December 15, 2006

  • Hamlet Meets Young Frankenstein:

     Putting the
    X
    in Xmas

    "It's all in Plato, all in Plato;
    bless me, what do they
    teach them at these schools?"

    -- C. S. Lewis

    Apparently they teach them nihilism, empty rhetoric, and despair,
    as reflected in Borges, Baudrillard, and Benjamin, according to the art review below from today's New York Times.  Let us hope
    that the late Peter Boyle, who died on Tuesday, Dec. 12, has moved
    beyond these now-- singing "Heaven, I'm in Heaven," rather than
    "Puttin' on the Ritz."

    Ritz and Heaven


    Black, White, and
    Read All Over

    by Randy Kennedy
    in The New York Times
    Friday, Dec. 15, 2006

    "In
    one of Jorge Luis Borges's best-known short stories, 'Pierre Menard,
    Author of the Quixote,' a 20th-century French writer sets out to
    compose a verbatim copy of Cervantes's 17th-century masterpiece simply
    because he thinks he can, originality perhaps not being all it's
    cracked up to be.

    He
    manages two chapters word for word, a spontaneous duplicate that
    Borges's narrator finds to be 'infinitely richer' than the original
    because it contains all manner of new meanings and inflections,
    wrenched as it is from its proper time and context...."

    [An artist's version of a newspaper is]....

    "a
    drawing of a copy of a version of what happened, holding a mirror up to
    nature with a refraction or two in between.  In a way that mixes Borges with a dollop of Jean Baudrillard and a heavy helping of Walter Benjamin, the work also upends ideas...."

    The Work:

    Pennsylvania Lottery
    December 2006
    Daily Number (Day):

    Borges,
    Menard's Quixote, and
    The Harvard Crimson    		 Mon., Dec. 11:
    133
    Baudrillard
    (via a white Matrix)    		 Sun., Dec. 10:
    569
    Benjamin and
    a black view of life in
    "The Garden of Allah"    		 Sat., Dec. 9:
    602

    Click on numbers
    for commentary.

    Borges and Benjamin are
      referenced directly in the
      commentary. For Baudrillard,
      see Richard Hanley on
      Baudrillard and The Matrix:

    "There
    is nothing new under the sun. With the death of the real, or rather
    with its (re)surrection, hyperreality both emerges and is already
    always reproducing itself."  --Jean Baudrillard

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