Jason (jcreed) wrote,
Jason
jcreed
Oh man I sure pissed away what might have been a productive day. Went to a recital of (former 312 student and bass player) Carlos Chadha's, which was very good. Got to hear Horace Silver's "Peace" and also "Blue Monk" and some Bach. Finished off "Genius", and found myself in Hillman again, addict that I am. I was hunting around for the stories "The Aleph" and "Everything and Nothing", because of references to them in "Genius". I did find both of them: the eponymous Aleph is, in the story, an anomaly in the basement of the house inhabited by a bad poet, the cousin of the narrator's late love interest, a point that is connected to every other point in the universe, a panopticon, a realization of God's omniscience into the world of things at all scales. Totally classic Borges. "Everything and Nothing" is a very brief piece, just about two pages, that is a haunting imagined bibliography of the life and death of Shakespeare. It's no surprise that Bloom referred to it, so overt is his Bard-love. But the Borges story's postulation of the fictional Shakespeare's conflicting life-yearnings for being other people (on the stage and on the page) and being some-himself, and encountering God in death and finding He has the same dilemma --- well, it does a much better service to the memory of the genius of the real Shakespeare than Bloom's offering: so many pages of casual, spiritually charged superlatives, such "never again"s, such polemics against whatever heretics fail to love Shakespeare enough.

Anyway, I couldn't leave Hillman without checking out a book of translations of some of Borge's nonfiction, which I had never encountered much of before, and it's fantastic.
Tags: books, music
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