Recently, I wondered aloud about the seemingly substantial number of Great Writers who suffered brothel-related misadventures/trauma in pubescence. Someone appropriately named “tlon” simply replied “Borges,” and sure enough, here it is in this month’s Harper’s (and elsewhere, no doubt) in a review of Edwin Williamson’s Borges: A Life:

Williamson has Borges caught between the noble sword of his heroic grandfather and the gaucho knife. His mother enforced the one; his father, the other. Borges went off to his first day of school with a knife his father gave him for fighting duels on the playground.

[…]

When Borges was a shy adolescent, his father made an appointment for him at a Swiss whorehouse. He couldn’t bring himself to go. The trauma of this reluctance, Williamson explains, remained with him throughout life: he had let down his father’s chivalric ideal of a man wielding sword and penis with equal fervor, a man with balls enough to engage in a bloody knife fight at every opportunity. On the other hand, he had lived up to his mother’s ideal of moral purity.

Somewhere, surely, a Freudian is smiling.

Show being prepped. Not enough sleep. Barely enough time to change socks and comb hair. Read my lips: no new content (until first week of Sept.). Interested parties (i.e., all 2 of you) may venture forth to the Wrestling blog (soon to be added) if you care, where inside dirt (of an amicable sort) will be dished. Superfriends?

[UPDATE: And yes, we know we can’t spell. Thank you for noticing. Forgive us. We’ll fix it soon. We’re looking more and more like Keith Richards. And the hell of it is, aside from caffeine, there have been no drugs involved.]

Wired shall no longer capitalize the Internet in their articles, along with the Web and the Net. Which is a shame, because this nation was built on initial caps, dammit!

The ASININE 2004 Organizing Committee has introduced a hyperlink policy that is laughably bureaucratic at best, and a deterrent to bonhomie at worst. What next? Policies dictating the manner in which spectators can point at the five rings? Mandates when you take in an opposing sponsor’s meal? Oh, wait.

Some solid hoots from the Times:

Mr. Gallo argues that the whole episode was exaggerated by the press and points out that the movie received a standing ovation at its official Cannes showing. In any case, it is coming to American theaters with some of the worst advance word in recent cinematic memory, almost daring moviegoers to go see it.

Denial’s a bitch, ain’t it, Vince?

After making “Buffalo ’66” Mr. Gallo said he had all but decided to leave filmmaking because he hated working with stars (he publicly insulted his costars, Christina Ricci and Anjelica Huston, as well as Ms. Sevigny), with unions and with almost everybody else involved in the movie business.

Gallo, by the way, is 42.

A few years ago, he says, he was offered what amounted to a blank check by a Japanese distribution company to make another movie, which at that point was little more than a vague concept and a title — “The Brown Bunny.” He said he had come up with the name before envisioning any kind of story (rabbits are his favorite animals, and he has always been a little obsessed with the color brown).

Hey, Vince, I love ducks and black myself, but you don’t see me making a movie called The Black Duck.

When he explained that the movie would involve a scene of real oral sex, Ms. Sevigny said she was hesitant but eventually concluded that the scene was integral to the movie. (She also smokes crack during the scene — but that, she said, was faked.)

So in the Vincent Gallo universe, it’s an act of artistic integrity to debase Chloe Sevigny by demanding real oral sex, but it’s appropriate verisimilitude when you fake smoking crack.

“If people are sitting there watching `The Brown Bunny’ and waiting for the motel scene, then I just can’t relate to them.”

It’s the insomniacs who will be doing just that when they tune into your movie on Showtime at some ungodly hour looking for T&A. Too bad, Vince. That’s your target audience.

“I feel much better now that I’ve placed this piece of work in the world.”

Helpful hint to Vince’s publicist: “A piece of _____” often connotes something else.

(via Amy’s Robot)