Posts Tagged ‘The Library of Babel’
“In order for a book to exist, it is sufficient that it be possible. Only the impossible is excluded.”*…
One of your correspondent’s daily pleasures is Rusty Foster‘s newsletter, Today in Tabs. Here, an especially pleasing excerpt…
In 1941, Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story called “The Library of Babel.” If you haven’t read it, or if it’s been a while, go read it now. It’s only eight pages. If that’s all this email accomplishes for you today, I’ll consider it a success.
In its finite but innumerable books, Borges’ Library contains every possible arrangement of letters. In 2015 Jonathan Basile made LibraryofBabel.info, a website that not only accomplishes this but is even searchable. Here’s one of the 10²⁹ pages that just say “today in tabs.” Here’s the last line of The Great Gatsby. Can you find it? If not, don’t worry, it shows up embedded in 29³¹⁴¹ more pages of gibberish. How about this page? It implicitly existed before I searched for it, which I find kind of upsetting.
But as interesting/disturbing as the Library’s content is, I’m also fascinated by the physical structure of it. Picture a cross between “The Name of Rose” and “House of Leaves.” A sort of infinite scriptorium designed by bees…
Enlightened, solitary, infinite, perfectly unmoving, armed with precious volumes, pointless, incorruptible, and secret: “The Library of Babel,” from @fka_tabs.
See also “Visit The Online Library of Babel: New Web Site Turns Borges’ “Library of Babel” Into a Virtual Reality, source of the image above.
* Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel”
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As we check it out, we might send thoughtfully and warmly observed birthday greetings to David John Lodge; he was born on this date in 1935. An author, critic, and professor of literature, he has written 18 novels, a baker’s dozen works of nonfiction (plus two memoirs), three plays, and four teleplays. He’s probably best remembered for his wonderful “Campus Trilogy” – Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975), Small World: An Academic Romance (1984) and Nice Work (1988), the second two of which were each shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
“The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries”*…
The Tower of Babel, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563)
Jonathan Basile, a Brooklyn author and Borgesian Man of the Book, taught himself programming so that he could recreate Borges’ Universal Library [the Library of Babel, which “contained all books”] as a website. The results are confounding. A true site-as-labyrinth, Basile’s creation is an attempt to write and publish every story conceivable (and inconceivable) to man. In the process, Basile encountered new philosophical conundrums, French rappers, and unheard-of porno search strings. The possibilities, after all, are endless…
Browse the Universal Library here; read more of Basile’s prodigious project here.
* Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel” [“La Biblioteca de Babel”]
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As we renew our Library cards, we might recall that it was on this date in 1667 that John Milton sold the rights to Paradise Lost to printer/publisher Samuel Simmons for £10. Milton, who’s worked for Cromwell, was on the outs in those early days of the Restoration. (Indeed, Simmons kept his name off the title page [below], naming only his sellers.)
That original edition was structured into 10 sections (“books”). Milton revised his work and reordered it into 12 books, the form we know today; it was published in the year of his death, 1674. While his motive may well have been, as some critics have suggested, to emulate the structure of Virgil’s Aeneid, a second payday probably also figured in.
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