BORGES MAKES GENIUSES OF US ALL

I was just reading a story by Jorge Luis Borges, "A Survey Of The Works Of Herbert Quain."

The writer Herbert Quain is totally fictional, as far I can determine. I love it when Borges messes with your mind. In another story, he claims that a writer named Pierre Menard wrote the story of Don Quixote. Line by line, word for word. Yet original. How funny. Hilarious.

Borges reminds me of John Cage, the late avant garde composer and performer. Years ago, at UC Irvine, I saw Cage with his collaborator, the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham.

When the show started, we wandered into a small theater on the campus, a theater-in-the-round, with steps leading up to a low stage. Music playing, very low, as I recall. As if in the background.

As we were sitting there, one by one apparent members of the audience got up from their seats, strolled casually up onto the stage, and began to dance.

It was wonderful. It messed with your mind, violating your expectations. Who was next? Was I expected to get up and dance? Is that woman next to me a secret dancer? Were we all secret dancers?

I loved it.

At one point, Cage was writing things down as he was playing the piano. He invited questions from the audience. Someone said, "What are you doing?"

Cage said, "I'm giving myself instructions and following them."

People laughed. He was making fun of the whole set-up, the audience, the third-wall convention, the act of performing, the status of being either a performer or audience member, the very act of creation.

I told my friend Tim about this, and he said, "I hate that kind of thing." Of course, as he told me one time, he was missing the point.

Watching was part of the art. The audience was part of the piece, as it always is, I believe.

Borges does the same kind of thing, making fun of the whole transaction, the whole creative process of writing, imagining, reading, recreating what is imagined.

By doing that, he sets us all above it somehow, so we can laugh at it and enjoy it and admire it, all at once.

Borges makes geniuses of us all.

-- Roger

Copyright © 2011, Roger R. Angle

HEMINGWAY, A CHILD NEXT TO BORGES

My old friend John and I were talking about Borges and Hemingway the other day.

John and I agreed that Hemingway seems like a Cub Scout alongside Borges. Like a child.

In an earlier post here on this blog, I made some excuses for Hemingway, a macho writer who found his calling while writing about the outdoors, hunting and fishing, and about war. 

If Hemingway hadn't gone to war, he would have been at best a minor writer, I think.

Hemingway referred to himself as "Ernie Hemorrhoid, the poor man's Pyle." How right he was. (Ernie Pyle was a famous war correspondent who is no long remembered much.)

Borges's work has more depth and is vastly richer and more complex. I can read it over and over, endlessly.

It is interesting that the more manly writer was in a way less of a man in the long run. And less of a writer.

-- Roger

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

BORGES AGAIN - HOW GREAT

I am back to reading Borges again. I love it.

I love his false scholarship, where he creates an elaborate fictional effort to find a lost country or continent that of course never existed.

It gives me a thrill. I am now reading "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."

What a blast. This book will give me years of pleasure.

-- Roger

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

BORGES vs. HEMINGWAY

I've been reading early Hemingway stories, and I am struck by how different he is from Borges. 

At first glance, Hemingway seems like the lesser writer, and yet the more I think about it, the more I see similarities and strengths in both writers.

When I was in Spain, in 1969, I saw young American men living the Hemingway life: drinking beer in the afternoon, with that Hemingway look, of exploring life in that way; going to the bullfights every Sunday; living in Spain to find something they would not have known was there except for Hemingway. Chasing Hemingway's memories and his ghosts.

There was a beauty and strength and dignity in the Spaniards that I didn't see in the often sleazy Italians or the stoic Greeks.

While I was in Spain, I read "Death In The Afternoon," about bullfighting. Hemingway thought he could tell what the bull was thinking as he charged the matador. That struck me as complete baloney at the time, but now I remember a scene in Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" from the point of view of the dog.

While Ernest Hemingway inspired macho behavior, I doubt if any young American adventurers went to Buenos Aires to live like Jorge Luis Borges, who spent his life in libraries and books. He was the more intellectual of the two, with a more subtle intelligence.

Yet the stories I remember best from Borges were about knife fights among thugs in cities and about hatred and jealousy among gauchos.

So both men were interested in macho behavior. Oddly, they were born the same year, 1899.

To tell the truth, I like Borges better, although Hemingway has a muscular strength in his language that I admire and enjoy. Borges has a more modern sensibility, playing with story and language and meaning in a way I've never seen in Hemingway.

Obviously, I find both worthwhile, for different reasons. Reading Hemingway is like eating steak and baked potatoes. Borges is like French cuisine, with delicate sauces and subtle flavors.

Depends on whether you'd rather shoot lions or see them in a zoo. At different times, I like to do both.

(BTW, I shot a lion in my pajamas last night. It was strange. I don't know how he got into my pajamas... Har-har-har.)
-- Roger

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

BORGES vs. CORMAC McCARTHY

This is truly a clash of titans. It never occurred to me before to compare Jorge Luis Borges and Cormac McCarthy.

They are very different writers, but I think it might be interesting to compare their minds. That is what you engage when you read.

Borges's mind is like an infinite palace of countless rooms. Some rooms are libraries filled with unforeseen books by myriad authors. Other rooms hold chests of jewels, like those you imagine pirates once buried in the Caribbean.

All in all, Borges is a magical and transcendent experience. How did one man contain so many mysteries?

It is impossible to conceive of such a writer, to understand him all at once. Reading him is like living in New York City. You could live there a thousand years and go out every day and every night and still not see everything.

Cormac McCarthy, on the other hand, is different. He is like going on a long voyage by ship. He reminds me most of Herman Melville. Reading him is like living "Moby Dick" over and over again. You become the whale, and you become the harpoon. And you die over and over.

I don't know how to explain what I mean. 

Both writers offer profound experiences of the imagination. At the moment, I prefer Borges. Perhaps that is because I am stuck in Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," an annoying and tedious story that is apocalyptic, episodic and bleak, to say the least.

Both are great writers, and I recommend them both. But not every book by each.

-- Roger

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

A SUICIDAL CODE OF HONOR

I've been reading Borges, and most recently found a fascinating story about a Samurai code of honor. The story, based on a Japanese legend, is shocking, to say the least.

The story is variously titled, in translation, "The Insulting Master of Etiquette Kôtsuké no Suké," or "The Uncivil Teacher of Court Etiquette Kôtsuké no Suké."

The emperor sends a master of etiquette to a local warlord's castle to teach him how to handle an emissary from that same emperor, who is due to arrive at the warlord's castle in a few days.

The teacher of etiquette is rude and disrespectful to the local warlord, who finally draws his sword. The master of etiquette runs away, like the coward he is.

The local lord is "allowed" to commit hara kiri, or ritual suicide, and his castle and holdings are decimated. The local lord's Samurai warriors are now reduced to 47 Ronin, or freelance mercenaries, who plot their revenge.

Their revenge takes two years. Finally, the 47 Ronin storm the fortified castle of the etiquette master, who escapes. They find him and ask him to commit hara kiri as an act of honor. He will not, so the warlord's men slit his throat.

The emperor's supreme court finds out and grants the 47 Ronin the "privilege" of committing hara kiri. Amazingly enough, they do. Online, you can see photos of their graves. (Link:)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forty-seven_Ronin

At no point in this story, does any man act as I would, or as any normal Westerner would. If I was the warlord, I would have told the emperor to go make love to himself. If I had been one of famous 47 Ronin, I would have done the same.

But these legendary warriors and most honorable men refuse to defy their emperor or to defile their concept of honor. Wow. I keep thinking about it.

We westerners would die for our country, but not many of us would die like that, for a code of honor that doesn't help us or our kin.

I think we all have a code of honor. Mine can be more or less summed up as follows:

"I won't be wronged, I won't be insulted, and I won't be laid a hand on. I don't do these things to other men and I expect the same from them."

-- John Wayne in “The Shootist”

Anyway, the Borges tale is much better than I have summarized it here. It is a great story, and I recommend it.

-- Roger

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

AH, BORGES, MY BORGES

I am in the process of rediscovering Borges, to me one of the great geniuses of the 20th century. It is a shame that he didn't win the Nobel Prize. 

For those who don't know, Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was a writer from Argentina. My friend Florinda Mintz used to drive him around Buenos Aires when she was a teenager. Her mother and Borges were friends. Florinda, who later became a poet, had no idea at the time that Borges was a great genius. To her, he was just an old man who was partially blind and could not drive.

One of the things I love about Borges is his intelligence. When you read American popular fiction, you are struck, or I am, by the stupidity and banality of the writing. Oh, God, this stuff is dumb. I am talking about virtually all the bestsellers I have tried to read.

The writing is mindless and full of cliches. It seems that every male hero is a macho ex-special forces stud who is armed to the teeth and can kill 20 men in a single whack, while he's taking a leak with one hand and using his American Express credit card with the other hand.

I am always struck by how limp and lifeless the language becomes in their clumsy popular hands. I am talking about Lee Child and Faye Kellerman and Dan Brown and Harlan Coben and Denise Hamilton and Tana French and James Lasdun (who is mostly an academic) and Scott Smith, and many others, probably anyone who is usually on the bestseller lists.

It seems to me that stupid writing implies both stupid writers and stupid readers. Maybe I am being too harsh. Maybe these pop fiction writers and readers are smart people who want to rest their brains. Somehow I doubt it.

On the other hand, when I read Borges, I am struck by his vast knowledge and erudition and by his remarkable intelligence. I have to get out my dictionaries for French and Italian and look up words in Latin. And I have to get out my Bible, for Christ's sake.

Borges seems to have read everything in the world worth reading. Yet he writes about knife fighters and gauchos and thugs and gangsters in the slums.

When I was young, I loved to read, but I was too lazy to look up words. But when you read Borges, you have to know the words to get the entire meaning. So I look them up.

Borges pushes your imagination, your vocabulary, your intelligence, and your knowledge. He would be good for old people, like me, to read because he forces your mind to stay nimble.

Borges was fascinated by many of the same things that fascinate me: violence and genres and meaning in fiction.

One of the Borges's favorite things was false scholarship, dramatic and complex references to obscure texts that never existed. In one story, as I recall from when I first read him years ago, he posits the idea that if two people wrote the same exact book, word for word, one could be a world-famous classic and the other unknown and worthless.  

Borges played with meaning and ideas in a way that made the stories have multiple meanings on different levels. In the book I am currently reading, "Collected Fictions," Borges quotes George Bernard Shaw as saying, "all intellectual labor is inherently humorous." I believe it should be. Life is too short to be gloomy all the time.

Borges also said, "good readers are poets as singular, and as awesome, as great authors themselves." What a delightful idea. It is hard to find good readers, especially these days. It's getting rare to find people who even like to read. It is fun to think that the ability to read is as valuable as the ability to write. Not quite true, but there is a grain of truth, and much humor, in that idea. Writers do need readers, otherwise their work never comes to life.

Borges brings me an intense joy, a sense of limitless possibility, an excitement just to be alive.

I've been away from Borges for years, and I am sure glad to be back.

-- Roger

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

LOVE AND BLOOD AND DEATH

You know I'm always having trouble finding something I like to read.

Well, I just read a story by Jorge Luis Borges, "the Intruder," from an old TriQuarterly anthology called Contemporary Latin American Literature, published in 1969.

Ah, how far back I have to go to find something good.

Anyway, Borges was a wonderful storyteller, a spinner of yarns. In this one, which is only four pages long, two brothers are deeply, emotionally entwined, and they are wild, tough men who sleep on cots and ride horses and gamble, and fight with knives as a form of entertainment.

They both fall in love with the same woman. There's the conflict, and it plays out wonderfully and brutally and ends in bloodshed, as it must.

This is what I love about Borges and the other Latin American writers. No gringo could have written this story. No white, middle-class, suburban man or woman would admit such intense passion into a story. That lack of passion is what I find so boring about Updike and Cheever and even Carver, although Carver was a great stylist and technician.

What I seek in fiction is intensity, magic, flights of fancy and deep insights into the human heart.

As Faulkner said, the human heart in conflict with itself is the only subject worth writing about.

-- Roger

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

PARALLEL UNIVERSES

The first time I heard of parallel universes, I think it was through Jorge Luis Borges, the famous Argentine writer, whom I loved for his depth and originality, and for dealing with novel-length themes in short fiction.

Now I have my own ideas about parallel universes. In mine:

• I overcame my early childhood and my fear of beauty, and dated all the women I ran away from in this universe. The woman on the plane, the one at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, the one in line at Mother's Kitchen, the one who stood in line to talk to me after my reading at Beyond Baroque in about 1975 or whenever it was. I loved them all, but that is another story.
• I published my first novel when I was 21 and became a wunderkind. Been famous ever since. Traveling the world and meeting the most interesting people and making love to the most fascinating women.
• President Obama has pulled us out of Afghanistan and Iraq and left only enough troops to guard U.S. engineers as we build hospitals and schools. Our goal is helping people, not killing people.
• People all over the USA have given up junk food and now they eat mostly beans, brown rice, vegetables and fruits. Healthcare costs have plummeted, and everyone has universal health coverage. No one complains. Our life span now is above 100. 

What goes on in your fantasy land, in your parallel universe? What is your wish list? And how can you make it come true?

Is this a valid subject for fiction? I believe it is. I think all subjects are valid. It's the way you treat them that is good or bad, art or not art, crap or work of genius. Borges was definitely a genius.


-- Roger

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle