Snippets

Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions (1999) sits in a certain room of my house where I spend a lot of time waiting. By the end of 2010 I should have finished reading it through in one to five minute segments. There I read this morning the passage I read two days ago, being reminded anew of a passage in another book completed two weeks ago.

Borges' note on method:

I let them talk; I carefully avoided formulating questions that might suggest determined answers.
Borges, "A History of the Tango," 394

Lembke's critique:

In fact, there was much more wrong with his testimonies than he acknowledged to his readers. In the first place there is [Bob] Greene's [Homecoming (1989)] own leading question: "Were you spat upon?" Had he asked a more neutral question such as, "What were your homecoming experiences?" the veterans' responses would be much more valid.
Jerry Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (1998), 80