"Who is Jorge Luis Borges?"

From a 1982 interview with Philip Larkin in The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 2.:

INTERVIEWER

     Is Jorge Luis Borges the only other contemporary poet of note who is also a librarian, by the way? Are you aware of any others?

LARKIN

    Who is Jorge Luis Borges? The writer-librarian I like is Archibald MacLeish. You know, he was made librarian of Congress in 1939, and on the first day... [here I had to put down the book, otherwise I would have thrown it across the room.]

Full-text of the interview here.

"I do not name the people I talk about"

"When I am returning from a trip, the best part is not going through the airport or getting home, but the taxi ride in between: you're still traveling, but not really. [...] I do not name the people I talk about to someone who doesn't know them, I use, despite the trouble of it, abstract descriptions like 'that friend whose parachute got tangled up with another parachute the time he jumped.' [...] Even if it is an odd sort of present, I thank my father and mother for having given me life. I believe the people who make the world are the ones who do not believe in reality, for example, for centuries, the Christians. [...] I get along with old people. A woman's breasts may hold my attention to the point I can't hear what she's saying. [...] I prefer desire to pleasure. My death will change nothing. [...] I have stepped on a rake and had the handle hit me in the face."

-from "When I Look at a Strawberry, I Think of a Tongue" by Édouard Levé, translated from the French by Lorin Stein, originally published in The Paris Review, Spring 2011.

Full-text here.

People came from all over the countryside

"The Execution" by Lydia Davis

Here is another story about our compassion. In a village not far from here, a young man murdered a banker and his wife, then raped the servant girl and drank all the wine in the cellar. He was tried, found guilty, sentenced to death, and executed. Well, there was such interest in seeing this peculiar fellow die on the guillotine that people came from all over the countryside the night before--more than ten thousand of them. There were such crowds that the bakeries ran out of bread. And because the inns were full, people spent the night outside: to see this man die, they slept in the snow.

And we shake our heads over the Roman gladiators. Oh charlatans!

-from "Ten Stories from Flaubert," originally published in The Paris Review (Fall 2010)

Bookshelves named Billy

Wesley Yang, on the Paris Review blog, must have been to my room:

Bare cream walls, four Ikea Billy bookshelves of pressed chipboard—three of them white, one of them black—with the cardboard back hanging precariously by extruded nails.... Eleven liquor boxes of unpacked books stacked on the tops of the shelves: Georgi Vodka, Hennessy Privilege, Columbia Winery. A desk in a grotesque orange veneer with one side constantly slipping out, requiring a periodic succession of quick sideways hammer-fist blows to hold it in place, trash-picked off the corner of Clinton and Park Avenues.... A dresser in the cheapest marmalade veneer extant with shelves that sit crooked in their rolling slats, imperfectly controlled by knobs whose naked screws, between the knobs and the shelves, are visible. The dresser was donated to me by means of a Facebook status update—not the least of the many valuable things I have acquired through social networking.

His fairly stunning, yet also totally inevitable conclusion: 

These are the material surroundings of the child of Korean immigrants who has deviated from the script.