I spent the evening before Thanksgiving sitting in the living room under a blanket and therefore also under two cats, drowsily reading Invisible Work: Borges and Translation. Eventually my brain couldn’t take more of this, so I looked up which streaming service offered Name of the Rose. It was Apple TV, one of the many channels which have replaced cable, which replaced channels.

I typed Name of the Rose into the search bar in the app, and the movie came up as expected. Next to it was a documentary, Umberto Eco – A Library of the World. Since my head was already in that space from reading about Borges and translation, I selected the documentary instead of the movie.

And that was very much the right choice to make.

One of my favorite moments was Eco’s comment in an interview that while the Pope in Rome and the Patriarch in Constantinople will never stop arguing about the filioque clause, they must both agree that Clark Kent is Superman.

Reading

After almost two months of working away at it, I finished reading Efraín Kristal’s excellent Invisible Work: Borges and Translation. I will be thinking about this book for a long time to come, and will certainly revisit it from time to time.

Now I am reading the recently published There is Room in a Horse for the Whole Boy, a collection of poems by Barbara Saunier. This book was one of the first few published by the Grand River Poetry Collective, of which I am a part.

Writing

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Spiritual Beings, Aliens
Setting: Lost City
Genre: Cyberpunk

Listening

PROJECT Trio, “Sweet Pea,” from their 2012 compilation album Random Roads Collection.

Interesting Links

• “Pluralistic: O(N^2) nationalism” (Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic)