Annotated Bibliography Assignment

Mallory Smith, Borges: An Exploration in Modeling

1. di Giovanni, Norman Thomas. The Lessons of the Master: On Borges and His Work. London: Continuum, 2003.  

    In Lessons of the Master, di Giovanni, Borges’ preferred English translator throughout the 1970’s, combines a memoir of the time the two worked together and seven additional essays about Borges, translating his work and the reactions it received.  Throughout, di Giovanni reveals how he and Borges “developed a method of collaboration that allowed them to ‘recreate’ Borges’ stories from their original language into English.”  In the last essay Di Giovanni states:

Borges has a marvellous prose poem about Shakespeare called ‘Everything and Nothing’. In the opening line, Borges described Shakespeare’s words as ‘copias, fantasticas y agitadas’. One translation of this reads, ‘copious, fantastic, and agitated’; a second, ‘copious, imaginative, and emotional’. This is distinctly better and shows that the translatoris not just translating the words but is thinking about their meaning in terms of Shakespeare. A third translation reads, ‘copious, fantastic, and stormy’. A fourth, ‘multitudinous, and of a fantastical and agitated turn’ - a solution both long-winded and stodgy. A fifth version - the one made by Borges and me - reads, ’swarming, fanciful, and excited’.

    In the essay “Borges at Play: The Selves and Selves,” Di Giovanni explains, with reference to “Borges and Myself,” Borges’ own fascination with his identity in both the real and hyperreal: his private and personal self and the publicly know author and writer.  Borges is also troubled by the nature of reality.  In his work he blurred the distinction between the “two dimensions of reality- one as the cramped, mortal and conditional physical world…the other as an unconfined, timeless, and unconditional spiritual ‘world.’”  And in contradicting the two throughout his works, Di Giovanni believes Borges touched his own concept of eternity.  While the book does not directly pertain to the Borges film, it offers an insight into the philosophy of Borges, the reasons for certain word choice, and how in translation, meanings can be altered.

2. Frisch, Mark. You Might Be Able to Get There from Here. Cranbuty, New Jersey: Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp., 2004.

    In his book, Mark Frisch analyzes Borges’ impact on twentieth century postmodernism and argues how this impact has been greatly misunderstood.  Frisch highlights that through Borges’ philosophy or “larger vision," symbols, techniques, parody, and irony, the heart of postmodernism is revealed: What is real and what is a dream? Who are we?  Frisch draws upon Borges’ work and characteristic pluralism in order to discuss subjects of “subjectivity and the self, love, history and universal history,” the labyrinth, and the One and the Many.  In his “El tiempo y J.W. Dunne,” Borges suggests that our are nightly dreams capture eternity because in an instant the past, present and future all become an instant.  Borges explains:

Theologians define eternity as the lucid and simultaneous possession of all instants of time and declare it a divine attribute…eternity already belongs to us, a collaborated by the dreams we have each night.  In them, according to him, the immediate past and the immediate future intermingle.  Awake, we pass through successive time at a uniform speed: in dreams we may span a vast zone."

    Frisch explains that Borges’ is enchanted by the ways dreams and “reality” flow into each other.  Simulations fuse with reality. Is reality just a collaboration of simulacras, codes and models? 

3. Many Eyes. IBM Collaborative User Experience. 12 February 2008. http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/app.

 Created in 2004, Many Eyes is an interactive website that allows user to turn data files, such as an Excel file, into visual representations.  Visualizations include world maps, line and stack graphs, matrix charts, scatterplots, tree maps and tag clouds.  The Many Eyes website, a “bet on the power f human visual intelligence to find patterns,” offers the ability to view and discuss visualizations and data sets and the chance to create visualizations from pre-existing statistics.  However, if you register, you can upload your own data to the Data Sets page, pick from a large array of visualization tools, have your work added to the collection of data visualizations and be able to participate in a “new social kind of data analysis.”  Many Eyes would allow for our data on camera position and movement, the number of occurrences the camera filmed from a certain angles, etc…, to become a visualization, and possibly apart of the film.  Ironically, it would be a visual analysis of data from a visual analysis of a literary work.    

4. TAPoR: Text Analysis Portal for Research. Canadian Foundation for Innovation. 12 February 2008

        http://portal.tapor.ca/portal/portal.

     TAPoR is an interactive web portal offering a spectrum of text analysis tools.  Users can quickly search large texts and conduct complex searches through visual, statistical and text gathering applications.  Why text analysis?  According to Geoffrey Rockwell, “text analysis tools 1. break a text down into smaller units like words, sentences, and passages, and then 2. gather these units into new views on the text that aide interpretation.”  In assisting to reveal word use, patterns and/or themes within a literary work, TAPoR only enhances what we (as analytical readers) are already doing.  TAPoR will allow for quick and easy identification of words (simple noun, adjective and verbs) and word patterns that can depict and be translated into camera position and movement.  Yet, what if the results received through basic text analysis are too unilinear?  Unlike other sites offering implements for similar text analysis, with TAPoR users can create their own MyTAPoR account wherein individual texts and tools can be added, saved and combined through the Workbench.  With the TAPoR Recipes page, users can see how others mash-up tools in order to identify and analyze themes, specific terms and textual devices; the “community benefits from shared experience.”  With the availability of more sophisticated tools, nouns, adjectives and verbs are no longer individual in meaning, but a collaboration creating complex themes and word patterns, thus, offering a possible gateway towards the depiction of more complex camera movement, position and style. 

5. Young , Freddie and Paul Petzold. The Work of the Motion Picture Cameraman. New York: Hasting House, Publishers, 1972.

    Young and Petzold collaborate to produce a straightforward guide to mastering the actual reality of the motion picture. Lighting objections, lighting for effects, camera techniques, filming studio and location effects, working with artificial backgrounds: each tool, so to speak, is taught (with accompanying images) in a comprehensible fashion perfect for the beginning cameraman.  Though, the book provides an unnecessary, extensive depiction of the who, what, where, when, why of each individual of the “camera crew”  (obviously such does not pertain to a group of four), it does offer practical advice of camera techniques: creating conversation, camera movement, the close up, and, most interesting, multiple-camera techniques.  Simultaneous camera angles and positions offer the ability to layer camera movements.  Nouns, verbs and adjectives assigned certain camera positions/movements can be combined with one another in order to create and reveal more complex themes.  Young and Petzold also successfully convey the importance of lighting and lighting techniques.  From “Lighting and the Atmosphere” to “Moving Lights- Static Camera,” we are given the possibility of creating a second parameter.  Could different lighting convey additional, or at least, further emphasize word combinations and patterns?  Nouns, adjectives and verbs can, too, be assigned to lighting techniques and distinctions, a possibility not yet considered.  With lighting tools fused with camera movement, complex new patterns could reveal additional insights to Borges, or any other literary work.