Purpose of site: This site came about when I was assigned to do a project about Jorges Luis Borges's story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius for my World Literature from 1750 class in the Fall of 2004. The story was mind-numbing and I did whatever I could (i.e. make this site) to help myself understand and absorb the material better.

The story and author: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius was first published in 1945 as part of Ficciones, a collection of 17 short stories by Jorges Luis Borges.

Considered a genius by some, Borges (1899 - 1986) is considered one of the greatest Argentinean writers of all time. A poet and an essayist, Borges is generally best-known for his short stories.

There used to be a site online that had Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius on it for anyone to read, but I've lost the link and several Google searches have been fruitless. If you want to purchase the story it's available on Amazon.com and several other places.

Why make a site? I have strange study habits, not to mention I'm a visual learner. I'm best at remembering things in a visual sense (maybe it's my art background?), so that's why when I need to understand something I'll often incorporate visual aids of some sort to really help it stick in my mind.

I'll do things like take insane amounts of notes and photocopy them. Then I'll study from those. Sometimes I'll go as far as to actually illustrate my notes with little comic characters talking about the material (corny, I know!). Stuff like this always helps me understand difficult material much better than I would if I simply read it and nothing else.

In this case, I was confronted with the prospect of not only understanding this complicated story, but doing a project that showed my understanding and interpretation of the story. I was overwhelmed, so I pulled out all the stops in trying to understand what this crazy little story was trying to convey. I actually started this little website months in advance to the project's due date, because I figured that by completely absorbing myself in the material it would help me along with the project, and it did.