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Saturday, June 12th, 2010
My and Mariana's exchange of Spanish books continues -- yesterday I gave her El informe de Brodie (she says she and every other Argentinian student read Borges' stories in her High School classes but has not gone back to them since then) and she gave me Galeano's Bocas del tiempo and El palacio japonés by José Mauro de Vasconcelos (translated from the Portuguese, and with a foreword, by Haydée M. Jofro Barroso).
posted morning of June 12th, 2010: Respond
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 At a street fair yesterday, I happened on Patrick Woodruff selling his wares, including Las aventuras de ¡QUIXOTE! -- bought a copy, it's a lot of fun. Take a look at his deviantart gallery, the pages of this comic are all there.
posted morning of June 12th, 2010: Respond
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Thursday, June 10th, 2010
At Shorpy today, Dave publishes an absolutely stunning view of the (as yet incomplete) Williamsburg bridge, shot circa 1902; the photographer is at the base of the bridge on the Brooklyn side looking west:
The bridge would open December of the following year. (And I got a nice shot of it in February of this year, not of course on anything like such a grand scale.)
posted evening of June 10th, 2010: Respond
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 Belle Waring (who is blogging again! Hooray!) alerts us to the ridiculous stance of Apple's iPad App Store, that Buck Mulligan's genitalia may not appear in material distributed to an iPad app -- with the upshot that Rob Berry's Ulysses "Seen" comic would not be sold in the App Store. Berry has agreed to cut the nudity, the expurgated comic will again be available on Apple products...
 An interview with Berry and Levitas, at Robot 6. ...Update: Macy Halford at the New Yorker's Book Bench reports that Apple is altering its restrictions on iPad apps and has asked Berry to resubmit the unexpurgated version.
posted evening of June 10th, 2010: Respond
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 Via Elan' Rodger Trinidad, a Russian adaptation of Bradbury's Here There be Tygers:
 For more Soviet sci-fi cartoons, see chewbakka.com.
posted morning of June 10th, 2010: Respond
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Wednesday, June 9th, 2010
The piece of Pliny's Natural History which Funes is reciting the third time Borges sees him is from the beginning of Book VII*, chapter 26; in Philemon Holland's translation: AS TOUCHING MEMORIE, the greateſt gift of Nature, and moſt neceſſarie of all others for this life; hard it is to judge and ſay who of all others deſerved the cheefe honour therein: conſidering how many men have excelled, and woon much glorie in that behalfe. King Cyrus was able to call every ſouldior that he had through his whole armie, by his owne name. L. Scipio could doe the like by all the citizens of Rome. Semblably, Cineas, Embaſſador of king Pyrrhus, the very next day that he came to Rome, both knew and alſo ſaluted by name all the Senate, and the whole degrees of Gentlemen and Cavallerie in the cittie. Mithridates the king, reigned over two and twentie nations of diverſe languages, and in ſo many tongues gave lawes and miniſtred juſtice unto them, without truchman: and when hee was to make ſpeech unto them in publicke aſſemblie reſpectively to every nation, he did performe it in their owne tongue, without interpretor. One Charmidas or Carmadas, a Grecian,†††was of ſo ſingular a memorie, that he was able to deliver by heart the contents word for word of all the bookes that a man would call for out of any librarie, as if he read the ſame preſently within a booke. At length the practiſe hereof was reduced into an art of Memorie: deviſed and invented firſt by Simonides Melicus, and afterwards brought to perfection and conſummate by Metrodorus Scepſius: by which a man might learne to rehearſe againe the ſame words of any diſcourſe whatſoever, after once hearing.
†††Carneades, according to Cicero and Quintilian.
* (The same volume to which John of Pannonia will refer in "The Theologians".)
posted evening of June 9th, 2010: Respond
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My sorry condition of being an Argentine prevents me from engaging in the genre -- obligatory in Uruguay -- of dithyramb; my subject is after all a Uruguayan.
Line from "Funes, the memorious" has me looking around to see if there are any examples of old Uruguayan dithyramb chanting... and I do not find that, not exactly*. But check out this more recent Chilean group, Ditirambo.
 * And I have a sneaking hunch that Borges is not saying quite what I at first took him to be saying, either -- that the usage is exaggeration or mis-naming, that "dithyramb" is here just a manner of speaking.
posted evening of June 9th, 2010: Respond
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An idea I just had which I think it would be fun to implement: a database table with favorite (striking or profound) brief lines from each book I read -- When you read the archive page for the book in question, those lines, or some randomized subset of them, would be displayed as part of the information in the left hand sidebar. Add to this a setting in the database for "current reading", the book or books that I'm currently reading/thinking about, and a set of lines from those books could be on the front page's sidebar. A little bit like the epigraphs I run at the top of the page, but a bit more fleeting, less a permanent part of the site. For instance I really liked the line, "He does not know -- nobody could know -- my immeasurable contrition, my weariness," from "The Garden of Forking Paths." But it really only seems meaningful in the context of that reading. (This would really free me up in terms of posting short quotations, too -- generally I try only to post a quotation when I have something in particular to say about it. And only to create a new epigraph when I find a really meaningful one. -- So this is a third way.)
Two notes about the translation of that line, * Thanks John for helping with the adjective, "immeasurable" sounds much better than "innumerable" or than "endless", and * Thanks Dr. Hurley for the repetition of "my" at the end, I was leaning towards just using "contrition and weariness" as being the closest thing in format to "contrición y cansancio" -- but somehow that doesn't sound quite right in English.
Implementation: have a button or link on the editing view of the blog that is called "Add Quotation" or something similar -- clicking on it will bring up a dialog box or form where you can enter your quote and the book it is from -- then the the "current reading" books will be books for which I have either posted a quotation or a journal entry over the past say week or two.
posted evening of June 9th, 2010: 2 responses
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Tuesday, June 8th, 2010
The caprice, the fantasy, the utopia of a Total Library has certain characteristics which are easily mistaken for virtues. Incredible, in the first place, how long it took mankind to arrive at this idea. Certain passages which Aristotle attributes to Democritus and to Leucippus clearly prefigure it; but its tardy inventor is Gustav Theodor Fechner; its first expositor, Kurd Lasswitz.
The note in Sur #59 to which Borges referred in the foreword to The Garden of Forking Paths, is his essay "The Total Library" -- I thank Daniel Balderston of the Borges Center at U. Pittsburgh for pointing this out to me. "The Total Library" (which has appeared many times in translation, most recently in Selected Non-Fictions) is a lovely read and excellent companion material for "The Library of Babel" -- it lacks the haunting, overpowering sense of futility which is that story's strongest characteristic, but it lays out clearly and concisely the premises underlying the story and its sources of inspiration.
 See also Theodor Pavlapoulos' essay, Lasswitz and Borges: Indexing the Library of Everything; and Lasswitz' story Die Universalbibliothek.
posted evening of June 8th, 2010: Respond
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 Longtime readers will remember how excited I was to read Augusto Monterroso's short story "The Dinosaur"* -- today I discover that Monterroso had an august predecessor in Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway's story "Baby Shoes" is only six words long, and has inspired a whole genre of six-word micro-stories. Perpetual Folly reprints a  BlackBook feature in which 25 major writers -- skewing older-white-male-mid-century -- contributed their six-worders; I'm partial to Brian Bouldrey's contribution, but there is a lot to be said for Norman Mailer's, too. Wired Magazine ran a feature with 92 six-word stories from science-fiction or science-fictiony authors including Frank Miller, Neil Gaiman, Bruce Sterling, and more. And Pete Berg maintains a blog at sixwordstories.net dedicated to publishing readers' six-word stories.
* (Follow the link! Nick Boalch is attempting to translate "The Dinosaur" into a comic -- what a great idea.)
posted evening of June 8th, 2010: 2 responses
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