Weekly Reader: Borges Edition

I have been reading a lot of articles about Borges lately, so this week’s weekend reading post to exclusively for him:

  • I came across Eric Ormsby’s essay on Borges & I sometime last year while searching for something else.

DB: Could this be tied in then with you saying that there is only a finite combination of elements and so actually the conception of ideas is only a rediscovery of the past?

Borges: Yes, I suppose it is. I suppose that each generation has to re-write the books of the past and do it in a slightly different way. When I write a poem, that one has already been written down any amount of times, but I have to rediscover it. That’s my moral duty. I suppose we all attempt very slight variations, but the language itself can hardly be changed. Joyce, of course, tried to do it. But he failed, though he wrote some beautiful lines.

DB: Would you say then that all of these poems that have been rewritten are the coming back upon the same wall in the labyrinth?

Borges: Yes, it would. That’s a good metaphor, yes. Of course it would be.

Auster

In November Paul Auster wrote a wonderful piece about writing for Guardian Unlimited:

I don’t know why I do what I do. If I did know, I probably wouldn’t feel the need to do it. All I can say, and I say it with utmost certainty, is that I have felt this need since my earliest adolescence. I’m talking about writing, in particular, writing as a vehicle to tell stories, imaginary stories that have never taken place in what we call the real world. Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist - except in your head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice.

Amy Goodman

One of the few voices in the news media I feel like I can trust is Amy Goodman.  I really enjoy listening to Democracy Now!’s daily podcast.  Goodman has a very diverse group of people on the show and tackles news that mainstream and so-called corporate “liberal” media outlets won’t go near.  Here are a few interviews with Goodman I have read recently: One from November that Working For Change did and another from 2005 that The Nation did.

We Believe In A Great Poet As The Author Of The Iliad and The Odyssey—But Not That Homer Was This Poet

Project Gutenberg has archived a Nietzsche lecture from 1869.  Nietzsche lectures on Homer and classical philology.  Among the things the lecture focuses on is just who, or whom, Homer was:

They conceived the Iliad and  the Odyssey as the  creations  of one  single Homer; they declared it to be psychologically possible for two such different works to have sprung from the brain of one genius, in contradiction to the Chorizontes, who represented the extreme limit of the scepticism  of  a  few  detached  individuals  of  antiquity  rather  than  antiquity  itself considered as a whole.

Nietzsche also wonders how much of Homer was actually left in The Odyssey by the time it was written down:

The name of Homer, from the very beginning, has no connection either with the conception of æsthetic perfection or yet with the Iliad and the Odyssey. Homer as the composer of the Iliad and the Odyssey is not a historical tradition, but an æsthetic judgment.

Weekly Reader

  • One of my favorite pieces of Transformers fan fiction is A Chance In A Million.  Now that I think about it, it might have been the first one I ever read too when I got back into the fandom in 1997.

  • It seems that I link to a Marjane Satrapi interview almost every week.  This week’s interview is from Nerve:

I have to tell you something: I never felt as free as when I wrote Chicken with Plums.  When I write about women, and obviously when I write about myself like in Persepolis people relate [the text] to me. In this book, the main character in is a man. I could hide behind him, yet in some ways, he is me. I can be very cynical, but I can also die of love.

  • Incoming Vermont senator Bernie Sanders is interviewed over at Mother Jones:

Third, I want to take a look at some of the good things that are being done around the rest of the world that are almost never discussed in the United States. How often is it discussed that the American people work the longest hours of any industrialized country in the world? The two-week paid vacation is almost a thing of the past; meanwhile in Europe you get four to six weeks vacation, and maternity leave with pay. We don’t know about these things. I want to take a look around the world and see what workers are receiving, and compare that to the United States — from an educational point of view.

 

Categories

The past few days I have spent time fixing the categories on this blog.  Some changes you might notice:

  • Categories are now in alphabetical order.

  • I have broken down posts about literature into separate categories for each author.  If someone has more than one, or two let us say, posts about them they will get their own category.  The Literature category will still be used for misc posts.

  • Other categories like Television and New Media have been broken down a bit more and will continue to be broken down as I decide to make more changes.

  • There is now a link to my most recent Netflix DVD’s to the right on the bottom of this blog.

  • Below that there is also a link to the most recent comments this blog has gotten, although it doesn’t seem to be updating right now.