I love google !

Today Google celebrates my favourite author, Jorge Luis Borges...the blind man in the library who dreamt the stuff he couldn't see and wrote down what he had dreamt. He would have been 112...


"The Google Doodle shows a complex scene of an aging man overlooking great architecture from behind glass. Study the illustration and you will find a library on the right and images from “The Garden of Forking Paths,” a short story of his in which Borges describes the future in multiple ways. But, of course, he had never enjoyed the wonders of a digital computer, so even his scenes of a far-flung future have a distinctly retro feel."


http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Horizons/2011/0824/Jorge-Luis-Borges-The-man-behind-the-Google-Doodle

And on Gallica (the online catalog of the BnF) it's now possible to read the first issue of Proa (1925) which was Borges' magazine.

Picturing the future, longing for the past

All Our Yesterdays

“Quiero saber de quién es mi pasado.
¿De cuál de los que fui? ¿Del ginebrino
Que trazó algún hexámetro latino
Que los lustrales años han borrado?
¿Es de aquel niño que buscó en la entera
Biblioteca del padre las puntuales
Curvaturas del mapa y las ferales
Formas que son el tigre y la pantera?
¿O de aquel otro que empujó una puerta
Detrás de la que un hombre se moría
Para siempre, y besó en el blanco día
La cara que se va y la cara muerta?
Soy los que ya no son. Inútilmente
Soy en la tarde esa perdida gente.”

Jorge Luis Borges, La rosa profunda.

If you don't read Spanish, The New York Review of Books posted the poem translated into English by Robert Mezey.

Not a comedy person

Two weeks ago I watched Melancholia by Lars Von Trier and rather enjoyed it (I hadn't read anything about it in order to keep an open mind so I was suprised to see that Kirsten Dunst's husband in the film was Eric from True Blood!); it's my favourite film by Lars Von Trier so far, and  a better film than A Tree of Life that won the Palme d'or in Cannes.

Last week I went to the movies again and saw the last Planets of the Apes film (entertaining but pure Hollywood formula from the beginning to the ending credits *sigh*) and the last Almodovar's flick, La Piel Que Habito which is quite good IMHO (I know that some people/critics hated it but I found it very well crafted), much better than its trailer. I shall write a review some day...

It's funny because Lars Von Trier and Pedro Almodovar aren't film makers I'm usually a big fan of...

Today, I saw another Spanish movie at the cinema: Pa Negre, a dark film that won nine Goyas (the Spanish awards) this year and made me think of both Cria Cuervos and El Laberinto del fauno. The language was Catalan so I hardly understood a word here and there and had to read the subtitles. Not a bad movie at all, and the cast was splendid, but nothing really...especial.


Speaking of drama movies, Soderbergh's Contagion is a film about which I don't have high expectations but I will watch it...if only for Bryan Cranston and the great John Hawkes !

Oh yes there are also many big Hollywood stars in the film who probably have bigger parts...

What can I say? I love good cinema but I also love my TV actors*!

*ETA: That said, I am not sure I love David Tennant enough to go and see Fright Night...