Jorge Luis Borges, born this date, 1899!

What would Borges have thought of the blogosphere?

The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a resume, a commentary . . . More reasonable, more inept, more indolent, I have preferred to write notes upon imaginary books.

(quotation source)

and

There is no intellectual exercise which is not ultimately useless.

(from Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote)