Had a Borgesian dream this morning. My day job was sitting around a table with a group of co-workers writing one sentence descriptions of every present and past employee of the company that had hired us. In addition to the descriptions we had to draw an accurate portrait of each employee's face. Working from photos was OK, and we had piles of those at our elbows. We were expected to produce about six text-and-picture combos a day, so it was kind of a sweatshop. Except no one was caught up on their quota; people were constantly getting up from the table and goofing off. During one such "break" I perused several of the file cabinets in the room (the cabinets stretched to infinity, natch). The cabinets were jammed with folders of past employee dossiers such as the ones we were producing. I was admiring the drawing styles, going back further and further in time from the present, with the styles becoming more and more archaic. Some looked like 1920s newspaper sketches, and before that, engravings. I felt I was learning something by looking at how the earlier faces were drawn.