The Aleph’s diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror’s face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America…
From The Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges
““The Aleph” is an invitation to exuberant adventure as well as a humbling and cautionary tale, an allegory on the infinite complexities of space and time. Attaching its meanings to Lefebvre’s conceptualization of the production of space detonates the scope of spatial knowledge and reinforces the radical openness of what I am trying to convey as Thirdspace: the space where all places are, capable of being seen from every angle, each standing clear; but also a secret and conjectured object, filled with illusions and allusions, a space that is common to all of us yet never able to be completely seen and understood, an “unimaginable universe,” or as Lefebvre would put it, “the most general of products.””—
Edward Soja, Thirdspace (1996:56)
Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man
From Sundance Channel:
In 1951, American expatriate George Whitman opened a unique English-language bookshop/commune on Paris’s Left Bank. Later renamed Shakespeare and Company in honor of Sylvia Beach’s legendary literary meeting place of the 1920s and ’30s, it welcomed literati from around the globe, including Allen Ginsberg, Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller and James Baldwin. Filmmakers Benjamin Sutherland and Gonzague Pichelin celebrate Shakespeare and Company’s half-century and profile its colorful owner, who continued to oversee this Parisian landmark into his 90s.
