Writer and editor Dave Eggers appears on this week’s R.U. Sirius show.

MP3.

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John Barth on Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges:

Here, I thought, was a sort of Borges without tears, or better, a Borges con molto brio: lighter-spirited than the great Argentine, often downright funny (as Sr. Borges almost never is), yet comparably virtuosic in form and language, comparably rich in intelligence and imagination.

Full Article: Center for Book Culture.

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The Modern World held a Borges inspired “imaginary book review” contest. I haven’t read any of the reviews yet, but I love the idea.

The Modern World.

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Borges’s story about a map as big as the territory it represented compared to Google Maps:

It is in these days that we are witnessing the collective creation of a map even more exact that Borges could imagine; one that describes the limits, the roads, and the shores of every territory on the planet. At the same time it uncovers another ambition more perfect and occult: that every shepherd or “emperor” can edit their own map as they wish, they can forge their own version of the world. In that map we will have a blueprint of human life: Things moving, crimes, thefts, migrating animals, childhood memories, imaginary battles between good and evil, hookers and ogres, real-time weather. In all, anything that can be pointed down to the soil and be named. (Mira!)

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The Economist on new smart drugs:

At least 40 potential cognitive enhancers are currently in clinical development, says Harry Tracy, publisher of NeuroInvestment, an industry newsletter based in Rye, New Hampshire. Some could reach the market within a few years. For millions, these breakthroughs could turn out to be lifesavers or, at the very least, postpone the development of a devastating disease. In America alone, there are currently about 4.5m people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, and their ranks are expected to grow to 6m by 2020. Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), defined as memory loss without any significant functional impairment, is estimated to afflict at least another 4.5m people. Because the majority of MCI patients will eventually develop Alzheimer’s, many doctors believe that intervening in the early stages of the disease could significantly delay its onset.

Link (via R.U. Sirius).

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Here’s a great sub-site from a Borges site with analysis of Borges’s influence on numorous writers, including: Grant Morrison, William Gibson, Joyce Carol Oates, Neil Gaimon, Harlan Ellison, Umberto Eco, and others.

Morrison: I had a dream where I was on a train going through a horrible bone-like station. The name on the platform said “Orqwith,” so I’d thought I’d use it. Also, part of this dream was that this fictitious world was infiltrating parts of itself into our world. But like you say, it’s got a lot to do with stealing work of a blind Argentinian writer.

AH: I’m afraid I stopped reading after “The Garden of Forking Paths.”

Morrison: So you haven’t finished Labyrinths?

AH: I did read ‘”Tl?n, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” and the one about Don Quixote.

Morrison: I think he’s wonderful. I just have baths in this sort of thing. That was one of the things I wanted to Introduce in Doom Patrol. All those strange paradoxes and philosophical curios.

Link (via the Barbelith Underground).

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The Garden of Jorge Luis Borges is a collection of online texts that contains, in addition to criticism, some of Borges’ fiction and poetry; including “Library of Babel,” one of his most acclaimed and frequently referred to stories.

When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope. At that time a great deal was said about the Vindications: books of apology and prophecy which vindicated for all time the acts of every man in the universe and retained prodigious arcana for his future. Thousands of the greedy abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed up the stairways, urged on by the vain intention of finding their Vindication. These pilgrims disputed in the narrow corridors, proferred dark curses, strangled each other on the divine stairways, flung the deceptive books into the air shafts, met their death cast down in a similar fashion by the inhabitants of remote regions. Others went mad … The Vindications exist (I have seen two which refer to persons of the future, to persons who are perhaps not imaginary) but the searchers did not remember that the possibility of a man’s finding his Vindication, or some treacherous variation thereof, can be computed as zero.

Link.

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The latest edition of the weird literary magazine Exquisite Corpse has an Jorge Borges story called “Ragnar?k” in it. Short and thought provoking.

In dreams, writes Coleridge, images form the impressions that we believe them to trigger; we are not afraid because we’re clutched by a sphinx, but rather a sphinx embodies the fear that we feel. If this is so, can a mere account of one’s dream–shapes transmit the stupor, the elation, the false alarms, the menace, and the jubilation that is woven into last night’s sleep? I will experiment with this account, without restraint; perhaps the fact that the dream was a single stream of consciousness expunges or mitigates this essential difficulty.

Link.

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