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From Stephen Elliott
Down at the Atlantic, Nathaniel Rich touches on Kazuo Ishiguro, memory, and literature’s Borgesian debts:
...moreThe answer, as most readers will intuitively conclude, lies between two extremes. Forget everything and you lose your soul; remember everything and you lose the ability to forgive.
Laura van den Berg talks with Salon about writing her first novel, Find Me, and the connection between memory and storytelling:
...moreI think memory and storytelling rise from a similar impulse. Part of the drive behind the shaping and recalling of memories is a desire to self-narrate: We need our story, our history, our trajectory through life to make some kind of sense, to have a comprehensible shape.
First, Grant Snider considers New Year’s resolutions in his inimitable way.
Then, Barbara Berman draws a connection between two recent poetry collections—famous German playwright Bertold Brecht’s posthumous Love Poems and The Book of Scented Things: 100 Contemporary Poems About Perfume, edited by Jehanne Dubrow and Lindsay Lusby.
...moreWhat to do with the interesting or vexing stories from our lives, the people who fascinate us, the situations that obsesses us? Do we spin them into fictions or try to capture them in nonfiction, in memoirs, essays, or—in what seems to be a trend—some hybrid form?
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The most powerful imaginings of science fiction aren’t the technological devices.
Insert Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind reference here.
Despite the Internet, Millenials are out-reading you. You should feel ashamed.
The difficulty of online conversations.
The science of studying existential risk.
...moreA new scientific study has demonstrated that learning to write by hand before learning to type helps in developing children’s brains, and the benefits stretch from childhood to adulthood memory-wise. Psychologist (and Rumpus interviewee) Maria Konnikova explains on the New York Times:
...moreCursive or not, the benefits of writing by hand extend beyond childhood.
...moreThese days, memorization, like corporal punishment, is something our culture has largely evolved beyond. We might all know the first verse of Jane Taylor’s “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” but beyond that it’s hit and miss. In the age of search engines, perfect recall is no longer prized—just remember a couple key search terms and we’re good to go.
The New York Comics & Picture-Story Symposium is a weekly forum for discussing the tradition and future of text/image work. Open to the public, it meets Monday nights 7-9 p.m. EST in New York City.
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The dictionary defines memory as “the ability to recall.” For a computer, it’s an exact science when regurgitating programs, data, and facts, but for humans, that process can be ephemeral, flawed, and selective.
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Guernica examines the intersections of science, emotion, and memory by way of an exchange between novelist Rivka Galchen and neuroscience professor David Linden, featured in the Rubin Museum’s Brainwave series.
“As Linden explains in his book, ‘memory retrieval is an active and dynamic process.’ Thus recollecting past experiences—reliving them again and again or retelling them to others—subtly modifies the memories we keep.
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Memory is a protean thing.
There is an eerie room of memories at the current exhibit at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Walk into it and all the signposts of a collective nostalgia are there but the room is more than the recognizable objects therein.
...moreThis might seem obvious to many, but apparently there is now research behind the idea that smart phones, computers and the Internet are weakening our memories.
According to this article, the phenomena is called the “Google effect” (which you can surely google for effect).
...moreWhat does luck have to do with memory?
The connection is drawn in this Millions essay, which tackles the role of memory in the life of the reader–a rather comforting discussion for those of use who feel the anxious tug to remember or the frustration of forgetting.
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