Thank You, Jorge-Luis Borges, for The Dancing Baby…
Sunday, January 6th by Shane
According to this NY Times article, the prolific author predicted the existence of not just the internet, but Wikipedia, Youtube, and some crazy old nerd with a camera hat. I agree that the text seems fairly prescient, but I don’t believe the idea of a tangible omniscience was a new idea even if Borges may have written about it more eloquently than others. Can anyone back this up?
Ed, who I assumes sleeps no more than three hours a day in a discount hyperbaric chamber, has already remade Return of the Reluctant into the (tentatively titled) Filthy Habits. Here’s the introduction, and here is a piece on wasted french fries that somehow invokes Vietnam.
The Millions runs us through some factoids about the site, and links back to their list of how to pronounce the names of authors. Make sure you look back at the title of this post and say it ‘bor-”hAs
From my friend Tim, Minneapolis and Seattle are the two most bookish cities in America. Plano, Texas ranked 51st. Are you guys just reading cereal boxes over there?
And finally, an uplifting story from The Guardian about the healing power of books. Not the ones by that Kevin Trudeau shyster, but classic works of fiction. Some say it alleviates pain while others contend it can calm mental disorders. The article is very thorough and a nice diversion from the book is dead mantra, but for some reason they left out an arbitrary photo of Susan Powter.
