Everyone seems to be talking about the New Aesthetic lately. Have you seen it? It might possibly have shattered records of attention credits/takes in its opening weekend. In its tumblr form, it has has been around for a a scant year or so, instigated by James Bridle. He said he had been collecting things for a while now, and described it as a “mood-board for unknown products.” Drones, mapping, surveillance infrastructure, conspicuous augmentation, pixelation, fetishising obsolescence, technological ghosts, nostalgia for the glitch, #botiliciousness, the haptic revolution, and so on. Visual as all get out. All the aesthetic seductiveness of a near future that might be already here.

Little is quite as dull as literary worship; this essay on Borges is thus happily doomed. One finds oneself tempted toward learned-sounding inadequacies like: His work combines the elegance of mathematical proof with the emotionally profound wit of Dostoyevsky. Or: He courts paradox so primrosely, describing his Dupin-like detective character as having “reckless perspicacity” and the light in his infinite Library of Babel as being “insufficient, and unceasing.” But see, such worship is pale.

And problematic as well. More than any other 20th-century figure, Borges is the one designated — and often dismissed as — the Platonic ideal of Writer. His outrageous intellect is cited as proof of either his genius or of his bloodless cerebralism.

But Borges did have some mortal qualities. He lived most of his life with his mother. He loved detective and adventure novels. (His first story in English was published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.) Though he started to go blind in his 30s, he nev