Library of Borges

The feature image – used on the Resources page – doesn’t begin to capture the size of the library Borges imagined in his short story The Library of Babel, a library with unimaginable mathematics. What would the card catalog system for such a physical library be like? The Central Social Institute of Prague (1937) offersContinue reading “Library of Borges”

Memory Palace

In the BBC Sherlock, series, both Holmes and his adversary Charles Augustus Magnussen demonstrate a disciplined version of the method of loci, the so-called “Memory Palace.” Sherlock stores libraries of information in imagined corridors and retrieves them at will, solving cases and saving himself from peril by walking the halls of his own mind. IContinue reading “Memory Palace”

TOMAHAWK

James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales (1823-1841) is a five-part series comprised of The Deerslayer, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, The Pioneers, and The Praire. (Mark Twain has a nicely acerbic essay on Cooper’s literary offenses.) In the Last of the Mohicans (1992) movie, Col. Munro’s younger daughter Alice, grows weary on the escortedContinue reading “TOMAHAWK”