"Etiquette and poetry go together like salami and eggs used to before the cholesterol craze. What we need is an authority to adjudicate -- an Emily Post, if you will." -- Noah Herzog
Lo and behold, some wiseacre has taken Herzog's words to heart, though the definition of etiquette appears to have been, er, de-stabilized. Here's a snatch of a recent column featuring a typical exchange between an MFA candidate and Emily on a short story by Argentine author George L. Borges [pictured left, winking]. I myself don't know why Emily gets so worked up about Anthony Madrid's interpretation of the short story in question, which I haven't read but probably will because the intensity of the exchange suggests that the coin designated in the story's title, "The Zahir," symbolically stands for currency, commodities, or what is made of them by Karl Marx, always on the side of the Engels. -- MA
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Dear Emily Post-Avant,
So I know you have written about Anthony Madrid before. I know you think he’s a cool poet. But you’ve also given him the business about a couple of his columns for the Paris Review Daily. I also know you are a big fan of Juan Luis Borges, and I see that Madrid’s latest column, from 11/20/19, focuses on that famous writer of Argentina and of the world. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/11/20/the-most-famous-coin-in-borges/#more-141008 Therefore, I was wondering what you thought of it? Anything you could say?
–Bored MFA Café Fly with Nothing Better to Do than Ask, in Lawrence, Kansas
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Dear Café Fly with Nothing Better to Do than Ask, in Lawrence, Kansas,
Yes, I believe Anthony Madrid is a frightfully good poet. He also usually writes brilliant pieces for the Paris Review Daily. Not always, and there is no shame in falling short. But this is one of those “not always,” I’m afraid. Let me try to explain.
Mr. Madrid’s piece is about “The Zahir,” a story first published in the legendary 1949 collection El aleph, by Jorge (not Juan, my love) Luis Borges. The story is about a twenty-centavo coin of Argentine mint, dated 1929, one that has been dug into by unknown razors or knives, so that the N and the T in the word “CENTAVO” on the tail face are notched through. The number 2 on the coin, belonging to the “20,” is also notched. These particular notches or incisions are, one presumes, connected to the coin’s strange and wild powers. Thus, the coin is claimed to be a Zahir by Borges, which in Arabic–and in the mystical Sufi tradition in particular—designates an everyday object that assumes talismanic powers.
All sorts of alarming things happen to the innocent people who come into contact with this coin/Zahir, after Borges receives it within his change, at some bar. Borges, in a panic to rid himself of this objet petit a with-event-horizon, spends it later on another drink, because it has begun, he senses, to eat away at his very identity and soul. Thus, in what might be secondarily taken as an allegorical critique of the circulation of capital and its attendant fetishisms (with the minted coin, writes Engels, “The commodity of commodities had been discovered, that which holds all other commodities hidden in itself, the magic power which can change at will…”), he passes on the coin’s infectious spells to unfortunate others. (Nice guy, this “Borges”!). Basically, anyone who comes into contact with the coin/Zahir goes bonkers or dies.
Madrid, with not a little evident Jill Bialosky-like raiding on Wikipedia, I’m afraid, recounts all this. And he then goes on to end his essay in something of a bizarre rush, to too-earnestly proffer a weirdly banal notion about the Christian symbolism he sees behind Borges’s Zahir. Which, unless he means it as a kind of joke, is surprising, for someone as ingenious as he.
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