Oof, you catch me becoming Sainte-Beuve, which is embarrassing. Dislike of Borges: in general this comes from re-reading some of his work (particularly the later fiction) for the first time since high school & finding that it didn’t quite live up to my memory of it, or more particularly, noticing things in it that I’d missed before. Also reading Richard Burgin’s Conversations with Borges: he’s interesting, but clearly had a lot of terrible ideas and seems at that point like he’d become an imperious old man, set in his ways. Not just his politics, which have been covered pretty exhaustively; his ideas about literature are really weird. Who really thinks that Stevenson is the high-water mark of English literature?