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October 28, 2005
I found the Borges text captivating — both physically and meta-. More than anything, I enjoyed the latent humor, nearly irony throughout the writing. Still the concepts Borges presents are very much sobering. The passages regarding the limited nature of the labyrinth — the lexicon — are perfect. Borges plays with scope in very interesting ways — there are definite limits to the labyrinth of language, but they are so vast, we often deify them — canonization. Borges defines the length of the books, the size of rooms, and alludes to a finite number of works comprised.
I was also struck by the passage regarding the destruction of certain volumes. The writing almost seems self-deprecating, invalidating word-smiths. But Dan O'sullivan put it nicely today, to paraphrase, "Just because someone painted flowers before, that didn't stop people from painting flowers." The concept is very Aristotelian, that the knowledge is there, the trick lies in recovering/remembering it. I was consistently thinking of entropy while reading this.
Hejduk, however, I found tiring. Too much relied on abstract symbolism, I felt — so I chose to read it for what it was — a short work of fiction. The imagery, however is fitting of the content. I just couldn'y see anything more than novelty within the context.
I maintain that last week's 'reading' dealt with labyrinths. What about Calvino???
Posted by alex at October 28, 2005 01:10 AM