If you, like almost everyone who uses the internet, use Google, you probably already saw today's google doodle. You probably also hovered your mouse over it to see who or what is important today. Maybe you even clicked on the picture and were taken to a list of other blogs about Jorge Luis Borges, and skimmed one.
Therefore, I won't bore you with "interesting" on dits about him.
Instead, I'd like to draw your attention to something he did before it was cool - making stuff up. And pretending he wasn't. I read in one of those wikipedia-fueled blog posts about LJB, as I'm going to call him from now on, about how he wrote literary reviews about books that were never written. Like he made up the fact that they existed, then urged people to go out and read them.
Ingenius. Talk about always having source material. I feel positively inspired. Perhaps I'll write a review of a movie that Bred Renfo never made in 2000 but should have. Or the book I didn't stay up late reading last night. Or the blog my husband will never write.
Or imagine if Oprah or John Stewart did it. Hundreds of people would storm into their local bookstore or flood Amazon's homepage searching for the book. They saw the author sit next to the host and talk about their book, saw the cover. Where is it? It's like the literary version of wagging the dog or discounting global warming.
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