Russian Doll

Years ago I gave up any pretension of possessing an ability to critique anything coherently, but the new television series Russian Doll is pretty fucking Borgesian. It's seemingly very conscious too. An interview I've seen with one of the creators says she loves video games as a creative medium. It's well-known that video game creators lean heavy on Borges in their branching narratives. However, it's almost certain that Headland and/or Lyonne is directly acknowledging Borges with the mirrors and split timelines. There are too many other literary allusions. They didn't just stumble onto that, but are deft enough not to make a clumsy namecheck.

Speaking of namechecks though, it delights me that "Jodorowsky's Dune" is used as a password to a drug den.

Borges' The Gospel According to Mark audio

It's the first time that i ran across this SF audio blog. It turned up in another of my damned Borges searches. This post has a link to the New Yorker podcast in which Paul Theroux reads the Borges story The Gospel According to Mark.

A Sunday spent reading

Nothing much is going on here. I'm having some coffee as i package a job to be shipped out.

Yesterday was a lot of aimless reading. I re-read some Borges stories, mostly from his earliest collection. I went on a tangent finally realizing that he lifted Lazarus Morrell from John Murrell when i was reading the Wikipedia entry on the book. Even though i had recently re-read Twain's Life on the Mississippi, and knew the story by heart at that point, i neglected to make the connection consciously. It was nice to make a Twain-Borges connection.

After i got proprly riled up by that Slidell Jesus political money scam, i went hunting for H.L. Mencken quotes to throw in an email to that candidate, but in truth, i have nothing to say to the man. He probably duly be elected and have a long career fleecing the electorate. After all, some of these people are the same ones who keep voting for that shyster Jindal.

So to hell with my neighbors and my native territory... and i ordered some H.L. Mencken colections.

For no apparent reason, i picked up Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and re-read it straight through. It's been a few years. (Not Through the Looking Glass though. Not yet anyway.) Now i'm on an annotation fit with that, as i don't know all of the people these characters are based upon.

Then i read a bit of of Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year. It's new to me, and the old, idiosyncratic style of capitalization threw me off.

The evening ended with me picking up Heym's The Wandering Jew, as i had misplaced it for the past couple of months, but only clunked through 50 more pages.

A steadfast reader, i am not.

still waiting for Borges

Damn it! Still no word on when the Bioy Casares biography of Borges makes it into English translation? All of this bitchy letter writing has me itching. The more i know about Borges the man, the more i think he's a bastard, but the Bioy Casares has me ready to explore new complexities of his character, when before, i was ready to divorce his work from his life entirely.

self-absorbed, unsentimental

I never knew that Borges considered Rabelais "abominable." His loss. I still don't know Rabelais too well, but he impresses me. It's no surprise that Borges had no patience for lengthy books though. In fact, he comes off as an opinionated, arrogant asshole. And he has a sense of cruel humor. This is far better than Williamson's mama's boy. Good. I like this. The Borges biography by Adolfo Bioy Casares look to be fantastic.

It also seems a relief that Borges' actual work is never deconstructed. He reveals nothing.

So is it in English translation yet, or this more tantalizing bits to torment lazy people like myself?

(While i own the Williamson biography of Borges, i have not read it. I'm basing my opinion from reviews. Shallow perhaps, but i have other things to read.)