Franz Kafka Story Gets Adapted into an Award-Winning Australian Short Film: Watch Two Men

in Film, Literature | November 18th, 2016

“When you go walking by night up a street and a man, visible a long way off — for the street mounts uphill and there is a full moon — comes running toward you, well, you don’t catch hold of him, not even if he is a feeble and ragged creature, not even if someone chases yelling at his heels, but you let him run on.” Good advice, you might think, “for it is night, and you can’t help it if the street goes uphill before you in the moonlight, and besides, these two have maybe started that chase to amuse themselves, or perhaps they are both chasing a third, perhaps the first is an innocent man and the second wants to murder him and you would become an accessory.”

Or “perhaps they don’t know anything about each other and are merely running separately home to bed, perhaps they are night birds, perhaps the first man is armed. And anyhow, haven’t you a right to be tired, haven’t you been drinking a lot of wine? You’re thankful that the second man is now long out of sight.” So goes the entirety of “Passers-by,” a very short story — one might now use the label “flash fiction” — written sometime between 1908 and 1913 by none other than Franz Kafka. If short stories make more suitable bases for feature-length films than novels do, surely extra-short stories do the same for short films. Director Dominic Allen tested that idea in 2009 with Two Men, the adaptation of “Passers-by” above.

Allen has also made the bold move of transplanting the story from Kafka’s home turf of a vague and allegorical Europe to the Kimberley, the northern tip of Western Australia and one of the first settled parts of the continent — not by Europeans, but probably by pre-Indonesians of 41,000 years ago. “My hope was that by retelling a hundred year old philosophical tale set in European city at night in such a different context as deep in the Australian Kimberley in the heat of a sunny day and by having it retold by a modern Indigenous thinker,” writes Allen, “I would affirm an element of humanity’s commonality.”

Two Men also happened to win him the Emerging Australian Filmmaker Award at the Melbourne International Film Festival and the 2009 Inside Film Rising Talent Award, but his other more immediate goals included celebrating “the robust and healthy youth of Fitzroy Crossing,” the town in which he and his collaborators filmed, and to “reinforce Kafka’s point that it’s impossible to ever truly know another’s motivations.” Or, in the locally inflected words of the short’s motionless observer-narrator, “You just bloody never know.”

Two Men will be added to our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

Franz Kafka: The Animated Short Film

Orson Welles Narrates Animated Version of Kafka’s Parable, “Before the Law”

Kafka’s Nightmare Tale, ‘A Country Doctor,’ Told in Award-Winning Japanese Animation

Vladimir Nabokov (Channelled by Christopher Plummer) Teaches Kafka at Cornell

Prague’s Franz Kafka International Named World’s Most Alienating Airport

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Philosopher Richard Rorty Chillingly Predicts the Results of the 2016 Election … Back in 1998

in Literature, Philosophy, Politics | November 17th, 2016

Twenty years ago a strong academic left in universities all over the world spoke to political culture the way that a globalized nationalist far-right seems to now. Among public intellectuals in the U.S., Richard Rorty’s name held particular sway. Yet in his contrarian 1998 book Achieving Our Country, Rorty argued against the participation of philosophy in politics. A member of the so-called “Old Left,” or what he called the “reformist left,” Rorty took on the “Cultural Left” in ways we now hear in (often bitter) debates between similar camps. In the course of his attacks, he made the uncanny prediction above.

The cultural left, wrote Rorty, had come “to give cultural politics preference over real politics, and to mock the very idea that democratic institutions might once again be made to serve social justice.” He foresaw cultural politics on the left as contributing to a tidal wave of resentment that would one day result in a time when “all the sadism which the academic left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back.”

As democratic institutions fail, he writes in the quote above:

[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here may then be played out. For once a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic.

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words [slur for an African-American that begins with “n”] and [slur for a Jewish person that begins with “k”] will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

He also then argues, however, that this sadism will not solely be the result of “economic inequality and insecurity,” and that such explanations would be “too simplistic.” Nor would the strongman who comes to power do anything but worsen economic conditions. He writes next, “after my imagined strongman takes charge, he will quickly make his peace with the international superrich.”

Rorty blamed the Marxist New Left for “retreating from pragmatism into theory,” wrote The New York Times in its review of Achieving Our Country. He felt the cultural left had abandoned the “American experiment as secular, anti-authoritarian and infinite in possibilities,” such as “Whitman idealized as loving relationships and Dewey as good citizenship.” The Times wrote then that Rorty’s predictions above were a form of “intellectual bullying.” We can take our dystopian futures from sci-fi novelists and filmmakers, but when philosophers “haruspicate or scry,” as T.S. Eliot wrote in “The Dry Salvages,” we tend to dismiss it as the “usual / Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press.”

The eminent Stanford professor exhorted his contemporaries to leave behind “semiconscious anti-Americanism” and embrace pragmatic civil engagement, and did so by offering up examples from American literature and philosophy that all had fierce activist strains. Excoriating one kind of life of the mind, Rorty can’t help but offer another. “What does Rorty offer as a solution?” asked the Times review, “Not really very much.” Perhaps not to politicians. But to the postmodern academics and writers he accused, he offers up as counter examples Walt Whitman, John Dewey, and—as Rorty noted in an interview—James Baldwin, whose “use of the phrase… achieving our country” inspired his book’s title, Achieving Our Country.

via Slate

John Searle on Foucault and the Obscurantism in French Philosophy

Huxley to Orwell: My Hellish Vision of the Future is Better Than Yours (1949)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 28 ) |

When Franz Kafka Invented the Answering Machine (1913)

in History, Literature, Technology | November 10th, 2016

We’ve all had the experience, punctuated by interminable waiting, of circling over and over again through some enormous company’s automatic telephone answering system. Whether or not it counts as genuinely “Kafkaesque” may be up for debate, but we do have some evidence that the technology itself, or at least the idea of it, does indeed trace back to the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial himself. This comes out in Kafka biographer Reiner Stach’s new book of photographs, letters, and other discoveries called Is that Kafka? 99 Finds.

“Although Kafka was timid and skeptical in his interactions with the latest technical gadgets—particularly when they intervened in social communication—he was always fascinated by people who knew how to handle these devices as a matter of course,” writes Stach in an excerpt at the Paris Review. “That included his fiancée Felice Bauer, who worked in the Berlin offices of Carl Lindström AG, where she was in charge of marketing for the ‘parlograph,’ a dictation machine.” It must have required no great leap of Kafka’s formidable imagination to dream up “a cross between a telephone and a parlograph,” which he described in a 1913 letter to Bauer:

The invention of a cross between a telephone and a parlograph, it really can’t be that hard. Surely by the day after tomorrow you’ll be reporting to me that the project is already a success. Of course that would have an enormous impact on editorial offices, news agencies, etc. Harder, but doubtless possible as well, would be a combination of the gramophone and the telephone. Harder because you can’t understand a gramophone at all, and a parlograph can’t ask it to speak more clearly. A combination of the gramophone and the telephone wouldn’t have such great significance in general either, but for people like me, who are afraid of the telephone, it would be a relief. But then people like me are also afraid of the gramophone, so we can’t be helped at all. By the way, it’s a nice idea that a parlograph could go to the telephone in Berlin, call up a gramophone in Prague, and the two of them could have a little conversation with each other. But my dearest the combination of the parlograph and the telephone absolutely has to be invented.

The modern answering machine took some time to develop, attaining its first commercially successful form, the Electronic Secretary, in 1949, a quarter-century after Kafka’s death. But alas, unbeknownst to him, someone had also beaten him to it when first he thought it up. “The combination of a telephone and a dictation machine had already been invented and patented — including the functions of an answering machine,” writes Stach, citing the engineer Ernest O. Kumberg’s invention of something called the “Telephonograph” in 1900. This might seem like just one more disappointment in a life full of them, but remember: just over a century on, when voicemail and even newer technologies have replaced the answering machine, nobody describes anything with the word “Kumbergian.”

You can pick up a copy of Is that Kafka? 99 Finds here.

via The Paris Review

Related Content:

Find Works by Kafka in our Free eBooks collection

Four Franz Kafka Animations: Enjoy Creative Animated Shorts from Poland, Japan, Russia & Canada

Franz Kafka’s Kafkaesque Love Letters

The Art of Franz Kafka: Drawings from 1907–1917

The Animated Franz Kafka Rock Opera

What Does “Kafkaesque” Really Mean? A Short Animated Video Explains

Download Jim Rockford’s Answering Machine Messages as MP3s

Mark Twain’s Patented Inventions for Bra Straps and Other Everyday Items

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Patti Smith Reads from Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, the Love Letter He Wrote From Prison (1897)

in Current Affairs, Literature | November 7th, 2016

Just last month, the U.K. announced the so-called “Turing Law,” a policy U.K.’s justice minister Sam Gyimah describes as pardoning “people convicted of historical sexual offenses who would be innocent of any crime today.” The law is named for Alan Turing, the brilliant gay computer scientist whose work on A.I. gave the artificial intelligence test its name.

Turing was also instrumental in breaking the Nazi Enigma code, and the Ministry of Justice’s press release identifies Turing only as an “Enigma codebreaker,” suggesting that his patriotic duty may have made him something of an official martyr; Turing was one thousands of men unjustly convicted over many decades. But “does pardoning those men unlucky enough to get caught,” asks Jonathan Cooper, “actually address the trauma to which the British state subjected LGBT people?”

I couldn’t possibly say. But the “unlucky ones” who were arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for crimes of “gross indecency” have left often poignant records of their mistreatment, and of the psychological toll it took on them. Turing wrote a very pained letter to a friend, Norman Rutledge, after his conviction (hear Benedict Cumberbatch read it here).

Around sixty years earlier, an even more well-known convict, one of the first to be convicted of “gross indecency” laws, Oscar Wilde, left an even more profound expression of his emotional turmoil. Called De Profundis (from the depths) and addressed to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas, the hundred-page document, with its lengthy digressions and ruminations, cannot solely be read as a letter, although it contains a wealth of tender and angry expressions for Douglas.

De Profundis, writes Colm Tóibín, “cannot be read for its accurate account of their relationship, nor taken at its word.” This is in part because Wilde had no other choice but to write a letter, or write nothing at all. The succession of prisons in which he was held between 1895 and 1897 allowed no writing of plays, novels, or essays.

Over the last four months of Wilde’s incarceration, he and the governor of Reading prison came up with a scheme. Since “regulations did not specify how long a letter should be,” Wilde would be given pen and ink each day and be allowed compose correspondence as long as he liked. The letter would then be his personal property when he left. Despite its literary density, the letter remains, writes Tóibín, “one of the greatest love letters ever written.”

Reading prison has just been opened to the public for the first time this year. Since July, artists, writers, and performers have gathered with audiences inside the prison to celebrate and commune with the spirit of Wilde. Among the events have been readings of De Profundis by Tóibín, who read the letter in its entirely last month, as did Patti Smith.

At the top of the post, you can see an excerpt of Smith’s reading. “The edited version of De Profundis” from which she reads “was the first one to be published in 1905, in a limited edition of 200, five years after Wilde’s death.” In-between clips of her reading, there are interviews with a Reading prison caretaker and others, and voice-over narration telling us Wilde’s tragic story of imprisonment, as well as the general outlines of those who left no record of their persecution.

Once released, Wilde went right back to writing literature, beginning with the long, violent poem, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” The video up top comes from The Guardian.

via Vintage Anchor

Oscar Wilde Offers Practical Advice on the Writing Life in a Newly-Discovered Letter from 1890

Benedict Cumberbatch Reads a Letter Alan Turing Wrote in “Distress” Before His Conviction For “Gross Indecency”

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Benedict Cumberbatch Reads Kurt Vonnegut’s Incensed Letter to the High School That Burned Slaughterhouse-Five

in Letters, Literature | November 4th, 2016

If you’ve kept up with Open Culture for a while, you know that Kurt Vonnegut could write a good letter, whether home from World War II, to high school students, to other writers, to John F. Kennedy, or to the future. You also know that Benedict Cumberbatch can give a good reading, whether of literature like The Metamorphosis and Moby Dick or more directly personal words from Alan Turing or a Guantánamo prisoner. It must have seemed like only a matter of time, then, before this master reader of letters (in the broad sense) took on the work of a master letter-writer, and here we have a clip of Cumberbatch at the Hay Festival 2014 reading a Vonnegut letter — and a particularly impassioned Vonnegut letter at that.

“I am among those American writers whose books have been destroyed in the now famous furnace of your school,” Vonnegut writes to Charles McCarthy, head of the school board at North Dakota’s Drake High School, who in 1973 ordered its copies of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and other novels burned for their “obscene language.” “Certain members of your community have suggested that my work is evil. This is extraordinarily insulting to me. The news from Drake indicates to me that books and writers are very unreal to you people. I am writing this letter to let you know how real I am.”

After assuring McCarthy that “my publisher and I have done absolutely nothing to exploit the disgusting news,” Vonnegut goes on to describe himself not as one of the “ratlike people who enjoy making money from poisoning the minds of young people” that McCarthy may imagine, but as a “large, strong person, fifty-one years old, who did a lot of farm work as a boy, who is good with tools. I have raised six children, three my own and three adopted. They have all turned out well. Two of them are farmers. I am a combat infantry veteran from World War II, and hold a Purple Heart. I have earned whatever I own by hard work.”

And as for the products of that labor, “if you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life.” Vonnegut acknowledges the school’s right to decide what books its students should read, “but it is also true that if you exercise that right and fulfill that responsibility in an ignorant, harsh, un-American manner, then people are entitled to call you bad citizens and fools. Even your own children are entitled to call you that.”

More that forty years have passed, and hardly anywhere does Slaughterhouse-Five now count as controversial reading material. But Vonnegut’s words to McCarthy, which you can read in full at Letters of Note web site (or in the Letters of Note book), still bear not just repeating but breathing new life into by a performer like Cumberbatch, one of the most respected of his generation. At the Letters Live Youtube channel, you can see his interpretation of more letters originally written by Sol LeWitt, William Safire, and other people known primarily for their work, but the reading of whose letters make them, in Vonnegut’s words, “very real.”

22-Year-Old P.O.W. Kurt Vonnegut Writes Home from World War II: “I’ll Be Damned If It Was Worth It”

Kurt Vonnegut Urges Young People to Make Art and “Make Your Soul Grow”

Kurt Vonnegut’s Tips for Teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (1967)

Kurt Vonnegut to John F. Kennedy: ‘On Occasion, I Write Pretty Well’

Benedict Cumberbatch Reads a Letter Alan Turing Wrote in “Distress” Before His Conviction For “Gross Indecency”

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 10 ) |

When Vladimir Nabokov Taught Ruth Bader Ginsburg, His Most Famous Student, To Care Deeply About Writing

in Current Affairs, Literature, Politics | November 4th, 2016

There are a few ways to get a glimpse of Vladimir Nabokov as a teacher, a role he occupied for almost twenty years at Wellesley and Cornell. We can take the “good reader” quiz he gave to his students. We can listen to his interviews on life and literature, though they won’t give us any sense of spontaneity. The Russian-émigré writer insisted on carefully scripted questions and answers “to ensure a dignified beat of the mandarin’s fan.”

We can see also see Nabokov, as played by Christopher Plummer, teach his second favorite novel, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, at a Cornell lecture above. Plummer, who introduces himself in the role, tells us, “this urbane, worldly Russian aristocrat spent a large part of his productive life in Ithaca, New York.” And the characterization, if not a likeness, is a convincing dramatic interpretation of a very urbane, and witty, Professor, not a man who “speak[s] like a child,” as the real Nabokov once wrote of himself in 1973.

What of his students? What can they tell us about Nabokov as a teacher? One of his most famous, Thomas Pynchon, won’t say much. But perhaps his best known pupil, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, has paid him tribute many times, telling The Scribes Journal of Legal Writing in 2011, “I attribute my caring about writing” to Nabokov, who “was a man in love with the sound of words. He taught me the importance of choosing the right word and presenting it in the right word order.”

Ginsburg, who studied under Nabokov as an undergraduate in the early fifties, still sings his praises over sixty years later. “He was magnetically engaging,” she told The Culture Trip this week. “He stood alone, not comparable to any other lecturer.” And last month, the Supreme Court Justice wrote a New York Times Op-Ed titled “Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Advice for Living.” Second on the list, “teachers who influenced or encouraged me in my growing-up years.” Her first example, Nabokov, who “changed the way I read and the way I write.”

If Nabokov so profoundly influenced Ginsburg’s reading and writing, and made such a dramatic impression on her as a professor, would we find any traces of that influence in her jurisprudence? Perhaps. As Jennifer Wilson notes in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Nabokov pronounced himself “resolutely ‘anti-segregationist.’” This was among the “few issues he spoke out against strongly and unambiguously—Marxism, fascism, anti-Semitism, and racism.”

You may or may not see some influence of Nabokov—of his repugnance for legalized discrimination or of his meticulous wording—in Ginsburg’s passionate dissent to the 2013 gutting of the Voting Rights Act, for example. There, Ginsburg called voter suppression “the most constitutionally invidious form of discrimination” and wrote “given a record replete with examples of denial or abridgement of a paramount federal right, the Court should have left the matter where it belongs: in Congress’ bailiwick.” Within their constraints of legal writing, I’d argue Ginsburg’s best sentences contain the cutting precision and wit of Nabokov’s scathing, deeply considered observations.

via The Culture Trip/Vintage Anchor

Vladimir Nabokov Names the Greatest (and Most Overrated) Novels of the 20th Century

Vladimir Nabokov Talks About Life, Literature & Love in a Meticulously Prepared Interview, 1969

Vladimir Nabokov (Channelled by Christopher Plummer) Teaches Kafka at Cornell

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Father Writes a Great Letter About Censorship When Son Brings Home Permission Slip to Read Ray Bradbury’s Censored Book, Fahrenheit 451

in Current Affairs, Education, Literature, Politics | November 1st, 2016

book permission slip.jpg Ironic permission slip request https://twitter.com/i/moments/790703810427494400

How does censorship come about in advanced, ostensibly democratic societies? In some cases, through institutions colluding in ways that go unnoticed by the general public. As Noam Chomsky has argued for decades, state agencies often collude with the press to spread certain narratives and suppress others. And as we see during Banned Books Week, legislatures, courts, and educational institutions often collude with publishers, teachers, and parents to suppress literature they view as threatening. One such case remains particularly ironic given the book in question: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the story of a dystopian society in which all books are banned, and fire departments burn contraband copies.

Between the years 1967 and 1979, Ballantine published an expurgated version of the novel for use in high schools, removing content deemed objectionable. Bradbury was completely unaware. For six of those years, the bowdlerized version was the only one sold by the publisher. We can remember this case when we read the response of writer Daniel Radosh to a permission slip his son Milo brought home from his 8th grade teacher for a book club reading of Fahrenheit 451. Written in Milo’s own hand, the initial note, at the top, informs Mr. Radosh that the novel “was challenged because of it’s [sic] theme of the illegality and censorship of books. One book people got most angry about was the burning of the bible. Secondly, there is a large amount of cursing and profanity in the book.”

After this confession, Milo’s note asks for a parental signature in a postscript. Addressing the letter’s true writer, Milo’s teacher, Daniel Radosh responded thus, in the typed note attached to his son’s letter.

I love this letter! What a wonderful way to introduce students to the theme of Fahrenheit 451 that books are so dangerous that the institutions of society – schools and parents – might be willing to team up against children to prevent them from reading one.

It’s easy enough to read the book and say, ‘This is crazy. It could never really happen,’ but pretending to present students at the start with what seems like a totally reasonable ‘first step’ is a really immersive way to teach them how insidious censorship can be.

I’m sure that when the book club is over and the students realise the true intent of this letter they’ll be shocked at how many of them accepted it as an actual permission slip.

In addition, Milo’s concern that allowing me to add to this note will make him stand out as a troublemaker really brings home why most of the characters find it easier to accept the world they live in rather than challenge it.

I assured him that his teacher would have his back.

Radosh’s insinuation that the letter his son was induced to write is not an “actual permission slip” underscores his claim that the exercise is really a means of controlling children by means of collusion, even though, he jests, such a thing must be part of the lesson itself. Should he be allowed to read the novel, the signing and delivery of the permission slip, Radosh devastatingly suggests, completes Milo’s humiliation, bringing home to him “why most of the characters” in the book remain passive, and “find it easier to accept the world they live in rather than challenge it.”

In short, Radosh’s response, for all its pithy irony, digs deeply into the mechanisms that suppress speech deemed so “dangerous that the institutions of society—schools and parents—might be willing to team up against children to prevent them” from reading it.

See Metro UK for a complete transcription of both letters.

via Vintage Anchor

The Cover of George Orwell’s 1984 Becomes Less Censored with Wear and Tear

Frank Zappa Debates Censorship on CNN’s Crossfire (1986)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 7 ) |

What Does Jorge Luis Borges’ “Library of Babel” Look Like? An Accurate Illustration Created with 3D Modeling Software

in Architecture, Computer Science, Literature | October 27th, 2016

Sketchup renderings of the Library of Babel. Images courtesy of Jamie Zawinski.

Fulfilling the maxim “write what you know,” Argentine fabulist Jorge Luis Borges penned one of his most extraordinary and bewildering stories, “The Library of Babel,” while employed as an assistant librarian. Borges, it has been noted—by Borges himself in his 1970 New Yorker essay “Autobiographical Notes”—found the work dreary and unfulfilling: “nine years of solid unhappiness,” as he put it plainly. “Sometimes in the evening, as I walked the ten blocks to the tramline, my eyes would be filled with tears.”

And yet, for all of its tedium, his library position suited his needs as a writer like none other could. “I would do all my library work in the first hour,” he remembers, “and then steal away to the basement and pass the other five hours in reading or writing.” During those stolen hours, Borges dreamed up a library the size of the universe, “composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings.” Like so many of the objects and places in Borges’ stories, this fantastic structure, Escher-like, is both vividly described and impossible to imagine.

Many have tried their hand at visually rendering the Library of Babel, but according to programmer Jamie Zawinski, “past attempts,” writes Carey Dunne at Hyperallergic, “aren’t faithful to the text,” omitting crucial structures like the “sleep chamber, lavatory, and hallway” and screwing up “the placement of the spiral stairway.” You can see Zawinski’s various critiques of these supposed failures on his blog, JWZ. And you may wonder how it’s even possible to construct an accurate model of a structure that may have no finite boundaries and whose internal architecture the story itself calls into question. Nonetheless, Zawinski has boldly given it a try.

Using the 3D modeling program Sketchup, he has designed what he believes to be a model superior to the rest, though he admits “I don’t think this is quite right either.” If you’re wondering “Why is he doing this?” Zawinski writes, “you and I have that in common.” The Borgesian task, like that of the librarian, is an endless one, pursued with scholastic rigor for its own sake rather than for some great reward. And once one enters the labyrinth of his twisting designs, there may be no way out but eternally through. “The possibility of a man’s finding his Vindication,” writes Borges wearily of certain librarians’ attempts to solve the library’s riddles, “or some treacherous variation thereof, can be computed as zero.”

So Zawinski trudges on. His “wrestling with the details of his rendering,” writes Dunne, “his obsessive analysis of the wording of Borges’ description, recalls the library inhabitants’ futile quests to decipher the mysteries of the library.” The programmer’s admirable attention to the physics of the space may at times sound like a rather leaden way to approach what is essentially an elaborate metaphor: “I can’t help but think about the weight and pressure of a column of air that high,” he muses in his initial explorations, “and what is it sitting on, and how to route the plumbing from all of those toilets, and that toilets imply digestion, so where does the food come from?”

Such questions take him far afield of Borges’ theo-philosophical parable: “Is there a section of the library devoted to farming, and metallurgy?” Nonetheless, Zawinski’s detailed analysis has produced a visualization of the space like none other, and he admits to “overthinking a sub-infinite but nearly boundless hill of beans.” Borges’ imaginary librarian has abandoned trying to solve the library’s mysteries. Humbled by the failures of those who came before him, he persists in the “elegant hope” that the library “is unlimited and cyclical… repeated in the same disorder… which, thus repeated, would be an order: the Order.” He wisely leaves the ultimate metaphysical discovery, however, to “an eternal traveler” with infinite time on their hands.

You can view Zawinski’s commentary here, and see his designs here. On the bottom of this page, he lets you download his Sketchup file.

via Hyperallergic

Jorge Luis Borges Selects 74 Books for Your Personal Library

Jorge Luis Borges’ Favorite Short Stories (Read 7 Free Online)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Franz Kafka Story Gets Adapted into an Award-Winning Australian Short Film: Watch Two Men

Philosopher Richard Rorty Chillingly Predicts the Results of the 2016 Election … Back in 1998

When Franz Kafka Invented the Answering Machine (1913)

Patti Smith Reads from Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, the Love Letter He Wrote From Prison (1897)

Benedict Cumberbatch Reads Kurt Vonnegut’s Incensed Letter to the High School That Burned Slaughterhouse-Five

When Vladimir Nabokov Taught Ruth Bader Ginsburg, His Most Famous Student, To Care Deeply About Writing

Father Writes a Great Letter About Censorship When Son Brings Home Permission Slip to Read Ray Bradbury’s Censored Book, Fahrenheit 451

What Does Jorge Luis Borges’ “Library of Babel” Look Like? An Accurate Illustration Created with 3D Modeling Software

Essentials

Support Us

Free Courses

Receive our Daily Email

FREE UPDATES!

GET OUR DAILY EMAIL

Free Movies

Free Language Lessons

Free eBooks

Free Audio Books

Free Textbooks

K-12 Resources

Free Art & Images

Free Music

Writing Tips

Archive

Personal Finance

Categories

Great Lectures

Sign up for Newsletter

About Us

Great Recordings

Book Lists By

Syllabi

Favorite Movies

Archives

Search