George Borge Smorgasboard in Arts Picks


Philadelphia Weekly
February 16, 2010

A DJ, an English professor and two or three other academic types walk into the Kelly Writers House. In a good joke, one of them would also need to be a rabbi. In real life, they'd get together to discuss, celebrate and explore the work of the late, great Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine writer, essayist, and poet (who you probably confuse with the living Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez), through a variety of lenses--including "the labyrinthine, the Babelian and the intertextual"-- in an attempt to figure out where ol' Gorgeous Jorge stands in the global literary canon. In a Jorge Luis Borges story, the Writers House would be filled with every 410-page text in the world and the speakers would, instead of talking about Borges, solve murders with the assistance of Funes the Memorious and An Animal Imagined by Kafka. Matt Soniak Wed., Feb. 18, 6pm. Free. Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk. 215.746.7636. writing.upenn.edu/wh.