THINGS I DON'T LIKE BUT WISH I DID: lobster, jazz, alcohol, all-nighters, snow, hiking, international news, most dogs, most people, washing my face, public speaking, history books, psychology classes, academic writing, virginia woolf, Proust, black coffee, old movies.
THINGS I DO LIKE BUT WISH I DIDN'T: cheesy pop music, reality tv, stouffer's macaroni and cheese, tiaras, the democratic party, matadors, cheap gas and electricity, clove cigarettes, girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes
A man who doesn't name his genitals after German chancellors, not even Prince Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingfurst, however admirable the independence he gave to secretaries of state may have been.
For some reason, being asked to list my favorite music makes me excessively nervous.
Dangerous Liasons, The Usual Suspects, Strictly Ballroom, Dumbo, Clueless, Spinal Tap, Waiting for Guffman, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, Garden State, Spellbound, Philadelphia Story, and pretty much anything that takes place in high school, contains a Hazmat suit, won an oscar for costumes, uses lots of pseudo-scientific medical jargon, or has an ugly/clumsy character who becomes beautiful/talented.
Arrested Development, America's Next Top Model, Scrubs, The Office, Gray's Anatomy, Project Runway, Top Chef, The Bachelor Rome, The Daily Show, Whose Wedding Is It Anyway, The History Channel
Nabokov, Borges, Murakami, Byatt, Berke Breathed
The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.I do not know which of us has written this page.