librarypunk - 075 - Borges and the Library of Babel feat. R.E. Parrish

Episode Date: December 5, 2022

We’re talking with comic artist R.E. Parrish about Jorge Luis Borges and The Library of Babel. On the way we cover a Reddit question, information paradoxes, goth librarianship, and Twitter archiving.  https://reparrishcomics.com/ https://www.etsy.com/shop/reparrishcomics https://twitter.com/reparrishcomics  Media Mentioned The Library of Babel - Wikipedia  https://libraryofbabel.info/About.html  Infinite monkey theorem - Wikipedia  The Total Library  https://reparrishcomics.com/post/101029451973/writer-fights-1  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox

This is a thousand monkeys working at a thousand typewriters. Soon, they'll have written the greatest novel known to man. Let's see. It was the best of times. It was the blurst of times. You stupid monkey! Oh, shut up. Hello, I'm Justin.

I'm a scholarly communications librarian. My pronouns are he and him. I'm Jay. I am a music library director, and my pronouns are he him. And we have a guest. Would you like to introduce yourself? Sorry, I almost cut you up. Hi, I'm R.E. Parrish, and my pronouns are she, her.

Welcome. Thank you so much for having me on the show. Yeah. You can't remember how to do this on Tumblr to see how long I've been following your comics, but it's probably been a while. Oh, man. Just like the olden days on Tumblr. I remember it was when ALA reblogged one of yours was when I started seeing your stuff go around everywhere. The fucking American Library Association got to you.

I think that was like when I was in grad school. So that was like fully more than seven years ago. Oh my God. Yeah. Me and Jay have been mutuals on Tumblr eight years. Awesome. I'm returning there now. I've made my grand return.

I never stopped posting comics, but my personal blog, I sort of fired that up again because of the Twitter stuff. Yeah. I never left. But I have, I kind of didn't really buy new people for a while because a lot. because a lot of people left mostly. So it felt like I wasn't really adding anyone for a long time. So it just felt like I was kind of posting in circles for a couple of years.

But, I mean, that's also kind of Tumblr's nature is like a post just makes the round again and again. You're like, ha, I remember this and just re-blog it again. So it's kind of fine that it died because it just echoes anyway. Oh, hey, that was accidentally on theme. Yeah, I know. Awesome. But before we get to eternal recurrences, I have, it's not really a question. question, but it's a Reddit, ask

Reddit. Ask Reddit. Those people are dumb-dums. This post is idea sharing. What was your best program and display this year? I'm in adult services at a public library. My best active program was a plant exchange. People could bring a plant and take a plant. Was popular enough that I'll make a recurring event next year,

maybe quarterly or every other month. My best passive program was a book recommendation bowl, strips of paper with book recommendations on them. Sort of like a swingers book recommendation. My Best Display featured books and movies that take place in our state. People love the local content. I'm looking for ideas for next year. I just wanted to share this because those are good ideas.

Yeah, the plant one. I guess you bring a plant once you've killed it. That's what I would do. I would kill a plant and I would bring it back to the library. Sort of like seriously wrongs library socialism. Like when something breaks, you take. it back to the library to get repaired in like a library socialist society. Here's the plant I took out. It died. I'm sorry.

Yeah, maybe you can you can fix it. Yeah, I think I haven't done much like library programming yet at my new place, but the queer student union keeps inviting me to do zine workshops for them. And so I feel like a cool hip librarian teaching them how to make scenes and showing them Partair box, R-E-D, you know about Partairbox? Oh, God. Part-Ther Box is an opera blog, but it started out as like a queer opera zine in like the 90s and stuff. And the guy who makes Partair Box would like make copies and like go cruise the men's room at the Met during intermission and leave them in there.

Yeah. That's so cool. So it's like, this is our culture. That's awesome. I got to check that out now. Yeah, a P-A-R-T-E-R-E box. Cool. It's not really my job to do a lot of programming,

and I really haven't done much this year. I thought this year's Open Access Week theme was kind of a dud. It's about like Open Access and environmental climate change studies. I was like, yeah, open access isn't really the problem with climate change science. So I don't know. I do like the ideas that they mentioned, so I wanted to ring up in case someone else wants to do it. Yeah, do like a little plant exchange at your library. That's cute. Yeah, with the book bowl. I would definitely do the book bowl if I was still running like the reference desk.

I would just be like, yeah, we've got a book bowl. Here you go. When at the undergrad music library where I went to undergrad that I worked in, we would do blind date CDs where all of the student workers, we got to pick the CDs that we liked and wrap them up. and like you could like check one out as like a blind date where you would have like one word about it or something and then check it out but you wouldn't know what it was until you took it out and like listen to it. So CD blind dates are cute like programming idea too. Jay, do you remember any of the CDs that you did and like how you described them? I was always pulling like the Prince ones but also all the Diamonda Galas ones that we had.

I forget what I named the Diamandagalas one, but either you're welcome or I'm sorry if you got the Diamondagalas one, anyone out there listening. Because I was like, oh, all the weirdo shit that I made Kathleen by, like, I think I made her buy some Noibouten one time. Like, can we get some Noyboughton for the library?

So I was just forcing, like, weirdo. Or like, I think I did some Eliné, I believe we had like a CD of Jetsun Mila that I put out there. So like basically any like women electronic musicians or experimental music and whatnot, I was like, weirdo shit was finding it and putting it out there. But I forget what, how I was describing it. So I think for Prince, it was just something born like purple. It's a good thing of anything. But yeah, we did blind date with a book stuff in my last library.

But sometimes people would just unwrap the book to check it out. And they're like, oh, I don't want to read this. So they wouldn't check it out. See, we, they, like, we would check it out to them while it was still wrapped up. So they wouldn't know what it was until they got it home with them. So they couldn't unwrap it and then check it out. They had to check it out and then get it home and unwrap it. I just scanned the barcode.

I think we had, like, a number on it. And then we, like, wrote down, like, what it was or something. And so you could then check it out. Oh. You could just search for it or something, yeah. You can check things. that without knowing what their barcode is. Yeah. Okay, that was Reddit-esque Reddit. So, this is a J-heavy episode. He wrote out the notes. But since we have a guest, would you like to tell us about your work and what you do?

I feel like work is, it's like a generous term for it. I am a cartoonist. I mostly make comics about literature, movies, television, occasionally, kind of whatever. American history, I guess. And yeah, I have one novella out currently, which is a parody of the movie Amadeus, but with frat boys. And I'm currently working on a graphic novel about Northern Virginia in the year 1970, CIA. So yeah, that's pretty much, that's all I can. And my day job, I'm a, I'm a consultant. So that's really not very glamorous, unfortunately. Which of your comics was the one that ALA spread around? I want to say it was like the writer fights, one of them. I think so. It's very hazy. It's either that or that was the one Penguin did. For some reason, it didn't know Penguin had a Tumblr account, but I guess it does.

So, sorry. So Library of Babel? Yeah. Library of Babel. Jay, you want to tell us about Jorge Louis Borgia? Yes. Borges. So as we discussed way back when we did Name of the Rose, Jorge Louis Borges.

Yeah, I don't speak. It's Spanish in Argentina, right? Yes. Okay. It's not one of the Portuguese countries. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentinian writer, primarily short-strand.

stories, but he also did some like nonfiction, did some like pretty influential essays and stuff too. And he was also a librarian and a lecturer. And in Umberto Echo's name of the Rose, there's the blind librarian who is based after Borges. And he also did a lot of like translations and stuff. And what I found fun, I think it was yesterday or today going through, was I didn't know that he was an anarchist. He was anti-communist, but in the, like, authoritarian communism since he was like, fuck the state, don't tell me what to do, you're not my dad. He was a, quote, Spenserian anarchist who believes in the individual and not in the state.

And I looked up in Spenserian refers to the, like, social Darwinism guy. So, not great there. I was like, oof. but he was very like anti-parone as well. So dude was pretty cool. We're very anti-fascist. I see why Echo liked him, obviously. And hugely influential.

I see someone put in the notes as like, how do we classify Borges in his work? Is he like post-modern? Is he like philosophical fiction? Justin was that you or E was that you? Okay. Discuss. What do you think?

That's a great question. I mean, I would probably say postmodern, even though it's like kind of a little early for when that is thought to have happened in literature. And this is, by the way, I want to reiterate that I'm a cartoonist. I am like talking on my ass. I have no training whatsoever. And I didn't take any literature classes is just me just having fun here. So if I say anything wrong, which I will, you know, don't attack me people on the internet. But you think of like postmodernism, at least for me, like in terms of literature, starting maybe in the 50s, like William Gattis kind of era.

Yeah, and some like early pension. But there's also like all that stuff that came before that, you know, people are like, well, technically like Tristram Shandy, like Moby Dick, you know, these qualify as postmodern. I was like, maybe that's true. maybe that's true. But anyway, I'd use the term postmodern probably. Yeah, yeah, because I would say like in the way that it's like more like fucking around with structure. Maybe it's like postmodern in the way that like people say that Derrida is post-structuralist and that Derrida is not post-structuralist. Derrida is a structuralist.

But, but that like he's like because of how he exists within that space that then this. conversation starts to happen. So he's still kind of operating firmly within it, but it's starting to poke holes in it so that other people can start. Yeah, that's how I might classify what I've read of, of Borges. But there's also just a larger, also conversation around hypertext that Borges is part of. We've talked a little bit on here, the hypertext fiction and hyperlink fiction starts before the internet and hypertext and hyperlink and largely in South America

largely in Argentina and other countries with people like Porteis as well as this book called hopscotch. I love cortisol. He's so cool. Yeah. When I was working on my second master's, the advisor for the program studies

like Latin American hypertext fiction and told me about that. Yeah. I was like, oh dude, best friends right here. So that's sort of like playing with convention and like how stories weave together is very post. It's weird because like Joyce was doing that too, but I don't ever really hear people called Joyce a postmodernist. Oh, maybe it's the people you follow on Twitter.

I see it all the time. Oh. This probably speaks poorly of me. I don't know. But yeah, people, you know, say Ulysses. is postmodern sometimes. Yeah, I guess it's like, are we talking about in, like, themes or in, like, formal, like, structure stuff.

And that's the thing, right? Woke moralists and postmodern neo-Marxists. And Borges is to blame for it all. Yep. He sure was a post-modern neo-Marxist. He's the first one. Of yours, woke moralists. We'll see who cancels.

That's going to be the worst thing about. Twitter dying is like Jordan Peterson is the funniest person to ever exist. No, he really is. Like every time there's a new video, I have to watch it because he's going to do some, he's going to cry about something I never thought I'd see someone cry about. It's awesome. Yeah. And I hadn't heard of this essay, The Total Library, that Borges had done, but I first read Library of Babel and then a later work heavily inspired by it called the Book of Sands. Back when I was in high school and like sophomore year of AP English, we read some board Hayes and I was like, oh, there's fucking rules.

Especially a book of sands. I don't know if either of you have read. I have not. Book of Sands, it's about like a book and like you never can find the same page twice in it. And like you go crazy trying to like look for it and whatnot. It's just ADD. It's like it's infinite book. An infinite book. Because this is ringing about, okay, I have read that. Sorry. Yeah. It's like instead of giant big infinite library, it's one small, infinite book, basically. And there's like a cool,

like, online text version of it where you have to like arrange the pages in the right order. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, there's been a lot of cool, like digital humanities work done with Bortes's texts, including Book of Sands. And then the library of Babel has its own website where the actual library Babel exists and you can like search any text string that you want and it will show you anywhere that it shows up in the library including the book that like is your name if you so choose and whatnot which I did and I downloaded mine because you can do that but yeah so he wrote this essay called the total library and the sort of infinite monkey like you know if you put down what is it like monkeys with typewriters and they'll eventually

right hamlet or something is that what it is basically yeah or i think it's like the the quote is every book in the british museum which is interesting they said museum in the essay are they are there a lot of books in the british museum i don't know probably i know um in um room of one zone virginia wulf i believe it's i believe it's a room of one zone but the whole thing when virginie wolf was talking about not being able to find things about like lesbians in like the card catalog that's in the British Museum, not the British Library. I'm pretty sure. Yeah, I was definitely expecting the word library there, and I got museum, and I was like,

hmm? Very intellectual. But yeah, what I like about that essay is how much of it you see sort of as like a, it's kind of like a first draft of the story, like, especially at the end where there's, there's like a, the second, the last paragraph is like almost verbatim repeated in the story, which is very cool. It kind of reminded me of reading, oh, no, I'm bringing him up the TV essay by David Foster Wallace. And what he then sort of put into Infinite Just after that, which, you know, he wrote those like a few years apart.

So I always find that interesting. And I honestly, it's probably just because I don't read a lot of essays that I don't see this more. But these are the examples I can think of. I mean, Infinite Just so much of the stuff there. Uh-oh, it's Infinite Just posting time. So much of the stuff in there was just stuff that he had published in other essays and short stories and like email chains going around and stuff. So I'm not surprised that, you know, Porteis was doing it too. But yeah, that's sort of like a concept I've heard.

You know, it's like one of those like, I never, I don't remember the first time I heard the like if you sit a bunch of monkeys down with a typewriter, they'll eventually type, you know, Shakespeare. I don't remember where I first heard that. Same. But it just sort of gets tossed around. around, but I suppose this is the original source, I'd imagine. Yeah. I say Huxley, yeah. I hadn't actually read the Total Library until I was doing very cursory research

when you asked me to suggest like a topic for this podcast episode. And I'm like a dumbass because I was like, oh, library babble. That's pretty cool because they're librarians on the show. and I want to know what they have to say about it. Like neglecting to think about whether I would have anything interesting to say about this, which I like do not. So if the first 20 minutes hasn't given this away, please lower your expectations.

Because I was like, what can I bring to the table as like my own like feelings of mysticism? Which is like not rooted in any like reading or theory or anything. it's my own woo-woo spirituality and the vibes I get from the story, which is essentially like listening to someone recount a dream. So it's not interesting for other people. Unfortunately, I was sort of running into that as I was preparing for today. I was like, oh, God damn. No, that's why I like Borges and why I like the Book of Saints

and why I liked Library Babel when I first read them in high school, because it felt like even beyond like the book nerdery shit. It was like this like sense of like infinity that it opened up when I read them because they're written so simply is the thing like you start reading Library Babbel. And for the, okay, so people who don't know Library Babel's short story and it's about it details the universe, which is a library. And almost like like you would describe like when you're reading the Bible and how to build the arc almost. And it's like it's like it's a bunch of hexagons and they're this big and they're attached like this. And there's this many letters. And basically it's like all these like hexagon.

on book stack things. And they have this many books on them. And each book is 410 pages. And each page can fit this many characters on it. And these are the only characters that can be on there. And there are an infinite whatever, like any word or combination of letters or whatnot that could exist is contained within the library. And that's sort of like the basis of the library of Babel. And it's like a good chunk of the story is just detailing like.

And here's how this library works, which is why someone was able to literally recreate what it actually is, like, online, like, through algorithms and stuff where you can actually just go into the Library of Babel. It's like a real thing that exists now in the digital space. And the narrator of Library of Babel, it's like, all right, and all right, we're going to go into our building nose arc type of measurements for the Library of Babel and then starts to go into the more like the metaphysics and the mysticism and sort of lore and history about the library. And that was what I always found interesting. And like with Book of Sands, when this sort of like manic obsession about, you get a very like, my God, it's full of stars moment.

Yeah. Yeah. When you're reading Bortes for the first time, like that's, because it's so dry for a bit. You're like, all right, they're hexagons. Cool. There's this letter. Great. Awesome. There's this many pages.

Cool. And then it goes into like just and still written very simply. But just, I don't know if that makes sense of just like the type of feeling you get when you're reading Bortes for the first time, especially library of Babel. Yeah. It's just the way that Bort Hase can sort of capture the infinite in something, so mundane is like a book. So that's the mysticism aspect is also what always intrigued me about Porteis as well. This is before I wanted to be a librarian or anything.

So I was just like, oh, it's infinity, bitches. Oh, he's going crazy because he can't find him. Oh, no, the book is God. And maybe that's my house of leaves is my favorite book. I was going to say that it's clearly very influential to something like House of Leaves. But yeah. Yeah. Justin, had you ever read any Borges?

No, I keep running into him and keep meaning to like sit down and read some. I don't, I feel like there's something of as I must have read, but it wasn't the library of Babel. I might have run into him. Something about like, didn't you do like forgeries or hoaxes? There's something in his Wikipedia about this. Maybe that's how I came into it. It's Borges just Orson Wells. Yeah, I read, um,

I think the first time I read it, any story by him at all, was in graduate school, like, my second year of grad school, when, like, my brain was basically being, like, fried like an egg. And it was just, it was, it was a good time to encounter that because I was, I was very, I was feeling very raw, you know? Yeah. So, I don't know if it helped or hurt the over. the overall situation, but I was very open to it at the time. And recently I've been trying to actually read all of the stories because I've only read like maybe half of them at this point. So tons I haven't gotten to yet. Yeah. Yeah. I guess as like a non-library person, what do you, because I see that you are wanting to then ask us about what we as library people

think of the library. But like when you read Bortes and like, specifically like library babel, but I guess like Bocasans could also be interesting, but like is a non-library person. What is it being like a library? I mean, I sort of did the default uninteresting thing, which is, you know, the library is like, I don't know, either the structure of the universe or like natural law or like reading it as a metaphor, you know, for the universe man or whatever. and the question that I've written down in our like preparation document is the reason I like kind of wanted to talk about this was very selfishly to listen to librarians talk about this because I think it's interesting to like approach the story from a like literally being about a library perspective like if you want to read it that way and I don't work at a library I use the library but I don't work there and I don't work in like, you know, information, like, oh, what is it called?

I've written it down. Archiving, that's it. Shumstores, where do you use all the time? But because there is so much in there about like the sort of having to wade through all these books of like seemingly nonsense to get to the tiny, tiny percentage that are written in a way that you'd understand, unless you were, you know, trying to crack. the code, I guess, and like, you know, the librarians that, that try to, you know, throw certain books out and the sort of infighting there. I wondered if there is like, I don't know, something, if this was resonant to you professionally. Yeah. And like, so maybe it says something about me that, like, I never viewed this as metaphorical, even in high school when I read it. I was

like, oh, yeah, obviously this library is the universe. And this is all just like literal material fact within this universe that Lordhaste is writing. And I totally am down with the like, and God is a book in the center of this somewhere that these mystics are trying to find in like their ecstasy of searching. And all of that was like this very like, like this like material mysticism. And not necessarily like a not in the way that sometimes we on this on this podcast and just in the profession in general where there's like book people and people people. Like why? Why? Why? Why are you a librarian? What are the materials for?

You are like a materials person or are you like a people person? Not that those are mutually exclusive, but it's the sort of like, are you more there for like, are you into the objects or are you into like having people use objects and stuff? So not in that sense, but in a sense of like the materialness of this library just always felt very real to me. And I always thought that was like so fucking cool. That was what was so mind opening about it for me. We was trying to imagine this as a real space that could exist and being like theoretically it could if there's only so many, only so many combinations that you could do with these letters and whatnot. But and then in the way he's describing it, it's like once he brings in the metaphysics and like the mystics with their god with the book.

spine that goes around the room or something and the people that like the one library who found like the book that was a summation of all the other books and is like this like god figure and whatnot like that is what opened this up for me and I always found interesting and so revisiting it I wasn't even as a librarian it wasn't even registering of like oh how would these be cataloged and like it It was interesting for him to bring the point up as like what's on the spine as nothing to do with the contents of the book. I was like, oh, that's interesting. But I was much more concerned with like the mystical elements and whatnot, which I don't know. That might say something about me as a librarian then.

I don't know. Well, I mean, I think it's probably the most important aspect of the story. So it's not a bad thing to get hung up on by any means. But yeah. But what I think out of all that, though, what struck me was the librarians who would go through and get rid of the nonsense books and then our narrator making the point that that's kind of pointless because there will be other books where it's only a comma different. But then the point is brought up as like how much damage has been done to because of all

of those books that were removed. Like you can't ever know. And so are you overestimating your under? estimating. That I found to be very salient right now because this year especially there's been just a lot of talk of web archiving because of things like the war and conflict in Ukraine. And there was a bunch of librarians and digital humanities people that were doing a lot of web archiving and scraping of cultural institutions and heritage near the beginning of that. Stuff of the Internet archive in general. I know that I was writing a little bit about it because of the Isabel

Fall situation. And now with Twitter, there's been all like the book bannings and stuff going on. But I feel like things being lost online, like the ephemera of our digital information structures is what was more resonant with the story to me than anything. I don't know. I've been talking a lot, Justin. Yeah, I mean, it only works as sort of a metaphor for the and like information and information and sort of the information theory sort of way. And like information is the structure of atoms. It only exists when it has structure. It doesn't exist separate from atoms. So it's like a very materialist way of thinking about the world. It's a physical atomic way of thinking about the world. So you can imagine like what I was thinking about

is information theory does come into library science, but not in the same way that it comes into physics. This is more in the way that physics thinks about information. So, like, I imagine if this is an infinite series of like Hamiltonian cycles, because someone did the mathematics of this short story and figured out that it could be, it actually could be infinite if you had six-sided rooms, if you made Hamiltonian cycles, or if there were different floors or something like that. So I would imagine if you looked on the outside of it as a universe in the same way that physics imagines it might be possible. If you were to look outside the universe, all of the information would be visible to you on the outside of it if you were somehow external to it. So it's like

information and black holes, for instance, like how does information get pulled into a black hole and how is it? What would it look like if you fell into one? You would start, you would eventually see all of the universe sort of pinch in front of you because you would see before and behind you because of the way the singularity works. And so if you could see outside of the universe, you'd also see all the information that was reflect on the inside of it. So there's a fun idea there of like do black holes create universes that sort of thing so that all of the this is sort of really playing with like physicalism and atomic theory and if something was truly infinite then everything must exist out there in a way so even though the books are limited and the information

is mostly gibberish it's really interesting to put like humans in there and then having them try to figure out like how they make sense of all of these things because it's a weird metaphor because like libraries are really utilitarian things like they only work if you can use them. A library fold of like gibberish books wouldn't really be a library because no one would know how to use it without a catalog or without like an accepted language. So on that sense, like it's kind of a weird metaphor. And I think some of the other ones are more interesting because they're like,

I think there was a story. I know I've already asked Matthew about what it was, but he mentioned like a fiction story read or maybe it was a video game episode that they played. But the whole book was like one long room. and it was more or less infinite, but most of the rooms were abandoned. I imagine that would be a really fun thing because most of, when you're talking about abandonment, most of the stuff isn't inherently useful, whereas books tend to have more purpose and meaning behind them because they're made to be used.

Like useful objects. The idea of a randomly generated book is kind of weird. It is kind of the way we treat information in terms of like if it's gibberish. There's like a line paraphrasing. there's like a line in the story talking about how like the books and the library are either created by or manifestations of God and humans were either an accident or created by some lesser God like a demiurge. The narrator says this and obviously I'm big into the whole Gnostic thing and so I love it every time Borges does some Gnostic shit which is almost every story that I've read

by him. I always thought that was sort of interesting, the information itself being in some way perfect and the humans sort of can't comprehend it, obviously, as they're, you know, purging parts of it or whatever. Yeah, like, I think my favorite thing about, like, in them, like, trying to figure, like, in all the theories about, like, the cryptography and whatnot was the book that was just MVC and how, I think it was MVC. And how, how, I think it was MVC. And how, how, how some people theorize that like the MVCs at the beginning of that book were different than the ones at the end of that book, even though it's the same string of letters, just by like proximity and meaning and repetition or something. It's some like DeLuz shit happening and this is

pre-Dilluz, I think. I wonder if DeLose read this and was like, hey, some like difference of repetition happening. But just that like things like how something that is exactly, the same could have like its meanings and therefore itself like where the meaning of something could actually change what something is even though it's the same thing that sort of fucking like alchemy of meaning I found to be very fascinating and like how we understand language and I guess like semiotics and signs in general is it could be the same thing over and over and over again but its meaning was shifting or something. Yeah, like, Justin, I like what you bring up about, like, as a library, this would seem pretty useful, like, because they're not utilitarian, like, what use are these books and whatnot.

But then I would also, like, anything could be useful if you have the right use for it. And so we've been having some discussions lately, mainly around, like, special collections, but, like, what is the point of having, like, a special collections or, like, what is the point of having, like, a special collections or, having certain materials in a special collections. Like, we just talked about F for fake, and it's like, why would you have art, you know, in a museum or, you know, we talked about American animals and, like, why have, you know, a book of Audubon prints in your special collections? Like, why have these things? Is it to, quote, preserve a cultural heritage or is it for, like, the John D.

Fuxmith collection of, we want your money? And so like in a library, yes, it's more obvious that these are for use, but also most of these books are never going to be circulated a single time. Like even in a regular library, most books are never going to be circulated. And if they are, it's going to be very few times. Most books will sit there until they are weeded or they rot. And the books are just words printed on a page anyway. And so it's like, are books in a library even that utilitarian and useful? More. so than these nonsense ones would be. If I went into the physics section of a university library, it would probably be as gibberish to me as any of the books I could look up in the Library of Babel. Because I don't know that context. They're of no use to me. Most books are of no use to most people. That's like a dark... So in library science, RE, we have these things called the Rang and Nathan's Five Laws of Library Science. And you've maybe heard some form of these where it's like every book it's reader, every reader, their book, books are for use. Those are the important ones for our discussion.

Okay, yes, every reader, their book and every book they're reader, but not every book is going to be the book for every reader. And so if I went into another person's house and looked at their books, most of them are probably useless to me. Right. So then what's the fucking purpose of everything? That's a great question. Borges has me questioning my whole profession. I might go quit tomorrow. But I work in a music conservatory and we just have scores.

And most of them, a lot of them don't get checked out. There will be sections that I can tell get a lot of views because I have to shelf read them all the time. And we can never find anything because everything's always out of order. But there are a bunch of things that have just never been touched. So. Yeah. Yeah. I have no answer.

If it's a library that creates itself, then I think, actually, I think it makes sense to start weeding until you find meaning into it. I mean, that's kind of what humans do when they found themselves in the universes. We take things out in the physical world and we craft it into things that make sense for us. And sometimes that means destruction. And if your whole universe was just a series of books, then it would make sense to try and weed it down until you found things that worked for you. There was something in the Wikipedia about cabalistic reasoning, which is something I'm not familiar with, so I couldn't really understand what they meant. I assume, I mean, I know it has something to with mysticism, but I couldn't figure out exactly how it fit into the short story, but that was something I was interested in and tried to look up, but I couldn't find out like how that heuristic works. I imagine I've heard something similar before. I wish I could help. I have read some amount about Kabbalah, but I can't. I'm a dumbass, honestly. I could not paraphrase anything about it pretty much. There was like a phase of my life where I would like follow sleep listening to like a YouTube like question and answer series with like, I forget what it. It was called Ask the Kabbalist, I think. Most of what I know is because I read this book, Occult Features of Anarchism that talks a lot about the Hermetic tradition and Freemasonry, which has some Kabbalah in there, like the general Anglo-Sphere mystic tradition that arises.

With the hermeticism, I feel like I have a better, it's easier to grasp than like the hardcore books about Kabbalah, which are so hard to understand. stand. So, but I think a lot, like the, the Kabbalistic stuff, the, like, alchemical, hermetic stuff, the Gnostic stuff, Orhys uses all of them. Any sort of like peppers it in, I don't think any of the stories. And maybe this is, again, like, like a very stupid thing to say, it could be, but I don't think you need to have the, the total background in any of those to be on the right wavelength for these stories and perhaps it's like, I don't know, it's like a David Lynch movie. Like, it's about being on, approaching it with the wavelength that you're on and seeing how it matches up. Does this make any sense? Yes. Okay. No, no, completely. Yeah. Like, because like,

with Lynch, it's very like, how do you feel while you're watching it? People are always trying to like, what does it mean? It's like, like, one, Eraserhead is really not that complex of a film. two, it's more about like, okay, how is this like affecting you subconsciously? You know, how is this connecting with you? What are you bringing to it? And yeah, Borges is very like... Like, I'm not trying to say he's lynchian at all. No, not at all.

But like you said, his writing style is so simple and these impossible sort of like Escher ish or if you're talking about something like the Aleph, like all of the universe contained in one point kind of stuff that he writes about these things that you're picturing in your mind. So much of it is about what you bring to it with your own imagination. And so I imagine that everyone gets different stuff out of it, at least to a certain degree. Yeah, like when I read Borges,

especially like Book of Saints and Library of Bible, it always feels like that scene in the fountain where Hugh Jackman's character sees into Shabelba finally and it's like the like gold light over his face he has like the huh and then like his body just like melts away under like the gaze of the Shabalba star

that he goes through or like the 2001 or 2010 where it's the my god it's full of stars moment or like in contact you know should have sent a poet But those kinds of moments are what I get when I read Borges. And it's so funny because in the alif, it's like the narrator is, as I recall, I read this one more recently, the narrator is a writer and is like very distraught at the inability to convey this experience that he had with the alif.

And like he's just very, very upset that there's no way that human language could possibly begin to describe it. He obviously gives it his best shot, but I just, I, I, I, I like that aspect of it too. So something that can bug me in fiction a lot is, and I guess it's similar to like auto fiction is where someone like takes what they are in real life, like a librarian or something. And when they write, it's about that, right? Like sometimes that bugs me unless someone's really good at it. But that's what this is, is Borges being like, What if cool cosmic mysticism librarian chip? Whoa, wouldn't that be sweet?

Answer, yes, it would be fucking sweet. Knowing that like a librarian wrote this, how does that, because I didn't know he was a librarian when I was in high school when I read this. I didn't know until I saw that like today. So in the document. Really? Yeah, no. Yeah.

I don't know much about his life, honestly. Yeah. It was not his primary profession, but then definitely later in life. That was like his primary thing was librarianship. Granted, I don't think he had like a master's degree or anything. I didn't look. But it was something that he did at like a national level. Like he was like a national, he was like the Library of Congress for Argentina.

What didn't he do? I know. He's everything while blind. Like Jesus. And so I guess like I guess maybe what are some marks on this story where it's like only a library. would know to like mention that kind of thing or do we think how different do we think the story would have been if someone who wasn't a librarian had written it my impression of of borges I guess I not knowing that he was a librarian until very recently it's not like he gets into too

many like technicalities in in the story so not on that level I guess that that's sort of what I was trying to get out with my very dumb like, will you look at a library, like question, whether there is some sort of like more general, I don't know, resonance. I don't know. I mean, yeah, because like this, not that I was leading this, but that makes me think like, yeah, this doesn't have the marks of like, well, I do this. And so I'm going to write a story about this. Like, it doesn't have this annoying, specifics that no one else but you, like no one else but like a librarian would care about that. Right. And so you only put it in there to show that you're cool or that like you

are so steeped in it that you don't realize that no one else cares. Right. About that. And so it doesn't have that sort of like, and then this was the classification system it used. And this was how the cataloging happened. And this was the materials that the books were about. Like it didn't have these more, despite it going into the whole like hectares Noah's arc. Like seriously. Like I don't like what, yeah, it doesn't have like those marks on it. I feel like it does like it feels very like just like like you were saying like it feels different from any sort of like library science. And that the fact that it's a library is a sort of incidental and cool and not necessarily like making a commentary that it might be.

through, what do you do? There is a feeling a lot of people get in libraries, especially if you get into a library of a certain size for the first time and realizing that there's no way you could ever read everything in there, even if you wanted to, even if you had nothing else to do. If you never slept, you never ate, you could read, you still wouldn't have enough time to read all of it and understand all of it. And it's even worse because you can't live that life. So you're only going to be able to read a certain amount of books in your life, no matter how hard to try. There's always a limit to the information you can take in. And so that sort of despair does happen in a library.

Like, libraries do force people to confront their mortality simply by their size. A lot of things do that. But the idea of an infinite library would really make you confront your mortality, especially when every book is mostly gibberish. You could spend a lifetime never finding one that made any sense. That is my favorite line in this, though. it just hit me so much harder. And it's the paragraph of once I am dead, there will be no lack of pious hands to throw me over the railing.

My grave will be the fathomless air. My body will sink endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite. Very cool. Yeah. Like I feel like I, this is the first time I've read this and the stuff about death in it stuck out. more to me. I feel like when I read this in high school, I was just like, whoa, if it's a library, but whoa, it's so weird. And now I'm like thinking about like, oh, the suicides have gone. The suicides, yeah. It's what I was going to bring up to. It's like, there are other people in this. I always forget there are other people in the library of Babel. It's always just the narrator. And then I reread it and it's like, oh, it talks about how yes, there actually are other people. But not as many as there used to be. And apparently they will throw your body over when you don't. and then you just fall forever. Are there just bodies falling around everyone all the time?

I guess. But yeah, like, that is the way that this story makes explicit that connection between, like, a library collection and death and mortality and the infinite. It does it in a way that typewriting monkeys don't. Because you just say, well, if you had six monkeys typing for a couple of times, eternities, they would, which are not every book in the British Museum. But if you said that this was a library that maybe you could only get semantic meaning out of if you were to like cross-reference one sentence with every book every hundred years or something, that that's the only way you could find a complete work. Because other people have said, you know, you don't even need the

letters. You could put it into each book could be Morse code and you get rid of all duplicates. you'd only need one dot and one dash, and you just have the books repeat infinitely. So each book then becomes like a letter. That's where, like, I feel like the metaphor does break down because it's like, yeah, you could do that. So like the mathematics of it, I'll get kind of wonky. But I think setting it as a library is what gives it, it more feeling because like people do get that feeling in libraries of being overwhelmed in the face of like too much information.

And it's right there in front of you and you can't do anything about it. Yeah, and I keep coming back to it talking about, you know, the damage done or not done by the people who were getting rid, who were destroying the nonsense books. Again, we brought this up in the F for Fake episode, I believe. But like, even though we say we aren't hoarders as a profession, this sort of panic about, but what if I can't preserve the important thing? What if the important thing gets destroyed? What if I don't even know what the important thing is and we lose it? What if something gets lost forever and no one ever knew about it? I mean, you see all the time, even people who weren't librarians saying that they have like war flashbacks thinking about the library of Alexandria.

And like to even think about like, how much did we lose? We don't know. Where would we be? We don't know. And were people like, well, kind of jokingly, but not jokingly mourn the idea. that all of this was lost and that there was nothing we can do about it. And I've seen people say that like Twitter exploding is like Library of Alexandria happening again.

And that like I've seen this one article floating around that like scientists or whatever are concerned that like this will be like an ungrantuan loss of human knowledge if Twitter goes down. And it's like, well, the Library of Congress like was. archiving tweets and it was like, well, a lot of this is garbage. I mean, true. It's, you know, same. And so this like sort of inherent conflict that we've been having where we say like, oh, we don't hoard, we don't preserve everything, you know, it's the information and not

necessarily, you know, whatever that's important. But then the even thought of, oh, my God, we're going to miss something. Then all of a sudden it's like indiscriminate. let's screenshot every single drill tweet. Everyone download your Twitter archive because you're definitely going to want to look at your Twitter archive after you downloaded it. Like I said in that episode,

I think it's a religious reaction. I think people have a real problem with impermanence and the fact that information is not permanent and in fact it will inevitably decay. Books will decay. And it's like I get that certain things make people panic. Like I remember when the Trump, administration started. There were people who were

bagging and archiving climate change data. Same thing happened when the war in Ukraine started. Same thing happened with Twitter. Because they're afraid that a certain record will not be saved in some way, but it's really most of those things,

most of the impacts of that wouldn't have done anything anyway because even if the original data was lost, the papers had already been written and stuff like that. But there's just this big problem with, you can't can't archive everything. You can't know everything. And I think in the face of that, people panic. People were saying, like, you know, how do I, how do people get their stuff put into archives? Like, if I save, like, my Twitter archive, who's going to preserve that? And it's like, probably no one. Like, most of us are not going to have very much of a record left after we die unless we have a lot of money to give to John D. Fuxmith. So we know everything about John D. Fuxmith's life because he, he, gave all the materials to the library that's named after him.

But, like, you're not going to know much about anybody else. So I think that's, it's, uh, there are other reasons to be concerned about, like, Twitter going down. And I know we have an episode lined up to talk about web archiving, but like, is important. Yeah, it is important. I know we've been poo-pooing it a little bit, but it is actually important. Yeah, there's like the same. There's, there's like an equal crisis going on right now with, like, police dash cam footage

that's on VHS. And, like, that's deteriorating. And those cases are still going. And like, if those decay, then those court cases can't go forward because the evidence is literally destroying itself. And because it's been held up in the legal system for decades. And people don't really panic about that, but they're worried about their Twitter. I don't know. I think, like I said, I think a lot of people are going through it because they just have Twitter addictions.

Well, that's true. Yeah. Do you guys ever think about like what will happen if, I suppose when, but maybe not? not in our lifetimes. There's like a huge solar flare that just takes everything down. What then? It'd be great if it like, like the when they blow up all the credit card companies at the end of the club,

that could be fun. Yes. Yeah, there was like the Warner Hutzog movie where he's talking about technology. I think it was the one of you talked about technology. Lo and behold. Yes, that.

I love lo and behold. I wrote a paper about it one time. Just the part where he's like, what do we do? Like, what do we do when there's a solar flare? nothing and we're not ready for it and it's like oh

cool yeah where he like has a documentary and throw shade or he has a scientist throw shade at Elon Musk talking about solar flares and stuff and then it like just cuts to Elon Musk like just kind of looking sad that's a good documentary I wrote I watched that and wrote about it when I was working on my second masters that I didn't finish

but I was writing about digital gardens and Donna Hareway Okay. Because Ted Nelson talking about like Project Xanadu and like hyperlinks and stuff in that where he talks about how he was like putting his hand through the water. And Verna Herzog was like, I think you are the only one of us who is seen. And in his Van der Herzog voice. But yeah, like, again, like I remember like being assigned this in high school and it being like, oh, this is cool and infinite and stuff. but I feel like the death of information

Does information exist or have a purpose If there's not people there? I mean in a physical sense, yes Because you would just say information by definition is just a structure But a structure has to be something that's discerned by something else So information would interact with it Because structures will interact without anything observing it

I think there's like a line in the story that's sort of about that where it's like humanity is going to die up. The library is going to be here forever. It doesn't matter to the library. Yeah. It doesn't. It gets fuck out of the library. We don't want you here. And like now knowing his politics, how very anti-statist Borges was, but libraries, even the ones that he would be working at and stuff, are functions and agents of the state.

he was working at like the national library of Argentina. And so libraries and librarians are agents of the state and forces of the state and part of the state, unless they are a private library or perhaps part of a private education or something. But regardless, libraries, especially public libraries, are state agents. and I guess like the library, the universe in this, is it the state? Like, how does the relationship between like librarianship and the state? I don't know. Exist here. I think it'd be hard for me to read it that way just because of the whole like sort of

establishing thing of like the library's always been here and it doesn't seem to be made by humans and humans are sort of this lower life form. kind of a thing. Yeah, like, bugs. So the state is like a human creation. Maybe like some of the like cults that popped up in the library could maybe say that's something like a, no, that doesn't work either. Sorry, I disregard that. Yeah.

Yeah, it's hard to read into it. It doesn't mean it's not there, but I don't think that's a concern of the story. It seems like too much of the library is just the stand-in for the physical world and the universe. people have played around with the idea of like it's genetics it's algorithms like these would be subsets of the library I guess it's the ultimate structure outside of the state existed before like it's hasn't like I mean metadata anarchy time I guess we could make the argument that like a library doesn't necessarily need order but also what is order but as like an anarchist, an order that exists before order, an order that exists without us putting our ideas

of order onto it. Because the library exists and has order, but it hasn't been like cataloged and classified. It exists as it is without and before humans putting our own senses of taxonomy and subject and order and whatnot. onto it. So maybe it's just sort of like, I don't want to say natural order, but some sort of platonic ideal of order without like the bullshit, bullshit structures of the state on it or something. Yeah. Yeah. What's our favorite of the cults? I like the ones that are the heretics who try and make up their own books using like

random dice or whatever it is they use. I forget some sort of random method of generating letters and they try to make their own books. That was funny. Yeah, the book Heretics. I bet you, Justin. I don't know. I only read the total library. I didn't get or underreading the the library of Babel in time. I like them. I did, I found

the discussion of some of the, one of the cults in there. And I guess this cult was even like a state agent, kind of was the ones that would go around and destroy. the nonsense out of the books, to only leave behind the books that had like sense and meaning

in them. Because so many people yell at librarians for weeding. The dumpsters full of books discourse, right? Right. Yeah, I remember seeing that as an outside observer, obviously. And I think I saw your post about how

determining what will continue to be useful is one of the most important function. of libraries and people just don't understand that. And like there's all these sort of rotting, I don't know, duplicates or I don't know how you like determine what gets weeded or

whatever. I don't know the specifics. But I just thought it was interesting. The sort of curation is a very important part of being a librarian and this guy in the story, these guys who try to curate get yelled at

for it. Yeah, I believe the crew musty. Is it Musty or moist? I can't remember. It's a gross word. Yeah, but basically it has to do with like the condition of the book of the material. How much has been circulated? Like is it actually getting used or not?

Is it out of date? Like is this an encyclopedia for 1992 about baseball? Right. Misleading, ugly, superseded, trivial, your collection. Yeah. Yeah. So there are a lot. lot of things that go into weeding decisions, but it's mainly like current and past use and then

the state, like the physical condition of the item. And if also, if you know you're going to be wanting to get more things, you are going to have to make so much room for them. Because your library is not infinite. Your library is not infinite. Neither in space nor budget. Anything you add to a library is one probably something you have to get rid of, but also another thing you can't add. That's why the whole like intellectual freedom thing is often kind of BS and impossible because there's no way that you can have something from everyone and for everyone in every single library. Right.

You just do not have the literal physical, even if it's a digital collection, you don't have that much server space. That's true. Like you just don't. Even digitally, the library, Babel actually cannot really exist. You run out of server space. You run out of

money. Yeah, because ultimately all information is still physical. Yes. And that's kind of the point that it's making is, it's a very physicalist atomist book, which maybe might be the anarchist connection. Like, physicalism is, you know, a monist understanding of the universe.

It's not a dualist one. It's only material. I think that works pretty well with, like, that's why I would say, like, Boris seems very much a modernist when we were talking about that earlier is he's very situated within like the enlightenment but also within like industrialization because i was watching a series of lectures um that i go back to a lot but because it's really all that exists of this guy um he's a Texas philosophy professor uh why am i blanking on his name Jordan Peterson he's Canadian

up yours what more or less I wish I could do a good Kermit Peterson voice. Rick Roderick. I think of a porn name. Is he in Boogie Nights? Yeah, maybe. It's a good Dirk Diggler-ass name. He probably brought up Boogie Nights in one of his lectures.

He really liked talk about movies. He said modernism ultimately comes back to the factory. And so anything that has like the logic of industrialism, the logic of the factory, you can classify as modernist. It changes the way we enjoy our spare time and the way we educate our children. the way that we structure our relationships, all those things are influenced by the factory schedule. And that's what makes that what's, that's what defines modernity. So that's why I would say Boris is very strongly modernist. But obviously he's written in a period where postmodernism is about to emerge and is already emerging.

It's hard to say because it's the same with people who sort of classify him as magical realist, which I'm less, I agree with less, I think. than postmodern. Like that's a Marquay's. Yeah, I think it, yes. And it's, I think for the same reason that a lot of people, myself included, become like a postmodernist, is that he kind of created a lot of it. Like, or was a pioneer.

Obviously, he's not the only guy doing this, but he was a very sort of early influential writer who popularized a lot of what, came to be sort of these hallmarks of postmodernism and, you know, influenced these writers like, you know, Thomas Pynchon, Lou Cotazar, Echo, Calvino, et cetera. Yeah, what I'll end up doing is I'll go on a Borges reading binge after we do this episode. Much like I'm now watching all of Buffy after going on a podcast to talk about Buffy when I'd only seen two episodes.

And now I'm on like Season 5. I got invited on it and I don't even like Buffy. I kind of want to make you watch Buffy. Buffy now so I can talk to you about it. So I want to give your thoughts on an own extended Buffy discourse. I'm fucking fine. I'm having a lot of fun watching it now.

Once you're in it, you're just like, oh, this is funny. Just watch it for Giles. You'll get through it. And, and Spike. And Spike. I know I like Spike is really fun too. Yeah, I like Spike. Those are my two favorite characters, definitely.

they're the best characters. Even I know that. Yeah, I guess like with Borge's anarchism, I would say that it's interesting because he's also like the mystical Gnostic stuff because normally you wouldn't associate anarchism with that kind of stuff. But actually it's all in there. And this sort of like, oh, for those at home who weren't saying this, I was holding up my occult features of anarchism book about how so much of the modern. Americanist movement has to do with like freemasonry and the, uh, and her medicism and stuff, including the fucking A. Really?

I'm intrigued. Barbara Aaron Rick did the foreword of this book too. Okay, cool. It's through PM Press that like, I feel like, and this is probably just because I'm starting to notice it, but that there's been this sort of like material mysticism rise happening on left Twitter. Like the Philosopher's Terror is a thing that all of the spooky leftists have.

I've never seen this. All I get are people calling Joyce postmodern. It's all of the people who like Mark Fisher. Oh, okay. We're all into tarot now, I guess. Did you get that fucking drop, Justin? I've had that for like six months. I've been waiting to use it.

You just went waiting for me to drop. No one's brought up Mark Fisher in months. Congratulations. I did it. But yeah, there's been this like growing sort of like, let's not just be like, like, what is materialism as good communists and Marxists and anarchists? but at what point is materialism, very strict materialism limiting? And so I'm wondering if the type of mysticism, I mean, what is God, if not a big book? That's true.

You know, God in this universe is still a physical object. Yeah. That a person was able to read, you know? Or maybe it's that like the only thing that is real or important in this universe is the information and God is all of it. So it's sort of this like, you know, spinosis. thing perhaps, I'm not sure. Yeah. Or you have an impersonal God that doesn't know that humans exist, so God exists somewhere

in the universe, but is not aware of other things within it. So like in Futurama, God is a constellation of stars that collided with a satellite. And also there's sort of like the whole problem of dualism. Like if you wanted to interact with the physical world, that would imply that the thing interacting with it is physical. So it allows for like a monist interpretation of divinity. I was just about to start talking about the Nobel Prize in physics and this year. The sort of everything is connected, at least as far as I understand it, which I probably don't.

Again, I'm a cartoonist. But I did read about that. I got terribly excited because it was similar to a dream I had during a mental breakdown. So I was like, this is great. I feel a little ripped off that I didn't get a Nobel Prize for coming up with that, but it's okay. I'll let them have it. Yeah, it's like how I felt reading that fucking mushroom book and having like an existential crisis about reading. Like, oh, damn it, all of these deep truths that I knew. Exactly. You knew it all along.

I did. So what do we think for what's our like little action-oriented or deep, deep-thinking thoughts question for the end of this? Oh, God. Justin, what do you think? Justin normally asks them. I guess I would want people to consider more like the relationship between like libraries and librarianship and death and mortality, like, in a way more explicit way than just, oh, no, the information's going to go away or the book is rotting or something. But like, when I die, the hands will drop me over and then I'll fall through the library forever until the wind erodes me away forever. Oh, no, I will never, like, not just that you will not have time to ever read all the books in the whole world, but like that implies also dying. So I guess like my big thinking question would be sort of like, what should librarians, like, how should could we be grappling with death and mortality of ourselves and patrons more explicitly?

You could have like a creation of like goth librarianship. Literally me and Matthew And I think a few other people are Facebook group admins of the goth librarians Facebook group So there's that But yeah Goth librarians we have some work to do

I think We should get Caitlin what's her face on The Mortician lady Caitlin Doty? Doty, yeah Maybe she has ideas about death and libraries That's my big thinky brain thought Is goth shit

Yeah. It's sort of the same thing with like the man from Earth. Like why aren't librarians writing more science fiction about the universe? Like why aren't more historians writing stuff like the man from Earth? And you could grapple with with questions about like meaning and litter and use by sort of extending them into absurdities. I think science fiction is a good place for that. But you could also do with horror. That's way more my bag. Yeah. Is this a horror story? Is this a science fiction story? What do we think? I think it's probably a horror story in the line of like Frankenstein, like, the culmination of too much modernity and too much physicalism. I feel like I'm too much of a polyana. I don't read it as a horror story necessarily. Obviously, the stuff about eternity and death is a bit of a bummer. But, you know, I don't know what I would classify the story as or if it could even be classified really. Like philosophical fiction if that's a genre, maybe, but. It feels very cosmic to me.

Spiritual fiction, mystic fiction, these are not genres. It's just descriptions. Let's be good derrids here and say that things aren't a genre as they participate in them. Oh, true. So we're participating in this new genre that you just created. Hell yeah. Honestly, that is the genre I read the most these days anyway. Woo-woo, spiritual stuff.

same cool well thank you both for having me on thank you for having thank you for having thank you for having thank you for coming on you took a real risk uh trying getting getting someone like me to come on and try and like sound smart uh and it did not pay off but i appreciate it anyway no it super did we we have all sorts on here including gamers so well all right it makes you feel a little better And I'll put all of the links to your comics and social media in the notes. Do you want people to check out anything in particular? They should buy my book. No, that's on an Etsy store. That's like a sort of hidden link that I have not successfully linked to all of my other social media.

So I will send that to you. And if you want a physical book of Frat Boy Amadeus, please buy it from my Etsy. That's all I really have to plug. And then slowly we'll get it. everyone to read Infinite Jess. That was really really hard you on. We're going to take over and it's going to be an infinite I was like, can I make it through a whole podcast episode without mentioning David Foster Wallace? No. To this day, I've been on like six or seven at this point and it's always come up. That was my real purpose for having you on. It's good. Infinite Jess posting time.

If you ever do an Infinite Just episode. They'll have to kill me probably. Justin won't let that happen. good night