Urth syllabus

Derek Bell · 25 Apr 1998, 17:07 · from urth-v0009.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: Derek Bell <dbell at maths.tcd.ie>
Subject: Re: (urth) Urth syllabus
Date: Sat, 25 Apr 1998 18:07:34 +0100
Message-ID: <urth-v0009-0776 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0009/0776.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable


[Posted from URTH, a mailing list about Gene Wolfe's New Sun and other work=
s]

In message <199804221644.JAA02069 at lists1.best.com>, Dan Parmenter writes:
>Wolfe actually made less obvious use of the eiditic memory thing than
>Borges did in "Funes".  Borges seemed especially interested in the
>idea that his person with a perfect memory had absolutely no ability
>to make abstractions (he assigns names to individual numbers, etc.)

	I think the subject of A.R. Lurias' _Mind of a Mnemonist_ had
a simliar experience, though the example given was that of the
how he experience courthouses. (He was a journalist covering cases
and he had trouble thinking of a general courthouse though he easily
memorised individual courthouse layouts.)

	I'll suggest _Mind of a Mnemonist_ as a non-fiction book to
add to the hypothetical syllabus. I wouldn't be surprised if someone
nominates a book by Oliver Sacks!

	Derek

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net