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Thursday, February 26th, 2009

🦋 The existence of genre

Borges opens his lecture on "The Detective Story"* with a brief argument that it is legitimate to talk about literary genres. He is responding to an assertion by Benedetto Croce in "his formidable Æsthetics", that "claiming that a book is a novel, an allegory, or a treatise on æsthetics, has more or less the same value as claiming that its cover is yellow and that it can be found on the third shelf on the left." Borges makes easy, playful work of advancing his argument, but he does not really bother to point out how off-base Croce's analogy is. I will do that, because I want to take issue with something Borges says later in the lecture, and I'd rather start out with an easy argument.

The claims Croce is making about the book -- that it is yellow, that it is on the third shelf on the left -- are claims about a particular copy of the book. These are a different type of statement than claims about the book's genre, which refer to a class rather than to an instance of the class. That's all. The Stanford Encyclopædia of Philosophy says that it's "hard to find a figure whose reputation has fallen so far and so quickly" as Croce's, who fell quickly out of favor after the Second World War, and that his work is "full of the youthful conviction and fury that seldom wears well."

Anyways -- so that's sort of a warm-up for my post later this evening where I'll be arguing that Borges gets it wrong when he is characterizing the manner of reading that signals detective fiction.

* You can read the lecture online in Spanish at the blog of Theodoro and his philosophical dog; the English translation is in Collected Non-Fictions. Theodoro notes that it was included as a prologue to the 1982 edition of Seis Problemas para don Isidro Parodi (detective stories by Borges and Bioy-Casares); I don't know if it was included in the translation of that book. (Google Books suggests that it was not.)

posted evening of February 26th, 2009: Respond
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Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

🦋 On stage at the Largo

Driving home from work, I was listening to Robyn Hitchcock's April 3 1999 show at the Largo (in LA? I think so) and some of his patter caught my attention. And I thought hey, it's been a little while since I posted a transcription of Hitchcock's stage patter, why not give it a whirl? So here you go. Note: I don't think Robyn is really at the top of his game in this concert -- he sounds tired and probably drunk, and the music and patter both have a lot of rough edges -- I think he is acknowledging this when he says, after "Viva Sea-Tac", "Man, I am so rocking. Not even." He manages to come up with some interesting ideas amid the incoherence though. Patter below the fold.

posted evening of February 25th, 2009: 4 responses
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🦋 Whenless whyless ultimate things

Further to the post below about Borges' lecture on Emanuel Swedenborg: I see that Borges also wrote a sonnet about the theologian.

Más alta que los otros, caminaba
Acquel hombre lejano entre los hombres;
Apenas si llamaba por sus nombres
Secretos a los ángeles. Miraba
Lo que no ven los ojos terrenales:
La ardiente geometría, el cristalino
Edificio de Dios y el remolino
Sórdido de los goces infernales.
Sabía que la Gloria y el Averno
En tu alma están y sus mithologías;
Sabía, como el griego, que los días
Del tiempo son espejos del Eterno.
En árido latín fue registrando
Últimas cosas sin por qué ni cuando.

posted afternoon of February 25th, 2009: 3 responses
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🦋 Aristotelians and Platonists

In his note on "Jorge Luis Borges and William James" (pdf), Jaime Nubiola quotes a passage from Borges' introduction to a Spanish translation of James' Pragmatism. Very nice: I now understand a little better than I ever did before the common distinction between "Aristotelians" and "Platonists". (Also, I never realized this distinction was Coleridge's coinage.) This paragraph is useful in reading Borges' lectures on Emanuel Swedenborg and on Immortality.

Coleridge observes that all men are born Aristotelians or Platonists. The latter feel that ideas are realities: the former, that they are generalizations. For the latter, language is nothing but a system of arbitrary symbols: for the former, it is the map of the universe. The Platonist knows that the universe is somehow a cosmos, an order; that order, for the Aristotelian, can be an error or a fiction of our partial knowledge. Across the latitudes and the epochs, the two immortal antagonists change their name and language: one is Parmenides, Plato, Anselm, Leibnitz, Kant, Francis Bradley; the other, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Roscelin, Locke, Hume, William James. (...) From 1889, this lucid tradition is enriched with William James. Like Bergson, he fights against positivism and against idealist monism. He advocates, like Bergson, in favor of immortality and freedom.

posted morning of February 25th, 2009: Respond
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Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

🦋 Mystics

Recall that fearsome sentence of Carlyle, who read -- not without benefit -- Swe­denborg, and who said: The history of the universe is a scripture which we have, which is read and is written constantly. And it's true: we are continually presenting the history of the universe, and we are actors in it. And we are also letters, also we are symbols: A divine text in which we are written. At home I have a dictionary of correspondences. One can look up any word of the Bible and see what is the spiritual sense Swedenborg gave it.

The kingdom of heaven is owned by the poor in spirit, etc. This is what Jesus said. But Swedenborg adds more to that. He says that that is not enough, that a person must also save himself intellectually. He imagines heaven, above all, as a series of theological conversations between the angels. And if a person cannot follow these conversations, he is unworthy of heaven. Thus, he must live alone. And then comes William Blake, who adds a third salvation. He says that we can -- that we have to -- save ourselves also through the medium of art. Blake explains that Christ too was an artist, who did not preach through the medium of words, but of parables. And that parables are æsthetic expressions. That is to say, that salvation should be through the intellect, through ethics and through works of art.

And here let us recall some of the phrases in which Blake moderated, in a way, the great sentences of Swedenborg: The stupid one will not enter into heaven for being saintly. Or: Refuse sainthood; invest in intellect.

And then comes Blake, who adds that man must also be an artist to save himself. It is a triple salvation: we have to save ourselves through goodness, through justice, through abstract intelligence; and then through works of art.

The portion of the lecture where Borges is recommending that his students can't go wrong by reading a bit of Swedenborg's writing sounds to my ear like a throw-away -- he's obviously much more interested in the man's intellectual heirs. Besides Blake and Carlyle he mentions Emerson, William and Henry James, George Bernard Shaw.

A nice bit of background: Borges introduces his topic by saying that Voltaire said the most extraordinary person in history was Charles XII, that he is instead going to talk about a subject of Charles XII. Well -- I had not even known Voltaire wrote any history. But sure enough, he wrote a biography of King Charless XII of Sweden; you can read it at Google Books.

Also, from Wikipædia comes this fantastic bit of knowledge: Johnny Appleseed was a Swedenborgian! I had no idea!

Swedenborgianism in the news: the Springfield, IL News-Sun runs a profile of the Urbana Swedenborgian Church.

posted evening of February 24th, 2009: 4 responses

Sunday, February 22nd, 2009

🦋 Puppy pictures

Lots of pictures of Lola and Pixie (and various other shih tsus around the neighborhood) are up now at the READIN family album.

...And here is the article that Ellen was taking those pictures for: Shih Tsus in South Orange.

posted evening of February 22nd, 2009: Respond
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🦋 Cogitare ergo esse

Later in "Immortality", some source material for Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius:

And here, Berkeley maintains that matter is a series of perceptions, and that these perceptions are inconceivable without a conscious entity which perceives. What is red? Red depends on our eyes, our eyes are a system of perceptions as well. Later comes Hume, who refutes both hypotheses, who destroys the soul and the body. What is the soul, except that which perceives, and what is matter, except something perceived? If in the world we are to do away with nouns, we are left limited to verbs. As Hume says, we are not allowed to say I think, because I is a subject; one must say it is thinking, in the same manner as we say it is raining. When Descartes said, I think, therefore I am, he ought to have said, something thinks or it is thinking, because I supposes an entity and we have no right to make that assumption. He could have said: It is thinking, therefore something exists.

posted afternoon of February 22nd, 2009: 2 responses

🦋 Reading: sound and meaning

Mariana Eça's office in the Alfama quarter was half an hour's walk. It took him four hours. It began with him sitting down whenever he found a bench, sitting and changing his glasses. With the new glasses the world was bigger and for the first time, space really had three dimensions where things could extend unhindered. The Tagus was no longer a vague brownish surface, but a river, and the Castelo de São Jorge projected into the sky in three directions, like a real citadel.... In a little park, he took out Prado's notes and tried out the new glasses.

O verdadeiro encenador da nossa vida é acaso -- um encenador cheio de crueldade, misericórdia e encanto cativante. Gregorius didn't believe his eyes: he hadn't understood any of Prado's sentences so easily: The real director of our life is accident -- a director full of cruelty, compassion and bewitching charm.

I definitely experience the book differently when I am focusing on the sound of the words, rather than primarily on their meaning. I think there is something of value in this type of reading.

posted afternoon of February 22nd, 2009: Respond
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🦋 Nostalgia for Earth

A fun passage from the beginning of Borges' lecture "Immortality":

Without understanding [William James'] joke, don Miguel de Unamuno repeats it word for word in his The Tragic Sense of Life*: God is the provider of immortality, but he repeats many times that he wants to go on being don Miguel de Unamuno. Here I don't understand Miguel de Unamuno; I do not want to go on being Jorge Luis Borges, I want to be another person. I hope that my death will be total, I hope to die in body and soul.

I do not know if it's ambitious or modest, or at all justifiable, my pretension of speaking about personal immortality, about a soul which preserves a memory of that which was on earth and which already in the other world corresponds to the previous one. I remember that my sister, Norah, was at my house the other day and said: I'm going to paint a picture called "Nostalgia for Earth", having as its content that which an angel feels in heaven, thinking of earth. I'm going to make it up of elements from Buenos Aires when I was a girl.

Update: fixed a blunder in my translation, after referring to Eliot Weinberger's translation of the lecture in Selected Non-Fictions.

* Jaime Nubiola and Izaskun Martínez of the Universidad de Navarra have written a paper on Unamuno's Reading of The Varieties of Religious Experience and its Context. Nubiola also has an interesting note in Streams of William James, vol. I, #3 (pdf), on "Jorge Luis Borges and WJ", and in vol. III, #3 (pdf), on "WJ and Borges Again: the Riddle of the Correspondence with Macedonio Fernández". Professor Nubiola has confirmed to me by e-mail that as he understands it, "Unamuno is a deep believer and William James is -- at the end of the day -- a non believer, who understands the belief in God as the other side of the belief of immortality."

posted afternoon of February 22nd, 2009: 4 responses
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Friday, February 20th, 2009

🦋 Borges as teacher

I was reading the author's preface to Borges oral just now, in which he explains how he chose each of his topics -- of "The Book," he says it is the tool "without which I could not imagine my life, and which is no less intimate to me than my hands or my eyes."

I was very taken with Borges' humble description of his role as a teacher:

Thanks to the listener, who gives me his indulgent hospitality, my classes achieved a success which I had not hoped for, and which I certainly did not merit.

As a lecture, the class is a collaborative work, and those who listen are no less important than he who speaks.

This book contains my personal portion of these sessions. I hope the reader may enrich them as much as they were enriched by the listeners.

posted evening of February 20th, 2009: Respond

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