“We all know how, when groping in memory for a word or a name, some quite absurd and random association, something which has ‘stuck’ in the memory, will help us to dredge it up. The classical art is systematising that process.” (Francis Yates, The Art of Memory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.14)

“This, then, is an example of a classical memory image-consisting of human figures, active, dramatic, striking, with accessories to remind of the whole ‘thing’ which is being recorded in memory.” (Francis Yates, The Art of Memory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.11)

From Ad Herennium: “We ought, then, to set up images of a kind that can adhere longest in memory. And we shall do so if we establish similitudes as striking as possible; ifwe set up images that are not many or vague but active (imagines agentes); if we assign to them exceptional beauty or singular ugliness; if we ornament some of them, as with crowns or purple cloaks, so that the similitude may be more distinct to us; or if we somehow disfigure them, as by introducing one stained with blood or soiled with mud or smeared with red paint, so that its form is more striking, or by assigning certain comic effects to our images, for that, too, will ensure our remembering them more readily.” (Francis Yates, The Art of Memory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.qtd 10)

“And the rules summon up a vision of a forgotten social habit. Who is that man moving slowly in the lonely building, stopping at intervals with an intent face? He is a rhetoric student forming a set of memory loci.”(Francis Yates, The Art of Memory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.8) FLANEUR?

“The art of memory is like an inner writing.” (Francis Yates, The Art of Memory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.6). This is the second time that this art has been related to letter writing (even in Cicero’s account was it associated with wax tablets). Which makes me wonder: what was the art of memory “like” for those with no writing? Or was it always associated with a post-alphabetic society?

“In order to form a series of places in memory, he says, a building is to be remembered, as spacious and varied a one as possible, the forecourt, the living room, bedrooms, and parlours, not omitting statues and other ornaments with which the rooms are decorated. The images by which the speech is to be remembered-as an example of these Quintilian says one may use an anchor or a weapon-are then placed in imagination on the places which have been memorised in the building.” (Francis Yates, The Art of Memory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.3)

On Quintilian: “Noting that it was through his memory of the places at which the guests had been sitting that he had been able to identify the bodies, he realised that orderly arrangement is essential for good memory.” (Francis Yates, The Art of Memory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.2)

“We have been thinking about electronic texts as the wrong type of revolution. We have confused an extension of the Gutenberg revolution in replication and distribution with a revolution in expressive logic.” (Lanham, Richard. The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Digital Age. Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2006. 144)

Lanham seems surprised that “no equivalent of the ‘lean manufacturing’ enzyme has appeared in the word factories of the world” where “[t]he bureaucratic official style rolls on like the Mississippi.” (130) What Lanham fails to acknowledge is the ways that, in an attention economy, too many words also becomes effective for certain ends. Indeed, as Doctorow himself suggests, we ought to be rather suspicious when a media company foists upon us pages and pages of bureaucratic arcana as precondition for the use of their product, especially when that product is, like music and video and and dynamic social text, structured so as to make the most of an immediate (oral/aural) response. Click here for stimulus. (Doctorow characterizes Facebook as a highly effective Skinnerian black-box designed to train us to give up our privacy.) (Lanham, Richard. The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Digital Age. Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2006.)

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