Como dice Borges

Yes, as The New Republic says, Jorge Luis Borges hated soccer and its fan culture. But did Borges say or write these words?

El nacionalismo sólo permite afirmaciones y, toda doctrina que descarte la duda, la negación, es una forma de fanatismo y estupidez.

[Nationalism only allows for affirmations, and every doctrine that discards doubt, negation, is a form of fanaticism and stupidity.]

The New Republic piece on Borges and soccer includes the sentence in English, with a link to a source with the Spanish sentence. But TNR’s source gives no source for Borges’s words. Here’s a page that cites a 1994 issue of the periodical Tendencias. But look at what’s there:

[Google Books shows this periodical only in snippet view. But some searching and pasting makes the passage available.]

“Como dice (Jorge Luis) Borges”: as Borges says, followed by a statement not enclosed in quotation marks, and slightly different from the above: “En el nacionalismo sólo se permiten afirmaciones, y toda doctrina que descarte la duda, la negación, es una forma de fanatismo y de estupidez.” My translation: “As Borges says, in nationalism only affirmations are allowed, and any doctrine that discards doubt, negation, is a form of fanaticism and stupidity.”

And notice the guillemet (») at the end? Striking as this statement about nationalism may be, it’s a paraphrase of Borges’s attitude, not something Borges said or wrote. The more closely I look at the sentence, the more I suspect that perhaps only the first main clause is to be attributed to Borges: “As Borges says,” &c., and [let me add that] “any doctrine,” &c.

I finally found the source for this statement about nationalism by searching for “Quiero ser una persona internacional” [I want to be an international person]. The source is a 1994 interview with Mario Vargas Llosa. Here it is, in Spanish and in Google Translate’s English. The source for what Borges is said to have said is something I’d still like to discover.

More words for our times from this interview: “El nacionalismo es la negación de lo extranjero, y eso me parece una fuente de violencia.” [Nationalism is the negation of the foreign, and that seems to me a source of violence.]

Related reading
All OCA Borges posts (Pinboard)

[Nacionalismo, even in a paraphrase, seems to mean more than nationalism: in Borges: A Life (2004), Edward Williamson contrasts nacionalismo (“right-wing nationalism”) with Borges’s criollismo.]

Zippy Bumstead

[Zippy, July 1, 2018.]

Zippy as Dagwood Bumstead, Griffy as Mary Worth. Or is it Dagwood as Zippy, Mary as Griffy?

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

“Here’s your problem”

[Daily cartoon, by Pia Guerra, The New Yorker, June 29, 2018.]

[I’ve reformatted the cartoon to remove a large gap between picture and caption.]

From the Saturday Stumper

A pair of clues from today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Lester Ruff:

22-Across, five letters: “They often run about an hour.”

35-Across, four letters: “They run more than three hours for seniors.”

I especially like 22-Across. Even after getting the answer (the crosses let me know that it must be right), I was baffled. The dictionary was no help. I had to look at the answer again to understand.

Today’s puzzle — solvable! No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

George Cameron (1947–2018)

George Cameron, singer, drummer, and original member of the Left Banke, died earlier this week at the age of seventy.

When it comes to the Left Banke, I am very late to the show. I started listening to the group just a few months ago, after seeing Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri and hearing the Four Tops version of “Walk Away Renée,” which made me remember the Rickie Lee Jones version, which made me think: I should really look into the Left Banke. I bought the group’s available LPs (two, reissued as CDs), downloaded a compilation (the two LPs and two singles, from iTunes), and discovered an extensive website about the group at archive.org.

Suffice to say that the Left Banke, though shortlived, was fairly brilliant: Beatlesque harmonies, psychedelic touches, and great (“baroque”) pop songs. Like the Beach Boys, the group had a musical mastermind at its center, the songwriter and keyboardist Michael Brown (d. 2015). And like Brian Wilson, Michael Brown had a musical father who brought considerable misery to his son’s life. The Beach Boys, in one form or another, have gone on and on. The Left Banke fell apart in the late 1960s — with brief reunion appearances in recent years, and with plans earlier this year for a reunion with Steve Martin Caro, the group’s long-absent lead singer.

Here’s George Cameron, who usually sang harmony, taking a rare lead: “Goodbye Holly” (Tom Feher), from The Left Banke Too (Smash, 1968).

[In the small-world department: our friend Seymour Barab played cello on the Left Banke’s second hit, “Pretty Ballerina.” I wish I could have asked him about that.]

“The donor class”

“I think that a lot of Democratic politics has been about trying to find the least offensive cause to the donor class to rally people around while stepping on the fewest toes”: Jeff Beals, Democratic candidate in a New York congressional primary race, as quoted in the most recent episode of This American Life, “It’s My Party and I’ll Try If I Want To.”

[See also Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.]

I’m not sure there’s even an A.Word.A.Day word for this one

The New York Times examines the close relationship between our president and the son of a retiring Supreme Court justice:

“Say hello to your boy,” Mr. Trump said. “Special guy.”

Mr. Trump was apparently referring to Justice Kennedy’s son, Justin. The younger Mr. Kennedy spent more than a decade at Deutsche Bank, eventually rising to become the bank’s global head of real estate capital markets, and he worked closely with Mr. Trump when he was a real estate developer, according to two people with knowledge of his role.

During Mr. Kennedy’s tenure, Deutsche Bank became Mr. Trump’s most important lender, dispensing well over $1 billion in loans to him for the renovation and construction of skyscrapers in New York and Chicago at a time other mainstream banks were wary of doing business with him because of his troubled business history.

I have no evens to can’t.

A related post
Words from politics

Words from politics

This week from Anu Garg’s A.Word.A.Day, words from politics: malfeasance, nepotism, emolument, collusion, impeach. Yep. They all fit.

Lucy’s whom

[Peanuts, July 2, 1971.]

Lucy has asked Charlie Brown, “Which is correct, ‘Who are we kidding?’ or ‘Whom are we kidding?’” Charlie Brown: “Well, I suppose ‘whom’ is correct although most people would say ‘who.’” (He’s right.) And what does he think are the team’s chances of winning today? “Oh, I’d say about fifty-fifty.” Thus this panel.

Google hits for “who are we kidding”: 650,000. For “whom are we kidding”: 27,000. The informal kidding works strongly in favor of who. But not for Lucy.

*

11:36 a.m.: Comments on today’s strip claim expertise: “Lucy is WRONG… Whom is only correct when preceded by a preposition… One of those words with which you should not end a sentence!!” Um, no.

“‘Who (Nominative case, the case of the subject of the sentence) are we kidding?’ is correct.” Um, no. The subject of the sentence is we: we are kidding whom?

[Yesteryear’s Peanuts is this year’s Peanuts.]

Another

Another mass shooting, this time at a Maryland newspaper. And the president who calls journalists “the enemy of the people” has offered his “thoughts and prayers” in a tweet. To paraphrase Stephen Dedalus: current events are a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.