Friday, December 7, 2012

Borges, Memory, and the Library

From "This Is Your Brain on Borges":

In Buenos Aires, he contacted the author's widow, MarĂ­a Kodama, and after several long discussions, she invited him to visit Borges's private library. Quiroga made repeated visits, experiencing what he says felt like an "intimate conversation" with the icon of Argentine literature. ...

"It was like a treasure," he says, describing his sojourn in Borges's stacks, where he found books by William James, Gustav Spiller, and other figures in philosophy and psychology.
Quiroga was excited by Borges's annotations. Not marginalia exactly. Borges liked to write notes on the title page or last page of a book, in a minuscule hand, before he went blind. Later he would ask those reading to him to write the annotations. ... 

We live in a "Funes kind of world," he writes, suggesting that the media's bombardment of our senses gives a feeling of the inundation that Borges's protagonist [in "Funes the Memorious"] endures.

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Open Access Saves

From "Open Access to Scientific Research Can Save Lives":
Every institution of higher learning should ensure that peer-reviewed versions of all future scholarly articles by its faculty members are made open-access through a designated repository that captures the institution's intellectual output.