Tag: Jorge Luis Borges

You can buy Steven Tucker’s Nazi UFOs here.

3,380 words

In Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel, White Noise, the central character is a professor at the Department of Hitler Studies in an American university. DeLillo has a minor obsession with Der Führer. His 1997 novel, Underworld, is one of the great American novels of the twentieth century, and its title is a translation of Unterwelt. This refers to a strange home movie at the center of the novel, one apparently filmed in the Bunker during its last days. Hitler is and will remain a source of fascination for writers and, as we shall see, his ambition to rule the skies apparently took some freakish turns. Or did they? (more…)

2,434 words

How does memory work? What enables us to conjure up experiences, facts, and events from our past? St. Augustine wrote that our experience becomes memory by “going to a place which is yet not a place,” pre-empting Freud’s work on memory.

Incidentally, if you are ever racking your brains to try to remember some event, person, or fact, take this tip I learned from Freud (although, ironically, I can’t remember where): Don’t try to remember, don’t thrash your memory. Simply get on with something else and, in a minute or two, the memory will arrive. It works for me every time. (more…)