Chekhov's Mistress
Infinitely Literary Internet
Borges | British Library Treasures Collection
[Just a quick post because of ISP problems that turned out to be solely due to user error – that’s me.]
A happy confluence of events, I was telling a friend last weekend about the community of lit blogs and how the internet is a great place for literature discussions because it’s hard to find people that will let you discuss it in person without displaying their boredom.
Later, I stumbled across an old Salon.com article (may require subscription or registration), called “Web Master Borges”, by Douglas Wolk, that put the labyrinths of the Argentinean master into the context of the World Wide Web:
I am not the first to point out that Borges’ great invention, the Library of Babel, that immense, honeycombed labyrinth containing every possible text—true, false and gibberish—is a fanciful metaphor for the Web. As we become more familiar with the Internet’s applications and idiosyncracies, the parallels planted in Borges’ work become more clear. What are the “infinite stories, infinitely branching” of his character Herbert Quain’s book “April March,” if not hypertext? What is the purpose of Ireneo Funes, the paralyzed young man unable to forget any aspect of anything he has ever seen, if he is not to represent search engines burdened with memories of long-inactive links? What is Tlön, the virtual world in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” that gradually overtakes the real one, if not the cyberspace for which the physical world is rapidly becoming a quaintly antiquated sketch?
Wolk admits as a postscript to the article that he is obsessed with the idea of Borges prefiguring the WWW, so I suppose that he would be gratified to know five years later that through some Borges fan would stumble across the article and if not obsess over, at least enjoy mulling the possibilities and decide to re-read the Library of Babel.
Related to all of that, Maud posts today about the British Library scanning old – and I mean old, like 15th century editions of Chaucer – manuscripts and making them available on the web along with helpful commentary.
An interesting marriage of an analog past that in many ways we bookish people hang on to and the digital present.
Read widely, think well, and write often.
comments
No CommentsCreative Commons License Deed Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
You are free:
- to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
-
Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
-
No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.
- For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link to this web page.
- Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.
- Nothing in this license impairs or restricts the author's moral rights.
This is a human-readable summary of the Legal Code (the full license):
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/legalcode
This site employs rank-denial and other anti-spam measures.
Your link here will do nothing for your rankings or traffic. Off-topic comments will be deleted.
Previous entry: You Can’t Get Away From It
About this Post
- Posted by: Bud Parr
- Date: September 14, 2004
- Filed Under:
Wise Men Fish Here: Literature
- Comments:0
- Links to this Post: Technorati
