Playing

Thomas Wimmer, Ensemble Accentus
SEPHARDIC ROMANCES
Traditional Jewish Music from Spain

Daily Painting

Simon Palmer
CYCLING HOME (1996)

Watching

FROM BEYOND
Stuart Gordon
USA, 1986

SUSAN SONTAG

“Letter to Borges”

On the 10th anniversary of the death of Jorge Luis Borges, the late Susan Sontag revisited her admiration for his work and the enormity of his cultural legacy in a short and beautiful essay titled “Letter to Borges,” penned on June 13, 1996, included in her 2001 collection WHERE THE STRESS FALLS: ESSAYS.

____________________

You were very much the product of your time, your culture, and yet you knew how to transcend your time, your culture, in ways that seem quite magical. This had something to do with the openness and generosity of your attention. You were the least egocentric, the most transparent of writers, as well as the most artful. It also had something to do with a natural purity of spirit.

You had a sense of time that was different from other people’s. The ordinary ideas of past, present, and future seemed banal under your gaze. You liked to say that every moment of time contains the past and the future, quoting (as I remember) the poet Browning, who wrote something like “the present is the instant in which the future crumbles into the past.” That, of course, was part of your modesty: your taste for finding your ideas in the ideas of other writers.

The serenity and the transcendence of self that you found are to me exemplary. You showed that it is not necessary to be unhappy, even while one is clear-eyed and undeluded about how terrible everything is. Somewhere you said that a writer — delicately you added: all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. (You were speaking of your blindness.)

Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the “real” everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human.

I’m sorry to have to tell you that books are now considered an endangered species. By books, I also mean the conditions of reading that make possible literature and its soul effects. Soon, we are told, we will call up on “bookscreens” any “text” on demand, and will be able to change its appearance, ask questions of it, “interact” with it. When books become “texts” that we “interact” with according to criteria of utility, the written word will have become simply another aspect of our advertising-driven televisual reality. This is the glorious future being created, and promised to us, as something more “democratic.” Of course, it means nothing less than the death of inwardness — and of the book.

Dear Borges, please understand that it gives me no satisfaction to complain. But to whom could such complaints about the fate of books— of reading itself— be better addressed than to you? (Borges, it’s ten years!) All I mean to say is that we miss you. I miss you. You continue to make a difference. The era we are entering now, this twenty-first century, will test the soul in new ways. But, you can be sure, some of us are not going to abandon the Great Library. And you will continue to be our patron and our hero.

HAROLD PINTER
Ashes to Ashes

But there was a man sitting in front of me, to my right. He was absolutely still throughout the whole film. He never moved, he was rigid, like a body with rigor mortis, he never laughed once, he just sat like a corpse. I moved far away from him, I moved as far away from him as I possibly could.

Watching

BASQUIAT
Julian Schnabel
USA, 1996

Playing

Various Artists
DJ-KICKS: KRUDER & DORFMEISTER

Playing

Philip Glass & Susan Marshall
LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES
A Dance Opera Based on Jean Cocteau's Children of the Game

Conductor
Karen Kemensek

Voices
Christine Arand, Valerie Komar, Hal Cazalet, Philip Cutlip

Pianos
Eleanor Sandresky, Nelson Padgett, Philip Glass

Currently Playing

The Mike Flowers Pops
A GROOVY PLACE

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The Mike Flowers Pops
"Wonderwall" (1996)

Daily Painting

Nathan Oliveira
WILD DOG SEEKING ITS SHADOW (1996)

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Lois Mailou Jones
PORTRAIT OF LEOPOLD SEDAR SENGHOR (1996)

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OutKast
ATLIENS

Why am I sure that JTT Googles "JTT" fourteen times a day?

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Jenny Saville
SHIFT (1996-97)

Currently Playing

Tōru Takemitsu
PETER SERKIN PLAYS THE MUSIC OF TORU TAKEMITSU

Peter Serkin

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Litany (1950–rev. 1989)
Uninterrupted Rest (1952-1960)
Piano Distance (1961)
For Away (1973)
Les Yeux Clos (1979)
Rain Tree Sketch (1982)
Les Yeux Clos II (1988)
Rain Tree Sketch II In Memoriam Olivier Messiaen (1992)