Anne Fadiman: Ex-Libris: Never Do That to a Book

Excerpt: Never Do That to a Book

Essay: You Never Know What You’ll Find in a Book

By Henry Alford
Published: December 19, 2008

The relevant ideas raised were:

• (Book)stuffers are trying to create an aide-mémoire (memory aid) for themselves. “I have filled books with flowers I’ve received, to save the ­flowers in dried form and to remember the happy moment of receiving them,"
• Anne Fadiman (whose book excerpt I will link in another post) says that these aides-­mémoires are often specific to the book owner’s profession. Fadiman writes about a landscape architect who “savors the very smell of the dirt embedded in his botany texts; it is the alluvium of his life’s work.”

Full Article Here

Paul Connerton's 7 Types of Forgetting

According to Paul Connerton, a sociologist and a scholar at the University of Cambridge, there are seven types of forgetting. He argues that 'forgetting' is not necessarily a failing, but it is a combination of actions that lead to one term - forgetting. The seven types of forgetting, in his view, are:

Repressive erasure
This is the type used by government or states to remove the image or an event from someone's mind by completely getting rid of every artifact that reminds anyone of the image or the event.[citation needed] It does not need to only be used by government or states, but can be used by anyone to remove all memories from people of a certain event.

Prescriptive forgetting
This type of forgetting is an act of state. It does not depend on one person's forgetting, but acts as a collective forgetting, where all members of a party decide on forgetting a specific memory in order to continue to function more efficiently. An example of prescriptive forgetting is when the entire student body forgets an event of breaking and entering into the school to continue to have a sense of a safer atmosphere during school time.

Forgetting that is constitutive in the formation of a new identity
This type refers to the idea of forgetting the past identity in order to continue to live with a new one. For example, if a person has discovered to be a homosexual, they can use this type of forgetting to their advantage in order to limit their confusion as they will have no recollection of their past heterosexual lifestyle. This type of forgetting can be used to discard memories of past identity that serve no real purpose within the context of new identity.

Structural amnesia
This type states that a person only remembers those people who are socially important. This was discovered by John Barnes in his writings of genealogy.

Forgetting as annulment
This type of forgetting results from a surplus of information, where useless information is discarded.

Forgetting as planned obsolescence
This type of forgetting happens when a product or any type of good has a limited functionality and is not meant to last long, and so, the product keeps being bought by customers who use planned obsolescence forgetfulness. For example, buying a microwave that lasts only two months, and when it is not functioning anymore, going out to get the same microwave which lasts two months, forgetting its previous failure.

Forgetting as humiliated silence
Humiliated silence takes place when a mishap occurs, resulting in embarrassment that is favoured to be forgotten.

Full PDF Here