Regarding coal futures: more likely a reference to the quixotism of "selling coal to Newcastle"[1], and by extension to that famous Irish-American Quixote, Timothy Dexter, who indeed did so, and broke a miner's strike. The similarities probably end there; Mr Rosier was clearly a literate man, and Dexter was not.
As for the final baseball anecdote, I think you've misread it. It is not from the point of view of the batter, but the catcher -- the anonymous narrator was a boy watching the game from the stands, and he caught the ball at the final moment. It is unarguably a 12 year old Mr Rosier; this would have been during his "youth gang" era, and he tells us that
>Whiston is glaring daggers at me: I will suffer eternally for letting them down. The other guys look away at the stand ...
-- Whiston is one of his boyhood friends, and prior to this incident he disappointed them in some way. Catching that ball was a singular moment of glory, one that he dwelled on for the rest of his life, looming larger and larger in his mind until it could no longer be contained, but spilled out into a vast museum cataloguing everything connected to that instant. It was his "Rosebud". Everything about the war, Poland, etc is a red herring. He founded the museum precisely 30 years after the game, at the age of 42, possibly brought on by a midlife crisis.
It's a funny inversion of Ezra Buckley's project from Tlön; Buckley wanted to secretly invent an entire planet, Rosier wanted to publicly preserve an infinitesimal point in time and space (one which, per The Aleph, contains all other points in time and space, and through it they may be perfectly understood).
Wonderful Borgesian pastiche; though this part in particular rhymes so strongly with the end of Tlön, Uqbar that I fear he overdid it:
>Here, at the end of history, mankind has been disillusioned of ideology and symmetry, and unable to look forward, looks back. How could men not fall under the sway of the 30th, to the coalescence of its minutely detailed reality (in 1,440 equitable parts)? It would be futile to reply that today, as every day, is as detailed and real as the 30th—for where is the Institute of Today, and who its Maecenas⸮ It is no-one and no-where and no-when; and men cannot live in a utopia.
>The 30th may be a maze, but it was one lived by men, and destined to be solved by men. Its dialectical rigor enthralls the mind, though it is the dusty rigor of the chronologist. Already September 1939 (or “Zeroth of 0 AE”) looms larger in the imagination, other months and years decaying before it, as the textbooks are rewritten; Poland is remembered, while France is forgotten as merely an inevitable sequel. A Palo Alto recluse has changed the earth—and the great work goes on.
>If Trente’s exponential bibliometric projections are correct, by “152 AE”, no publication on the 20th century will fail to mention the 30th. We shall be remembered solely by scholars (of the 30th) for this autumnese review. The mere langue & parole of 52 AE will perish from the earth. The world of the Twentieth will be the Thirtieth.
>It makes little difference to us, as we go on revising, in our quiet countryside retirement, an encyclopedia of Casares we shall never publish.
Compare to:
>The contact and the habit of Tlön have disintegrated this world. Enchanted by its rigor, humanity forgets over and again that it is a rigor of chess masters, not of angels. Already the schools have been invaded by the (conjectural) "primitive language" of Tlön; already the teaching of its harmonious history (filled with moving episodes) has wiped out the one which governed in my childhood; already a fictitious past occupies in our memories the place of another, a past of which we know nothing with certainty-not even that it is false. Numismatology, pharmacology and archaeology have been reformed. I understand that biology and mathematics also await their avatars ... A scattered dynasty of solitary men has changed the face of the world. Their task continues. If our forecasts are not in error, a hundred years from now someone will discover the hundred volumes of the Second Encyclopedia of Tlön.
>Then English and French and mere Spanish will disappear from the globe. The world will be Tlön. I pay no attention to all this and go on revising, in the still days at the Adrogue hotel, an uncertain Quevedian translation (which I do not intend to publish) of Browne's Urn Burial.
And of course, that fraudulent encyclopedia of Casares is what started the whole foul business ...
Can I ask you this: What am I missing from my education or experience to be able to make sense of the original link (and by inheritance, this comment)? When I read the original post, I can't understand some of the words, and any full sentences and what they're saying, let alone a paragraph or as a whole what I'm even looking at (the URL says fiction, so I guess it's a short story of some kind). I'm not even talking about the top part in French, although it does apply to the French phrases scattered throughout. I hope I'm not the only one, because I feel pretty dumb right about now.
Take this for example (first the sentence in English from the story) :
> M. Trente has furnished a signal service to the scholarly world with his éclairage of one of our unsung research bodies, worthy of Block or Ginsberg.
Ok, M. Trente is a character. "signal service" sounds like some kind of business for sending messages. "éclairage", I don't know. "Block or Ginsberg", no idea. The meaning of the sentence? No idea.
(I wondered if I overdid it, but I was also thinking that it's necessary to overdo it at least slightly because that's the fake-out ending, and you don't want it to slide by the reader unnoticed. "And everyone thought the meeting of the man and woman had been by chance"...)
Ugh. I expected Gwern to have the good taste of not trying Borges "homages". Like, this stuff is fun, it's a nice exercise for an amateur creative writing workshop. But... come on.
casey2|9 months ago
jacksonwxyz|9 months ago
_dain_|9 months ago
As for the final baseball anecdote, I think you've misread it. It is not from the point of view of the batter, but the catcher -- the anonymous narrator was a boy watching the game from the stands, and he caught the ball at the final moment. It is unarguably a 12 year old Mr Rosier; this would have been during his "youth gang" era, and he tells us that
>Whiston is glaring daggers at me: I will suffer eternally for letting them down. The other guys look away at the stand ...
-- Whiston is one of his boyhood friends, and prior to this incident he disappointed them in some way. Catching that ball was a singular moment of glory, one that he dwelled on for the rest of his life, looming larger and larger in his mind until it could no longer be contained, but spilled out into a vast museum cataloguing everything connected to that instant. It was his "Rosebud". Everything about the war, Poland, etc is a red herring. He founded the museum precisely 30 years after the game, at the age of 42, possibly brought on by a midlife crisis.
It's a funny inversion of Ezra Buckley's project from Tlön; Buckley wanted to secretly invent an entire planet, Rosier wanted to publicly preserve an infinitesimal point in time and space (one which, per The Aleph, contains all other points in time and space, and through it they may be perfectly understood).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coals_to_Newcastle
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Dexter
FiatLuxDave|9 months ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_the_First_Is_Too_Late
_dain_|9 months ago
>Here, at the end of history, mankind has been disillusioned of ideology and symmetry, and unable to look forward, looks back. How could men not fall under the sway of the 30th, to the coalescence of its minutely detailed reality (in 1,440 equitable parts)? It would be futile to reply that today, as every day, is as detailed and real as the 30th—for where is the Institute of Today, and who its Maecenas⸮ It is no-one and no-where and no-when; and men cannot live in a utopia.
>The 30th may be a maze, but it was one lived by men, and destined to be solved by men. Its dialectical rigor enthralls the mind, though it is the dusty rigor of the chronologist. Already September 1939 (or “Zeroth of 0 AE”) looms larger in the imagination, other months and years decaying before it, as the textbooks are rewritten; Poland is remembered, while France is forgotten as merely an inevitable sequel. A Palo Alto recluse has changed the earth—and the great work goes on.
>If Trente’s exponential bibliometric projections are correct, by “152 AE”, no publication on the 20th century will fail to mention the 30th. We shall be remembered solely by scholars (of the 30th) for this autumnese review. The mere langue & parole of 52 AE will perish from the earth. The world of the Twentieth will be the Thirtieth.
>It makes little difference to us, as we go on revising, in our quiet countryside retirement, an encyclopedia of Casares we shall never publish.
Compare to:
>The contact and the habit of Tlön have disintegrated this world. Enchanted by its rigor, humanity forgets over and again that it is a rigor of chess masters, not of angels. Already the schools have been invaded by the (conjectural) "primitive language" of Tlön; already the teaching of its harmonious history (filled with moving episodes) has wiped out the one which governed in my childhood; already a fictitious past occupies in our memories the place of another, a past of which we know nothing with certainty-not even that it is false. Numismatology, pharmacology and archaeology have been reformed. I understand that biology and mathematics also await their avatars ... A scattered dynasty of solitary men has changed the face of the world. Their task continues. If our forecasts are not in error, a hundred years from now someone will discover the hundred volumes of the Second Encyclopedia of Tlön.
>Then English and French and mere Spanish will disappear from the globe. The world will be Tlön. I pay no attention to all this and go on revising, in the still days at the Adrogue hotel, an uncertain Quevedian translation (which I do not intend to publish) of Browne's Urn Burial.
And of course, that fraudulent encyclopedia of Casares is what started the whole foul business ...
drivers99|9 months ago
Take this for example (first the sentence in English from the story) :
> M. Trente has furnished a signal service to the scholarly world with his éclairage of one of our unsung research bodies, worthy of Block or Ginsberg.
Ok, M. Trente is a character. "signal service" sounds like some kind of business for sending messages. "éclairage", I don't know. "Block or Ginsberg", no idea. The meaning of the sentence? No idea.
gwern|9 months ago
timepaladin|9 months ago
tonetheman|9 months ago
[deleted]
unknown|9 months ago
[deleted]