Jorge Luis Borges

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“It Is Too Gigantic, Pedantic, Tedious”

August 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Videos | Permalink

Jorge Luis Borges penned a perplexing review of Citizen Kane in 1941, and Orson Welles had a perfect riposte for it: “Borges is half-blind,” the director pointed out. “Never forget that.” Here’s the ending of the critique, which can be read in full at the Interrelevant:

“I venture to guess, nonetheless, that Citizen Kane will endure as a certain Griffith or Pudovkin films have ‘endured’—films whose historical value is undeniable but which no one cares to see again. It is too gigantic, pedantic, tedious. It is not intelligent, though it is the work of genius—in the most nocturnal and Germanic sense of that bad word.”

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“Now he can live his dreams with less distraction”:

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“Mathematicians Have Spent Time Calculating How Long It Would Take A Monkey To Write A Copy Of Hamlet”

April 2, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Monkeys hitting random keys on typewriters (or tablets) would take eons to write Hamlet but not quite as long to write something better than Hamlet. It’s logical, even if it’s almost completely useless information. From Alex Mayyasi at Priceonomics:

“Mathematicians have spent time calculating how long it would take a monkey to write a copy of Hamlet (even if they perform better than the macaques in England, the answer is a really long time — orders of magnitude longer than the universe has existed). But Borges’s Total Library idea suggests an important corollary to the Infinite Monkey Theorem: a monkey hitting random keys on a typewriter would mostly likely write something superior to Shakespeare long before it produced a copy of Hamlet.

The logic is simple. The odds of a monkey writing an intelligible sentence are low, but the odds of one writing a sentence from Hamlet are astronomical because there are many possible intelligible sentences but a limited number of sentences in Hamlet. In the same way, there are a limited number of works by Shakespeare, but there are an almost infinite number of plays and books that are better than Shakespeare ranging from a copy of Hamlet with one small, superior tweak to yet-to-be-written sci-fi novels to George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series.”

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“Concerning His Work, His Critics Disagree, Except On The Proposition That It Will Survive The Century”

March 29, 2013 in Books, Videos | Permalink

Why don’t I like Jorge Luis Borges’ writing more than I do? He would seem aesthetically to be right up my alley, but I just don’t connect to it. Here’s an appearance by the Argentine legend with William F. Buckley on Firing Line in 1977. 

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“On The Today Show On Television He Invoked The Name Of Gustave Flaubert”

August 24, 2011 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Much as I’ve tried to feel differently, I’ve always liked the idea of Borges much more than the actual writings of Borges. But on this, his 112th birthday, I came across “Borges, a Blind Writer With Insight,” a 1971 New York Times interview with the Argentine writer, who apparently appeared on the Today show right around that time. An excerpt:

“Today his short stories — some hardly dawdle past a paragraph — appear in The New Yorker, and they are collected in books. Essences of essences. Labyrinths within mazes within mirrors.
When he comes to this country — he is here on a visit now — he has an utterly respectful audience. How many Latin-American authors are so well translated? He is naturally taken as a candidate for elevation to the Nobel Prize.
Beware! Who knows what this Imaginary Being will say next? On the Today show on television he invoked the name of Gustave Flaubert, and actually whispered a book’s title in excellent French. The effect could not have been more startling had he changed into a Hippogriff and pecked at the startled interviewer.
Replying to questions, he draws from the cadences of memory. Borges says, ‘At my age [71], what can I do but plagiarize what I’ve already said, no?’
What shall a writer be in the glare of glosses on glosses and endless honors? Scholars consecrate volumes to his carefully turned ironies. Is he a Domesticated Industry?
Borges lives on the north side of Buenos Aires. Recently he took a taxi to the National Library on the south side. The taxi driver said, ‘Are you by any chance Borges?’
Borges said ‘Well, more or less’ or ‘I think so.'”

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