06 February 2007

Quotable Ken, He's Not Just a Trivia Generating Enterprise

"Oh well. Even if the “trivia” connection is Hurley and not Borges, I’ve got my new .sig quote for a while."


Follow the link for the context, I just like giving the punchlines.

Jorge Luis Borges is one of the all time great writers in any language. One of my minor regrets was not hopping on a bus and catching a lecture by him back in 1985. So what if I was still in high school, we're talking Borges, here.

Other folks I never saw live that I regret missing opportunities that presented themselves to me, Kurt Cobain, Miles Davis and Michael Jackson (I know he's not dead, but as far as the performer he used to be, might as well be, it would have been an experience to see him live at any point up through the Dangerous album, after that, not so much).

2 comments:

Callimachus said...

I have the same regret about Borges. I wonder if it was the same tour of the U.S. (though my recollection was that it was 1983, but I might be mixing that up). He really was the writer who most captured the zeitgeist of mid-century: the counterfeiting, the doubling, the doomed-ness of it all.

XWL said...

If it was '83, then I was thinking about going to a Borges lecture in my Junior High years, and that seems unlikely (but not impossible).

I know it was at UCLA, and would have been an easy bus ride (or healthy walk) on a Saturday night for me at the time.

I'm pretty sure I didn't find Borges until my Sophomore year in high school, so that would be '85.

I think he 'toured' a quite a bit at the end of his life.

Probably better off having not gone, sometimes the memory of what might have been is stronger and dearer than the memory of what was.

(I could work on that previous sentence to 'Borges' it up a bit, but I'm lazy)