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8 posts tagged Borges
Many years ago, when I first started college, I’d come into the still-unknown city on the weekend sometimes to visit a childhood friend. One visit I remember, it was raining and I was wandering around, probably lost, and ducked into the NYU bookstore. I found Borges and pulled Labyrinths off, vaguely aware that it was a book I should read and would love. I opened to this page, read until my friend called me, put the book back on the shelf. Somehow I vividly remember this—the corner I stood in, the umbrella between my feet, the shiny mirrored cover, that feeling of sitting in a quiet mahogany office and not that cluttered small store off Washington Square. I didn’t pick Labyrinths back up for another couple years, when I finally devoted an entire weekend to it, sitting in Central Park, middle of summer, overhot and coming off a month of not reading anything. This book grabbed me, demanded an instant reread, managed to burrow itself back into my reading history so it became as if I’d first read it when I was ten, again when I was eleven, every year until that summer, so that the real first time was actually like the tenth or eleventh read. Like Borges was inherent.
“Corollary. One must reread Borges.”
“In understanding Borges, it is important to remember that, for him, literary experience has been more vivid and affecting than real experience, or, better said, that there is no sensible difference between the two; so that when Borges is talking about books and writers, it is like talking of landscapes and journeys, so vivid has his reading been to him. Through literature, he maintains, we can travel through time, and become all men; it is his Aleph.”
Google Doodle commemorating the 112th birthday of Jorge Luis Borges. Love.
Reblogged from skibinskipedia
Great article by Liz on one of my favorite subjects. (I mean, what is this, other than marginalia out of control…) This bit:
When a consumer encounters marginalia in a used book, it has the potential to change one’s perception of a book’s value. Cathy Marshall, a Microsoft researcher, found that university students evaluated textbooks before purchasing so that they can bring home the book with the smartest notes.Reminded me of Andrei Codrescu on the Kindle:
I don’t know about you, but I always hated underlined passages in used books. They derail my private enjoyment….When somebody offers perception of what’s important, something moronic, usually…And this thing on my Kindle…something called view popular highlights, which will tell you how many morons have underlined before so that not only you do not own the new book you paid for, the entire experience of reading is shattered by the presence of a mob that agitates inside your text like strangers in a train station.
Of course, if the people making the marks mean something to you, reading a marked-up book can be a wonderful experience.
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From “Marginalia” by Billy Collins:
Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page
A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”
Free, legal audio of Collins reading it here.
- David Quigg, 4/28/2011
sorry to add to this already long and thoughtful commentary! but, it made me think of my favorite found bit, from a hardcover copy of Borges’ The Book of Imaginary Beings (which is already so great):
I’m not sure it’s strictly marginalia, since it’s on an inside cover rather than on a page, and it doesn’t make strict sense, but still. I love it.
Source austinkleon
Reblogged from austinkleon
“…We dream we are reading a book, and the truth is we have invented every word in the book. But we don’t realize it, and we take it as strange. I have noted in many dreams this anticipatory process, which prepares us for the things to come.”
Reblogged from writewritewriteon
“And those of us, never angels, who are verbal, who “on this low, relative ground” write, those of us who lowly imagine that ascending into print is the maximum reality of experiences? May resignation––the virtue to which we must resign ourselves––be with us. It will be our destiny to mold ourselves to syntax, to its treacherous chain of events, to the imprecision, the maybes, the too many emphases, the buts, the hemisphere of lies and of darkness in our speech. And to confess (not without some ironic deception) that the least impossible classification of our language is the mechanics of phrases, whether they be active, passive, gerund, impersonal, or other.”
Borges, in his essay “An Investigation of the Word” in On Writing.
I love that I flip this book open to any random page and oh, hey, brilliance.
when a literary reference just doesn’t work
“Milton and Borges managed; my newly blind dog will, too, then.”
(but maybe kind of?) (no, no.) (well, she will manage, but not because two writers did once too.)
