Puck

review by Brian Charles Clark

Brodie’s Report
by Jorge Luis Borges
Publisher: Penguin, 2005

Jorge Luis Borges is best known in North America as one of the stars of “magical realism.” Such stories as “Funes, the Memorious,” “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “The Garden of the Forking Paths,” and “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” cemented his reputation as a meta-fictional writer concerned with the relationship between memory-as-story, life’s narrative arc, and the art of writing. After reading the stories in Ficciones or Labyrinths, one can never feel quite the same when browsing the stacks of a library which, for Borges (himself employed for many years as a librarian at the National Library in Buenos Aires), was a kind of labyrinth. Continue Reading »

The creationists’ back-door attempt to sneak their mythology into public education is called Intelligent Design. The issue is on trial as I write in Pennsylvania. The matter has been well covered by a number of publications, including The Onion which, as usual, has fair and balanced reporting. What a lot of the coverage has missed is the racism inherent to Intelligent Design (ID). That’s because the race card is kept hidden by both advocates and enemies of ID. Advocates of ID also try to keep the “G” word out of the discussion, too. But the canny critic sees through the veil. The argument goes like this. ID is racist because it is an argument for the design of complex systems. Some systems, though, are better designed than others. Continue Reading »

review by Brian Charles Clark

The King, the Crook, and the Gambler: The True Story of the South Sea Bubble and the Greatest Financial Scandal in History
by Malcolm Balen
Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2004

Nearly 300 years ago, a group of financial speculators dreamed up a plan to make money from England’s national debt. In an age when someone making £100 a year was considered wealthy, the national debt was huge: about £9 million. The idea behind the South Sea Company was that British merchants would trade English goods in South America, then controlled by Spain and Portugal. The problem was that Spain and Portugal wouldn’t allow any such thing to happen: they had a strictly controlled monopoly. What actually happened was that John Blunt, the director of the South Sea Company, ended up convincing the British government to sell its debt to the public through the Company in the form of shares. From the profits of the share sales, the Company would then repay the debt. Moreover, “in the persuasive but intrinsically nonsensical analysis” put forward by the South Sea Company, “as surely as night follows day, the bigger the debt, the greater the profit.” Continue Reading »

OK, people, let’s cut the crap. You’ve heard about the Bush Administration’s Big Idea: we’ll go “back to the Moon” within 10 years. Why? In order to build a base on the Moon that will serve as a jumping-off point for a “manned” (their sexist language, not mine) trip to Mars. Can we talk? If the U.S.–or anybody else, for that matter, wants to send a human’d flight to Mars, OK, that’s one thing. But why do it from the Moon? Why go all the way to the Moon–which takes 3 days and billions of dollars–to then take off for Mars? Continue Reading »

We’ve got a history of Islam: Reza Aslan’s No god but God, and a wonderful new novel by William Morrow called Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land. I highly recommend both books.

review by Brian Charles Clark

Borges: A Life
by Edwin Williamson
Publisher: Penguin, 2005

Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentinean writer, led a fascinatingly diverse life almost entirely within the city limits of Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires was, in the early twentieth century, one of the largest and most cosmopolitan cities on the planet, and so it is fair to say that Borges experienced numerous worlds without needing to leave home. Born in 1899, he was bilingual from the first, as his grandmother was British. His parents were in conflict over Argentinean politics, which perhaps influenced Borges’ seeming non-partisanship in his writing.

Indeed, if there is a problem with Williamson’s Life, it is the reduction of Borges’ life, character and work to this conflict between his parents. Williamson frequently tries to psychoanalyze the life and work in terms of this conflict and, as far as it goes, this provides insight. But did his parents really shape Borges’ entire life? The evidence provided by Williamson himself indicates otherwise. Continue Reading »