Putting the
X
in Xmas
|
“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.
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
