Borges' "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins"

"The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" is a short essay by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges and is a critique of the English Philosopher Wilkins' proposal for a universal language and of the representational capacity of language in general.  Borges also examines a bizarre and whimsical Chinese taxonomy quoted by Foucault and also Geoff Dyer in his 2005 photography study The Ongoing Moment.

Borges begins by noting John Wilkins' absence from the 14th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica and makes the case for Wilkins' significance, highlighting in particular the universal language scheme detailed in his An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668). Wilkins' system decomposes the entire universe of "things and notions" into successively smaller divisions and subdivisions, assigning at each step of this decomposition a syllable, consonant, or vowel. Wilkins intended for these conceptual building blocks to be recombined to represent anything on earth or in heaven. The basic example Borges gives is "de, which means an element; deb, the first of the elements, fire; deba, a part of the element of fire, a flame."

Examining this and other second-hand examples from Wilkins's scheme—​​he did not have access to Wilkins' actual work, but based his comments on the others' comments on it—​​Borges believes he finds "ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies", concluding "it is clear that there is no classification of the Universe not being arbitrary and full of conjectures." He fancifully likens Wilkins's classification scheme to a "certain Chinese encyclopedia," likely fictitious, called the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, said to divide animals into "(a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in the present classification, (i) those that tremble as if they are mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that look like flies from a long way off." Borges' point is the arbitrary nature of such taxonomies, regardless of whether they form a language or just a way of understanding and ordering the world. He challenges the idea of the universe as something we can understand at all—​​"we do not know what thing the universe is"—​​much less describe using language.

Redeeming Calcutta by Steve Raymer

Steve Raymer, professor at Indiana Univ. at Bloomington, knows his subject as evidenced in his Introduction. The color photos are excellent and buck the recent trend to go black and white when photographing Calcutta.  Most interesting is reference to trashing articles, e.g., Ved Mehta in the New Yorker (1970) and two books by Gunter Grass, Show Your Tongue and The Flounder. Oxford Univ. Pressis the publisher, wehich has been in India over 100 years.

Here are a few gems from the Intro.

Calcutta is a place where British dreams of global domination were given their most extravagant expression.  Calcutta's redbrick High Court, is a replica of the statehouse in Ypres, Belgium, though with a shortened tower since its marshy foundations could not bear the weight of a perfect copy. 
The City's decline began in 1869 with the opening of the Suez Canal.  William Makepeace Thackery, Anglo-Indian poet and author of Vanity Fair, was born on the site of the Armenian College. 

¡Vámonos! Bernard Plossu in México 1965-66, 1970, 1974, 1981

 Bernard Plossu is a well-known bohemian French itinerant photographer.  He is widely published in France.  This book is a work of art in itself and catalogs 4 trips to Mexico in 1965-1966, 1970, 1974 and 1981.  His portrairs are haunting.  He loved the beatniks and had friends like Henry Miller, Joan Baez, Jack Kerouac, and even Sergio Leone, who wrote a preface to one of his books.

Bernard Plossu (born in Dalat, South Vietnam, 1945) has traveled extensively through a life in photography, including in the jungles of Chiapas in Mexico, the American West, India, the Aeolian Islands, and Niger. Widely regarded as a leading figure in French photography, Plossu’s photographs have been exhibited internationally, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, Valencia, Spain; and Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, France. He has published numerous books, including Le Voyage Mexicain: L’integral, 1956–1966 (1979), African Desert (1987), Forget Me Not (2002), Bernard Plossu’s New Mexico (2006), and Europa (2011).

Mari Olguin

"In order to understand, you have to listen to what you see," Bernard Plossu.

The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq

Quiz - who is the most famous French author since Camus ?  Michel Houellebecq, of course.  If you like your intellectuals feisty, you're in luck, as I'd guess references to fellatio occur every other page or so.  This is the story of two half brothers, Michel and Bruno, who are polar opposites.

The Yale-China Association - A Centennial History by Nancy Chapman

Hsiang-ya Hospital, Changsha, Hunan

Boulevard of Dreams by Constance Rosenblum

 

Before the Bronx was a Borough (1895) or a County (1915) it was part of Westchester County, one of 12 counties in NY State set up by the British.  Manhattan, hungry for new land began annexing lands surrounding in the 1890s, including ample Park space in modern day Pelham Bay Park, Bronx Park,  and Van Cortlandt Park.  Unfortunately, there was no simple access to those parks, until a "speedway" (for horses) was proposed in 1892 along a north-south ridge from the Harlem River to the Mosholu Pkwy.  The inspiration for a Bronx-style Champs Elysses was a French immigrant engineer Louis Risse.  Legislators approved the road in 1895, and took title to properties by 1898.  It was not completed until 1909.  It was the first urban thoroughfare to incorporate underpaasses.

Gold Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li

 

Yiyun Li began writing short stories in America in her adopted English language, not unlike Ha Jin.  She is a favorite author of Amy Tan and is considered a feminist writer.  She became a MacArthur Foundation fellow in 2010 and teaches at UC Davis.

 

Gold Boy, Emerald Girl (2010) followed her novel The Vagrants.  In "Kindness", an unmarried woman, Moyan, recollects her closest relationships, a friendship with a Professor Shan, who loves English novels, Lieutenant Wei, a female army officer, and a brief crush on a man who moved out of her neighborhood. The English teacher reveals to Moyan that she is adopted (pp. 13, 73) and her mother was a nymphomaniac (p. 21).  In the Army, a friend asks her to translate the sexy passages in Lady Chatterly's Lover.  "I blushed at the words she used - zuo-ai, doing love, an innocent yet unfortunate mistranslation of the English phrase making love" (p. 31).  Inevitably, her lieutenant catches her with the book under the bedsheets (p. 39).  It is the death of Wei (p. 4) that motivates the narrator to tell her story.  At one point, Moyan develops a brief crush on a neighbor.  Shan comments "The moment you let someone into your heart you make yourself a fool...when you desire nothing, nothing will defeat you" (p. 39).   A sad commentary at best.

 

Li says she wrote this story as an homage to William Trevor:

I opened the novella with three sentences that echoed the opening sentences of Nights at the Alexandra, and while writing it, I imagined my narrator speaking to the narrator in Trevor’s novella – both characters lead a stoically solitary life, yet both are capable, and are proofs, of love, and affection and loyalty. Their conversation would not have happened in reality, but I hope that by speaking to one person in her mind, my narrator, in the end, speaks to many.

"A Man Like Him" concerns a celibate Teacher Fei (who "never cupped his hands around a woman's breasts," p. 91) who offers to assist a man wrongfully accused of adultery by his daughter, who exploits the Internet to seek revenge.  Fei's father had committed suicide (p. 89) and Fei gave his mother every chance to do the same (p. 90).  Fei's teaching career was ruined by a few moments of gazing (p. 98) at a female student, an indiscretion that branded him a pedophile (p. 99).  The Chinese character with the sound Fei means to give up or abandon - both these men have lost their livelihoods due to alleged wrongdoing for which they have no control.

In “Prison,” a Chinese couple (Yilan and Luo) living in America lose their 16-year-old daughter in a traffic accident (unintended suicide) and find their world shattered. They go to China and find a surrogate mother so that they might have another child.  The wife chooses an uneducated young woman (Fusang) whose only child has been stolen by a kidnapper several years before, and stays with her during the pregnancy with twins, fretting over imagined dangers to the unborn children. When the two women are approached by a young beggar boy on the street, the pregnant woman insists that the boy is her missing child (p. 125). When the two women get home, the girl demands that the woman give her half the money promised so that she can buy the boy back from the beggar man. When the woman asks the girl to sit down so they can talk about it, she threatens to run away and sell the twins. The story ends with a standoff as the woman thinks, “This was the price they paid for being mothers…that the love of one’s own child made everyone else in the world a potential enemy.” She knows that the relationship of trust she and the girl has developed during the pregnancy is crushed and that they will remain each other’s prisoners (p. 130).

In "The Proprietress," Mrs. Jin is the owner of a small general store in Clear Water Town. Even though she sells goods to the poor people of the village, her most important activities have little to do with her store. Her home is next to a county jail and is a safe haven for "adopted" women of all ages. Among whom is Susu, a woman who recently caused an uproar when she asked the courts to allow her to have a child with her husband before he was executed. Her request makes Susu nationally known, so much so that a reporter from Shanghai comes to Mrs. Jin’s shop to ask her a few questions.