of the personalities of Dwight Eisenhower and Socrates.
The Angry Janitor is programmed to teach respect for private property. When the main character is sent to repair the mechanical teachers at the local colony school for the first time, he recalls his visions of mechanical humans on earth and tries to come to grips that one possible explanation was he was having visions of the future, not just hallucinations. This is presumably part of the time-slip mentioned in the title, where past, present, and future all flow into an often disturbing, and even entertaining story of life on Mars in the future. The irony is that the book is set in the year 1994.
Here is a little dialog about the teachers and the janitor:
"We think it might be this," the woman--or rather this peripatetic extension of the school--said,
holding out a folded paper.
Unwadding it, he found a diagrammed congeries of selfregulating feedback valves.
"This is an authority figure, isn't it?" he said. "Teaches the child to respect property. Very righteous
type, as the Teachers go."
"Yes," the woman said.
Manually, he reset the Angry Janitor and restarted it. After clicking for a few moments, it turned red
in the face, raised its arm and shouted, "You boys keep out of here, you understand?" Watching the
whiskery jowls tremble with indignation, the mouth open and shut, Jack Bohlen could imagine the
powerful effect it would have on a child. His own reaction was one of dislike. However, this construct
was the essence of the successful teaching machine; it did a good job, in conjunction with two dozen
other constructs placed, like booths in an amusement park, here and there along the corridors which
made up the school. He could see the next teaching machine, just around the corner; several children
stood respectfully in front of it as it delivered its harangue.
We are staying indoors today. It has been raining in Central Texas, and we are like cats, we hate going out in the rain. We don't mind getting our footpads wet, as cats are not fond of getting their paws wet, we are made of sterner stuff, but rather we don't want water drops staining our books.
We have even canceled a book-buying trip today, because the water gets on the paper covers and leaves spots, we have to carefully wrap our books in plastic.
We will leap into action as soon as your order comes in. Here is some of the items we have for sale on eBay. They are also available on our own website: My-Lynx Associates as well. We have a 1949 copy of a book by Jean Paul Sartre's novel "Nausea", an early English-language edition by New Directions publishers. Another book we found recently is a literary essay on culture by the noted poet T. S. Eliot.
We have a book, a 1980s reprint, by the master of Science Fiction, Philip K. Dick - "Martian Time Slip" about a troubled repairman who flees Earth to one of the Mars Colonies, and finds himself in even more trouble. He left a comfortable conapt (Dick's futuristic term for a condominium-apartment) in Southern California because of troubling visions of people who looked like machines.
When he is unexpectedly called in to repair some teaching machines at his son's school, he sees for the first time the specialized mechanical teachers in the form of Edison, and other famous personages of history who teach history. And in a kind of mirror to our own contemporary universe (the book was started as a short story in '62 and released as a novel in '64), one of the critical teachers is a machine that does maintenance on the school, who is called "The Angry Janitor", a seeming simulacrum of the cartoon janitor "Willie", the Groundskeeper on the Simpsons television cartoon series, who appeared in the 1991 TV for the first time. Was it coincidence or just a stereotype of school janitors in general? P. K. Dick describes the janitor dryly as a combination of the personalities of Dwight Eisenhower and Socrates.
The Angry Janitor is programmed to teach respect for private property. When the main character is sent to repair the mechanical teachers at the local colony school for the first time, he recalls his visions of mechanical humans on earth and tries to come to grips that one possible explanation was he was having visions of the future, not just hallucinations. This is presumably part of the time-slip mentioned in the title, where past, present, and future all flow into an often disturbing, and even entertaining story of life on Mars in the future. The irony is that the book is set in the year 1994.
Here is a little dialog about the teachers and the janitor:
"We think it might be this," the woman--or rather this peripatetic extension of the school--said,
holding out a folded paper.
Unwadding it, he found a diagrammed congeries of selfregulating feedback valves.
"This is an authority figure, isn't it?" he said. "Teaches the child to respect property. Very righteous
type, as the Teachers go."
"Yes," the woman said.
Manually, he reset the Angry Janitor and restarted it. After clicking for a few moments, it turned red
in the face, raised its arm and shouted, "You boys keep out of here, you understand?" Watching the
whiskery jowls tremble with indignation, the mouth open and shut, Jack Bohlen could imagine the
powerful effect it would have on a child. His own reaction was one of dislike. However, this construct
was the essence of the successful teaching machine; it did a good job, in conjunction with two dozen
other constructs placed, like booths in an amusement park, here and there along the corridors which
made up the school. He could see the next teaching machine, just around the corner; several children
stood respectfully in front of it as it delivered its harangue.
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