All reviews copyright 2005-2008 Evelyn C. Leeper.
"The Babylon Lottery" by Jorge Luis Borges:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/16/2007]
I was reminded of "The Babylon Lottery" when I read someone's comment that as far as government health insurance goes, all they want is the same medical plan their Congresspersons get. This would be far more likely in a "Babylon-Lottery" situation, because the Congresspersons would know that with the next roll of the dice, *they* could end up with whatever health plan a random person in the society gets.
BORGES ON WRITING by Jorge Luis Borges:
TWENTY-FOUR CONVERSATIONS WITH BORGES by Jorges Luis Borges:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/08/2006]
I had read most of the Jorge Luis Borges available through my library system, but I was recently in a Library not in the system, so I read a couple of books that they had: BORGES ON WRITING edited by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, Daniel Halpern, and Frank MacShane (ISBN 0-525-47352-1) and TWENTY-FOUR CONVERSATIONS WITH BORGES (ISBN 0-394-62192-1). The latter is a collection of interviews by Roberto Alifano carried out between 1981 and 1983, and I will make a couple of comments. In "Funes and Insomnia", Borges claims that "memorious" is not an English word. Actually it is a very old word, dating back to at least 1599; Shakespeare uses it a year later in TIMON OF ATHENS.
In "Books", Borges says, "Scripta manent verba volant (The written word stays, the spoken word flies). That phrase doesn't mean that the spoken word is ephemeral, but rather that the written word is something lasting and dead. The spoken word, it seems to me now, is somewhat winged and light...."
And then later, he adds, "I believe that books will never disappear. It is impossible that that will happen. Among the many inventions of man, the book, without a doubt, is the most astounding; all the others are extensions of our bodies. The telephone, for example, is the extension of our voice; the telescope and the microscope are extensions of our sight; the sword and the plow are extensions of our arms. Only the book is an extension of our imagination and memory."
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"The Gospel According to Mark" by Jorge Luis Borges:
"The Streets of Ashkelon" by Harry Harrison: [From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/05/2008]
As regular readers of this column know, I am a big fan of Jorge Luis Borges. Recently I listened to a reading (in English) of his story "The Gospel According to Mark" (from DOCTOR BRODIE'S REPORT, written between 1970 and 1972). And something clicked, and I said, "I've read this before." An on-line query turned up the answer: this is basically the same story as Harry Harrison's "The Streets of Ashkelon". And lest you think that Harrison may have borrowed from Borges, Harrison published "The Streets of Ashkelon" in 1962.
So did Borges read the Harrison story? Well, "The Streets of Ashkelon" first appeared in Brian W. Aldiss's original anthology NEW WORLDS and has been anthologized over three dozen times (in fourteen languages), including a half dozen before the writing of "The Gospel According to Mark". It is possible that Borges read it in English (a Spanish translation did not appear until 1987). It is also possible that the idea is one that could easily occur independently to two different authors.
The Borges is available on-line at http://www.mrtheilacker.com/gospel_mark_borges.doc> or http://anagrammatically.com/2008/03/09/borges-gospel-according-to-mark> (the latter being bilingual). The Harrison is not available on-line.
JORGE LUIS BORGES: CONVERSATIONS with Jorge Luis Borges:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/08/2008]
After reading Edwin Williamson's opinion on the name "Emma Zunz", I ran across Borges's own comments on "Emma Zunz" in JORGE LUIS BORGES: CONVERSATIONS (ISBN-13 978-1-578-06076-4, ISBN-10 1-578-06076-1) in a conversation with Richard Burgin in 1967. What Borges says is, "[Even] the name Emma was chosen because I thought it particularly ugly, but not strikingly ugly, no? And the name Zunz is a very poor name, no? I remember I had a great friend named Emma and she said to me, 'But why did you give that awful girl my name?' And then, of course, I couldn't say the truth, but the truth was that when I wrote down the name Emma with the two m's and Zunz with the two z's, I was trying to get an ugly and at the same time a colorless name, and I had quite forgotten that one of my best friends was called Emma. The name seems so meaningless, so insignificant, doesn't it sound that way to you?" Nothing about the letters being mirror images, or rotations, or whatever.
On why he wrote only short works, Borges says, "I think what I want to write, but, of course, they have to be short pieces because otherwise, if I want to see them all at once--that can't be done with long texts. ... I want to see at [one] glance what I've done ... that is why I don't believe in the novel because I believe that a novel is as hazy to the writer as to the reader." This "holistic" view of a short story reminded me of the written language in Ted Chiang's "The Stories of Your Life". In that language, a sentence was not a series of consecutive words, but rather a single complex ideogram, written as a whole. (What is it about Borges, languages, and science fiction? A language he described in "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" was very similar to that in the "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episode "Darmok".)
Borges also talked about an earlier Argentinian science fiction writer, Leopoldo Lugones, and Lugones's 1907 book LAS FUERZAS EXTRANAS (STRANGE FORCES), influenced by Wells and Poe. This is available in book form in English, or (if you read Spanish) free on the Internet at http://www.edicionesdelsur.com/cuentos_lugones.htm.
(JORGE LUIS BORGES: CONVERSATIONS should not be confused with TWENTY-FOUR CONVERSATIONS WITH BORGES with Roberto Alifano. What is it about Borgesian books?)
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OTHER INQUISITIONS by Jorge Luis Borges:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/06/2006]
One finds references to Jorge Luis Borges in the oddest places. I was reading the title essay in ADAM'S NAVEL by Stephen Jay Gould (ISBN 0-146-00047-1), in which Gould discusses (and refutes) Philip Henry Gosse's OMPHALOS: AN ATTEMPT TO UNTIE THE GEOLOGICAL KNOT. Gosse's theory was that the world had been created by God out of nothing, but that there was a timeline before creation, implied but just as real as that after creation, and that Adam's navel, fossils in stone, and implications of growth and evolution before the time of Creation are all necessary to testify to this pre-Creation timeline. In a postscript, Gould writes that after the essay first appeared, he learned that Borges had written a comment on Gosse in "The Creation and P. H. Gosse" (OTHER INQUISITIONS, ISBN 0-292-76002-7). I find it amusing, if not downright bizarre, that the blurb on the back of OTHER INQUISITIONS from the "Saturday Evening Post" says, ". . . the word that best describes these essays is manly." I have seen many adjectives applied to Borges's writing, but up until now "manly" has not been one of them. ADAM'S NAVEL is one of those delightful "Penguin 60s" created for the 60th anniversary of Penguin Books.
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stories by Jorge Luis Borges:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/16/2007]
If science fiction is the literature of ideas, then the quintessential science fictional author is Jorge Luis Borges. This occurred to me when someone cited a short story by Borges, "The Library of Babel", and I realized once more that many of Borges's stories are not really stories, but "merely" ideas or concepts, unfettered by characters or plot. "The Library of Babel", "The Babylon Lottery", "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", "Funes the Memorious", ... so many of the "stories" are ideas presented so beautifully as to convince the reader that they are complete in themselves.
SIX PROBLEMS FOR DON ISIDRO PARODI by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy-Casares:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/28/2006]
Until a short while ago, I was unaware of the existence of SIX PROBLEMS FOR DON ISIDRO PARODI by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy-Casares (ISBN 0-525-20480-6). I thought I had looked through all the bibliographies and such for Borges, but I suppose that they may not have included books that were co-authored, or they were in a separate section or something. But checking what Borges was available at the library, I ran across this delightful book. These six detective stories feature Don Isidro Parodi and are (not surprisingly, given his name) parodies of classic detective stories. For example, Parodi is frequently referred to as "the prisoner in cell 273", which cannot help but evoke Jacques Futrelle's classic story "The Problem of Cell 13" as well as Baroness Orzy's "Man in the Corner" (who solves mysteries without ever leaving his corner table in the coffee shop). There are references to more Hollywood movies than one can imagine, as well as to such authors as James M. Cain and H. G. Wells. And when one reads, "My brain is a huge refrigerator. The circumstances of the death of Julia Ruis Villalba--Pumita to her peers--live on in this gray vessel, untainted," one cannot help but think of Hercules Poirot and his habit of referring to his brain as "the little grey cells." Even some of the plots copy classic stories; one seems heavily modeled after a Sherlock Holmes story.
(Borges's co-authored books include SIX PROBLEMS FOR DON ISIDRO PARODI, CHRONICLES OF BUSTOS DOMECQ, EXTRAORDINARY TALES, and NEW CHRONICLES OF BUSTOS DOMECQ (all with Adolfo Bioy-Casares); AN INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN LITERATURE (with Esther Zemborain de Torres), THE BOOK OF IMAGINARY BEINGS (with Marguerita Guerrero) and ATLAS (with Maria Kodama). ATLAS, AN INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN LITERATURE, and THE BOOK OF IMAGINARY BEINGS are non- fiction. "The Immortals" ("Los inmortales") from THE ALEPH AND OTHER STORIES 1933-1969 is from CHRONICLES OF BUSTOS DOMECQ. I mention this because it is *not* included in Borges's "complete" COLLECTED FICTIONS, which omits all co-authored works.)
To order Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi from amazon.com, click here.
BORGES: A LIFE by Edwin Williamson:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/08/2008]
BORGES: A LIFE by Edwin Williamson (ISBN-13 978-0-143-03556-5, ISBN-10 0-143-03556-8) is a very thorough biography of the life of Jorge Luis Borges--so thorough down to precise addresses that one could easily create a tour of Buenos Aires (and Geneva and Madrid), visiting all the houses where he lived, cafes where he ate, and so on. Beyond providing the minutiae of daily life, it also covers Borges's literary influences, contacts, and so on.
It also refreshed my memory on the word "tertulia", which I had first encountered in the film BUNUEL AND KING SOLOMON'S TABLE, but could not bring to mind. A "tertulia" is a group of friends who meet regularly at a cafe for discussions, and it struck me as an excellent term for the group that my father is in that meets twice a week at McDonald's. They have been meeting there for over twenty years. It used to be every day, but they cut back over the last few years. Borges's tertulia in Madrid did not last anywhere near that long, but almost definitely had a greater literary effect.
Borges wrote of learning Anglo-Saxon that it afforded him. "The pure contemplation of a language at its dawn" ["Al iniciar el estudio de la gramatica anglosajona"]. It's an understandable reaction, but there is something wrong with it. Assume that he was studying Anglo-Saxon from the ninth century. The problem is that in the ninth century they were not sitting around saying, "We're starting a new language here." Whatever state the language was in, it was in a continuum from what people were speaking in the eighth century and what people were speaking in the tenth century. Saying that this was a "language at its dawn" is really putting the perception of people a millennium later on the situation.
I was sure that I had remembered that Borges's first appearance in English was in THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION, but it was actually in FANTASTIC UNIVERSE--"The Rejected Sorcerer" appeared in the March 1960 issue of that magazine. This was not mentioned at all by Williamson.
And at times I think Williamson may be reading too much into Borges:
"Borges drew attention to the name of the protagonist: 'Emma with two m's and Zunz with two z's, I was trying to get an ugly and at the same time a colorless name... [T]he name seems so meaningless, so insignificant.' And yet, as he would have known, the name is so heavily charge with meaning that it reverberates like a magic charm. Emma is an abbreviated form of he father's name, Emmanuel, which in Hebrew signifies the 'savior.' Beginning and ending in vowels, Emma has an open, expansive quality, but Zumz is a thoroughly inverted word--the internal u and n are inverted mirror images of each other, and they are further boxed in by the two z's, which themselves are shaped like capital N's turned on their side. It is as if the fullness of Emmanuelle had been truncated to Emma by its juxtaposition with Zunz, and in that conjunction of a and z we again come across introversion--the a, which is the last letter of Emma, is also the first letter of the alphabet, but it is blocked by the letter z, which is the initial letter of Zunz, while being, of course, the final letter of the alphabet. The overall effect is of a confusion of beginnings and endings, of openings and closures, from which there is no issue other than in the blank space in the middle that divides one name from the other. In purely graphic terms, the name Emma Zunz functions as an ideogram of the kind of solipsistic labyrinth in which Borges imagined himself to be trapped, for all the ements end up turning in on themselves, pointing to nothing but reflections or distortions of each other, so that if there is a promise of salvation in the first name emma, the second, Zunz, stops it dead."
My one complaint about Williamson's book is that the proof-reading has some slips, including consistently giving Poe's name as "Edgar Allen Poe".
(Williamson's BORGES: A LIFE should not be confused with James Woodall's BORGES: A LIFE. Whatever possessed Williamson, whose last name also starts with a 'W', to choose the precise same title as Woodall, it must have been some Borgesian paradox.)
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