Borges’s fictional universe is relentlessly, oppressively male. He wrote very few female characters, and there is a vision of masculinity—violent, fearless, austere—that exists in his work as a counterpoint to its obsessive bookishness, and neither ideal has much room for the presence of women, writers or otherwise. His abstraction meant, among other things, a removal from the heat and chaos of human relationships. There is very little love in his work, very little emotional intensity; its richness and complexity is that of philosophical problems, of theology and ontology, not of human relationships.
Tag: borges
Borges and the Sharknado Problem
Borges:
The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a resume, a commentary … More reasonable, more inept, more indolent, I have preferred to write notes upon imaginary books.
Some books better left unwritten! Oh, but here again I will recommend Imaginary Magnitude, which I shortlisted last year:
A collection of introductions to fictional books covering, among other things, x-ray pornograms, computer-generated literature, and a biography of a sentient, moody super-computer. If you like the Borges above [Dreamtigers], or Borges in general, or strange science fiction, or strange conceptual writing in general, this is absolutely a book for you.
Jorge Luis Borges takes a leak (via biblioklept)
They’re just like us! Background on the photo. Filed under: Borges.
Some that will never be read
Limits
There is a line of Verlaine I will never remember
There is another street I can no longer walk down
There is a face in the mirror I have seen for the very last time
There is a door that is closed until the end of the world.
Among the books of my library (I am seeing them now)
There are some that will never be read.
This summer I will be fifty:
Death consumes me, constantly.
—Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Rebecca Walker; original
Image of Borges, Hôtel des Beaux Arts, Paris, by Pepe Fernández, 1969
Borges auto-reblog rule in effect.
God with magnificent irony / gives me at once both books and night.
Jorge Luis Borges, in Poem About Gifts. Disclaimer: translated, paraphrased. He almost certainly has blindness in mind when referring to night, but it reminded me of me complaining on Twitter:
Every night the same fruitless bedtime prayer: “Dear God, please let me stop getting sleepy so I can read more. Amen.”
Had the concept of software been available to me, I imagine I would have felt as though I were installing something that exponentially increased what one day would be called bandwidth, though bandwidth of what, exactly, I remain unable to say.
William Gibson on reading Borges’ Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius for the first time. Filed under: Borges; William Gibson.
There are cases were poetry creates itself. […] Let us take the title of one of the most famous books in the world, El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha. […] “De la Mancha” – now this sounds noble and Castilian to us, but when Cervantes wrote it down he intended the word to sound perhaps as if he wrote “Don Quixote of Kansas City” […]. You see how those words have changed, how they have been ennobled.
Jorge Luis Borges in “The Riddle of Poetry” segment of his Norton Lectures. File under Borges.
Colin Marshall on Creative Community from Colin Marshall on Vimeo.
Colin Marshall on Creative Community. In which I continue to admire Colin’s thoughtfulness and wonder when his film based on an awesome Borges story is gonna drop.
(Source: http://player.vimeo.com/)
Forgotten but Not Gone – Guernica
“On the fiftieth anniversary of Borges’s first visit to Texas, Eric Benson searches for traces of the fabulist in the Lone Star State.” (via)
Reading Borges isn’t like reading most fiction, it’s more like flipping through an encyclopedia: uncovering its most surprising truths requires whim and a wandering mind.
The Baroque is that style which deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its possibilities and borders on its own caricature.
Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him.
From Borges’ short story Borges and I, which, even though it’s so short, I’ve tumbled before. My reading of his work has been scattered (I picked up a few different collections to fix that), but it almost always hurts my brain in a good way. For the volume of imagination and inventiveness and ideas in such efficient form, I remain convinced that the right Borges at the right time can be more worthwhile than entire literature classes.
Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him.
From Borges’ short story Borges and I, which, even though it’s so short, I’ve tumbled before. My reading of his work has been scattered (I picked up a few different collections to fix that), but it almost always hurts my brain in a good way. For the volume of imagination and inventiveness and ideas in such efficient form, I remain convinced that the right Borges at the right time can more worthwhile than entire literature classes.
“Death and the Compass” by Jorge Luis Borges
Still trying to make sense of it all but I know I liked it.
“Death and the Compass” by Jorge Luis Borges
Still trying to make sense of it all but I know I liked it.
Nowadays, while literary men seem to have neglected their epic duties, the epic has been saved for us, strangely enough, by the Westerns.
Jorge Luis Borges in an otherwise somewhat disappointing Paris Review interview.
The Library of Babel – Jorge Luis Borges
Re-read this great story last night. I’ll have to try some other translations.
It suffices that a book be possible for it to exist.
Jorge Luis BORGES (Argentinian, 1899 – 1986) Self-portrait. ink on paper
8 3/4 x 6 inches (225 x 150 mm)When he drew this, because Burt Britton asked him to, Borges was blind.
Weirdly, Cormac McCarthy also did a self-portrait for Britton. Other writers in the collection: Joan Didion, Edward Gorey, Roald Dahl, Margaret Atwood, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Maurice Sendak, John Updike, and Tom Wolfe.
I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.
“Borges and I” by Jorge Luis Borges
“I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor.”
Mark Larson 