From A Primer for Forgetting, out this month from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
anti-mnemonics
Umberto Eco writes that “once, as a joke, some friends and I invented advertisements for university positions in nonexistent disciplines,” one of these being an ars oblivionalis, as opposed to the ancient arts of memory. Eco tells the story in an essay meant to prove that, from a semiotician’s point of view, no such art could possibly exist.
Others would disagree. At one point in the Biographia Literaria, Samuel Taylor Coleridge complains about the habit of reading periodicals, suggesting that it should…
