Jorge Luis Borges

Karl Rove: Fox News commentator, conservative who caused consternation on election night , major Republican strategist. And fan of metafictional writer Jorge Luis Borges. Yes, really. The news comes from Rove's own website ( via Twitter ). Since 2010, Rove has been posting his recently read books on his website, Rove.com ; Borges' "Everything and Nothing," published by New Directions, is No. 65, read by Rove this year. He writes, "I don't read much fiction but the stories, tales and essays of the Argentinan fabulist, Jorge Luis Borges, are worth reading and re-reading, as I did when I picked up a new collection of his work EVERYTHING AND NOTHING (NEW DIRECTIONS PEARLS)

BUENOS AIRES - A block away from Pope Francis' childhood home, a modest neighborhood church is wedged between a bakery and a bank of middle-class town houses. Inside is a small sign festooned in pastel construction paper - like the kind that church ladies anywhere in the world might make to celebrate a child's first communion. "Thank you, Francis!" it says. "Your pueblo accompanies you and prays for you. " Underneath is a reproduction of a card identifying Francis - Holy Father, bishop of Rome and vicar of Jesus Christ - as a fan of San Lorenzo, Buenos Aires' underdog soccer team.

Not a single star will be left in the night. The night will not be left. I will die and, with me, the weight of the intolerable universe. I shall erase the pyramids, the medallions, the continents and faces. I shall erase the accumulated past. I shall make dust of history, dust of dust. Now I am looking on the final sunset. I am hearing the last bird. I bequeath nothingness to no one.

Karl Rove: Fox News commentator, conservative who caused consternation on election night , major Republican strategist. And fan of metafictional writer Jorge Luis Borges. Yes, really. The news comes from Rove's own website ( via Twitter ). Since 2010, Rove has been posting his recently read books on his website, Rove.com ; Borges' "Everything and Nothing," published by New Directions, is No. 65, read by Rove this year. He writes, "I don't read much fiction but the stories, tales and essays of the Argentinan fabulist, Jorge Luis Borges, are worth reading and re-reading, as I did when I picked up a new collection of his work EVERYTHING AND NOTHING (NEW DIRECTIONS PEARLS)

On Aug. 24, Jorge Luis Borges, who died in 1986, would have been 100 years old. So erudite and allusive, Borges seemed always to have been 100 years old. Nevertheless, reading him today we discover that he speaks directly to our postmodern sensibility. Consider a few of his obsessions: Anything expressed in words (religion, philosophy) is fiction; fiction and nonfiction are indistinguishable; meaning is determined by the reader; artists alter the past by making us see it differently; opposites resemble nothing so much as each other.

"The Size of My Hope," a small volume of essays published in 1926, soon disappeared from bookstores and seemed destined for oblivion. After a few decades, only a few specialized scholars showed any interest in the book; the author himself disowned it. But after 67 years, a new edition of "The Size of My Hope" came out last November with a flurry of critical fanfare and soon began climbing best-seller lists.

In her insightful introduction to "The Book of Fantasy," Ursula K. Le Guin reflects on how fantasy today has become a business. One need only to visit the nearest bookstore-in-a-mall to see that this is so. Rows upon rows of gaudily packaged "fantasy" paperbacks are there to be consumerized. What is disconcerting is their turgid sameness.

Two of the most indefensible oversights of our time: Jorge Luis Borges never having been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature and Roger Maris never being elected to baseball's Hall of Fame. As a result, the literary world is overrun with obscure Nobelist Czechoslovakian poets, and the Hall of Fame is bursting to the seams with obscure turn-of-the-century utility infielders. PHIL STEPHENS Santa Barbara

You are invulnerable. Have they not granted you, those powers that preordain your destiny, the certainty of dust? Is not your time as irreversible as that same river where Heraclitus, mirrored, saw the symbol of fleeting life? A marble slab awaits you which you will not read--on it, already written, the date, the city, and the epitaph. Other men too are only dreams of time, not indestructible bronze or burnished gold; the universe is, like you, a Proteus.

On dec. 27, at 11:31 a.m., agents of the Department of Homeland Security detained me at Miami International Airport and, after searching my briefcase, impounded a speech I was scheduled to deliver at the plenary session of the Modern Language Assn. of America in Washington. Well, not quite. It's true I told this story to about 2,000 professors of language and literature attending a forum on the "Role of the Intellectual in the 21st Century."

A monster, Jorge Luis Borges says in "The Book of Imaginary Beings," is "nothing but a combination of elements taken from real creatures, and the combinatory possibilities border on the infinite." The lamia, the centaur, the Hydra, the Minotaur -- all taking attributes from two or more creatures -- are here in this rich little bestiary, as well as lesser-known cousins, such as the ichthyocentaur, which lives undersea, and the hippogriff, mingling the lion-eagle of the gryphon with the horse.

In the short story, "Funes, His Memory," Jorge Luis Borges creates a character, Funes, who has somehow managed to inoculate himself against the ravages of forgetfulness. Thrown from a horse, Funes is knocked unconscious, and--in a sly inversion of the classic amnesia story--awakens to discover not that he's suddenly "missing" weeks or months or years of his life but that he has been granted total recall.

Not a single star will be left in the night. The night will not be left. I will die and, with me, the weight of the intolerable universe. I shall erase the pyramids, the medallions, the continents and faces. I shall erase the accumulated past. I shall make dust of history, dust of dust. Now I am looking on the final sunset. I am hearing the last bird. I bequeath nothingness to no one.

On Aug. 24, Jorge Luis Borges, who died in 1986, would have been 100 years old. So erudite and allusive, Borges seemed always to have been 100 years old. Nevertheless, reading him today we discover that he speaks directly to our postmodern sensibility. Consider a few of his obsessions: Anything expressed in words (religion, philosophy) is fiction; fiction and nonfiction are indistinguishable; meaning is determined by the reader; artists alter the past by making us see it differently; opposites resemble nothing so much as each other.

You are invulnerable. Have they not granted you, those powers that preordain your destiny, the certainty of dust? Is not your time as irreversible as that same river where Heraclitus, mirrored, saw the symbol of fleeting life? A marble slab awaits you which you will not read--on it, already written, the date, the city, and the epitaph. Other men too are only dreams of time, not indestructible bronze or burnished gold; the universe is, like you, a Proteus.

"Death and the Compass" is but the latest in a long line of deliberately obscure fables of power and corruption set in a totalitarian future filmed amid settings of architectural grandeur and populated with bizarre, decadent characters. Watching it is more frustrating than most such exercises in tedium and pretentiousness because it is the work of a talented visionary, Alex Cox, working from a Jorge Luis Borges short story. There's enough substance here to have allowed Cox to risk letting us know what's going on. Ironically, it is said that when the 85-minute film existed in its original 55-minute form, commissioned by the BBC as part of a series of Borges teleplays marking the 500th anniversary of the Spanish invasion of the New World, it was actually more accessible.

Most people would agree that Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez are the major practitioners of magic realism, but even though they work the same generic terrain, their methods are markedly different. Garcia Marquez's world of flesh and blood is filled with characters possessing supernatural powers. Objects are transformed in crescendos of images or materialize out of nowhere, as is the case with the galleon in the jungle of "One Hundred Years of Solitude." His powerful themes grow out of closely observed human behavior over the breadth of his weighty novels.

The earliest published fictions by Jorge Luis Borges were elaborations of other stories: a Mark Twain yarn about a fearsome robber, Herbert Asbury's account of New York gangs early in this century, a book about Chinese pirates and another about Billy the Kid.