Monday, May 26, 2003
It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books — setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them. That was Carlyle's procedure in Sartor Resartus, Butler's in The Fair Haven — though those works suffer under the imperfection that they themselves are books, and not a whit less tautological than the others. A more reasonable, more inept, and more lazy man, I have chosen to write notes on imaginary books. Those notes are "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and "A Survey of the works of Herbert Quain."— Jorge Luis Borges,
Foreward to Fictions (1944),
Portal
Et Cetera
// Rolling list of recently browsed.
- » Not Gay Pride Month?
- » Hummina Hummina Hummina
- » Party of Five - 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.
- » Funniest Goddamned Commercial I?ve Ever Seen - (MPG video)
- » ?Smart Bricks? Monitor Building Safety - (via Slashdot)
- » History of the Word ?Cunt?
- » American Dialect Survey at Harvard
- » Finally, a use for those old CDs. - (via Slashdot)
- » R.I.P. Sir Bernard Williams, Vivre Vérité - (via Arts and Letters)
- » Sniffing Freon in the Freezer Aisle
