stuck at my evil corporate job where they force me to use ai. spending all day talking to a machine that lies to you sounds like it couldve been the basis for a borges story
I’ve never followed up on it. What would you recommend to me?
Hi all! I've recently started reading this collection of Borges' essays for the first time. I'm struggling a bit out of the gate, but confident persistence will be rewarded. That said, do you have any favorites from this collection? If so, I'll be sure to pay special attention when I get to them. Thanks!
Just wanted to leave some opinion of mine. More of a rant.
But I think we need a re-print of this book in Spanish. I think English speakers get one in October of this year, last time I checked, but the Spanish edition appears to be up to $400 dollars!
I am unsure if this is because of Maria’s complain about the book being a treason to Borges, but this is so frustrating!
I've illustrated Jorge Luis Borges Ficciones (1944) https://www.vladbichev.com/ficciones
12 interactive and animated algorithmic art illustrations inspired by Borges novels. Reading them I have the sence of prophecy related with quantum mechanics, algorithms, big data and generative AI. Add to this philosophy of Crhristianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism religions. And finally mix with "Realismo Mágico" — the mystical Latin American prose tradition. Reading Borges is an experience.
The Library of Babel is a hex grid of every possible book. The library is complete and meaningless at once, and that contradiction — the same contradiction we now face in an age of generated text — is the story's real prophecy. To make a generative artwork of it is to step inside the joke. https://www.vladbichev.com/ficciones/library-babel.html
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is a cellular automaton dissolving our world's glyphs into a fictional one. The children are taught a school history that never happened. Replace "encyclopedia" with "language model" and the parable becomes operational. Generative systems now write faster than any culture can verify, and the cost of producing a plausible counterfeit has fallen to zero. https://www.vladbichev.com/ficciones/tlon-uqbar.html
Pierre Menard is two transparent layers of identical text — the same word, written by two different centuries. The story is haunting because its joke is now technologically real. When a generative model produces a paragraph of Hamlet, character-for-character identical to Shakespeare's, is it Hamlet? Borges, in 1939, says no — a text is not a sequence of glyphs but a sequence of glyphs read against a context. https://www.vladbichev.com/ficciones/pierre-menard.html
The Garden of Forking Paths is a directed acyclic graph: nodes are moments, edges are decisions, and the structure fans outward through time without ever returning to itself. Every Git commit history, every dependency tree, every Bayesian network, every possible-worlds semantics for modal logic descends from this same skeleton. https://www.vladbichev.com/ficciones/forking-paths.html
The structure of the library of babel is not finite and can be used to create an infinite structure. If you take a hexagon with four walls and an image on each wall and two exits, then loop back into a hexagon with a similar structure you can create a near infinite structure. Each hexagon becomes a node, and the exits form an A/B structure. Thus you get a walking knowledge graph or spatial database. This is actually useful if you let of the scrambled internals and change them to selective items. You create a shell to put something like a memex or world brain into. I put together something to show this. I am looking for feedback on this idea. I am starting here. https://babelnexus.com It is not creative commons right now. I am trying to figure out what I can do with this.
This is partly just to share with fellow enthusiasts and partly to ask for ideas!
I’ve been collecting editions of Sur with my favorite Borges stories recently, along with other interesting publications highlighting his work and whatever first edition books of his I can find that aren’t insanely expensive. I have four more editions of Sur on the way and am on the lookout for three more.
I have rifled through these, but I have all of these works in less fragile forms, so would prefer these be decorative rather than practical.
I have several frames just like the one containing the orange issue, which have UV-protective glass, but I only have the summary of contents shown below for that issue (the rest have it listed on the back). Should I just get custom matting for the others? Should I ditch the frames and just get them bound when my collection is complete?
The editions shown here are “Tres Versiones de Judas,” “Pierre Menard,” and "La Biblioteca Total," an essay published prior to La Biblioteca de Babel. The “Club Libro Del Mes” below was an insert in one of the editions, but after seeing the lineup I couldn’t help but frame it.
Thanks, all!
Junto al aljibe de la estancia
bebe un rocín color de polvo;
nadie recuerda ya su nombre
salvo la luna y los rastrojos.
Fue bestia humilde de labranza,
costilla y barro bajo el sol;
pero un hidalgo de los libros
le dio otro cuerpo con su voz.
Cruje La Mancha entre los cardos,
gira despacio el aire frío;
un ciego toca viejas páginas
como quien busca un evangelio.
Otro, en un siglo ya imposible,
vuelve a escribir la misma historia;
la frase es igual, pero la sangre
ha atravesado la memoria.
Quizá el misterio no sea el hombre
ni la ilusión que el hombre nombra,
sino encarnarse tan profundo
que el Verbo vuelva por la sombra.
Y Rocinante alza la frente
bajo la rueda de los astros:
antes rocín de los caminos,
ahora llevando heridas y milagros.
