Monday, December 20, 2010

"In the sweet mojave rain!"

Of all the contemporary Christmas songs I've heard, this is in my top 3, and the video is great fun. Merry Christmas from The Killers.

Sunday, December 19, 2010

Finnish Licorice Pipe Guy: Eyes Only

A friend of mine is married to a Finnish gal and they speak Finnish at home. Why does this matter? Because he often passes along gems of Finnish youtube-culture, like this!



"Hey Ma, order me a case-a-them licorice pipes so I can fnd licorice pipe nirvana like this young Finn."

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Last Year at [.....................]

 "Sin embargo, de un momento en otro, en esta pesada noche de verano,
 los pajonales de la colina se han cubierto de gente que baila, que pasea
y que se baña en la pileta, como veraneantes instalados desde hace tiempo
en los Teques o en Marienbad."

-Bioy Casares, La invención de Morel

Borges wrote that "To classify [La invención de Morel] as perfect is neither an imprecision nor a hyperbole." (7).  If anything will finally reveal one's poverty of thought, that they are merely an impostor among impostors, it will be any attempt to write about the perfect novel.  There was a critic that believed he had happened upon an original idea, one that had not yet been weighed down by volumes of criticism or, worse yet, a few books of that ugly beast we call "critical theory".  Still, he wasn't surprised to discover that two South American's (one, Chilean, the other, a pompous Uruguayan) had prefigured what he once thought to be "his ideas."  Their bibliography is an exact copy of the sacred combination of texts he'd hurriedly penned nine days ago in the University of Texas library.  How strange that someone else had read Ecographies of Television and thought to include it in a study on Bioy Casares's masterwork.  Returning to the novel he'd attempted to understand, hoping to salvage his work, the young critic read on page 52, "Di un paso: por arcadas de piedra, en ocho direcciones vi repetirse, como en espejos, ocho veces la misma cámara...".  Then, according to the librarian's report, he stood up and walked out of the library, repeating these words again and again, "los espejos y la cópula son abominables, porque multiplican el número de los hombres."