IdleRich

IdleRich
I think of Borges as the most dissensus of authors.... also Calvino (not his early realist stuff).... maybe Cortasar (the short story stuff I mean, not Hopscotch so much)... I assume that everyone has read them to death but maybe that's not true.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
But was a long time ago.. I was a different person, really... I should read this stuff again... but is there a modern equivalent that I haven't read? I'd love to know about someone whose writing could hit me as hard as those freaks.
 

sus

Well-known member
But was a long time ago.. I was a different person, really... I should read this stuff again... but is there a modern equivalent that I haven't read? I'd love to know about someone whose writing could hit me as hard as those freaks.

Try ctrlcreep
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
It seems wrong not to mention that our friend who just left and was (at least partly) responsible for our Sunday night hi-jinks has the surname.... Borges. Obviously more common here than elsewhere but I would feel remiss not to mention.
 

catalog

Well-known member
i feel like i've definitely read it, or at least have a read a few from it, like babel, so I would be game at some point.

I did make a point of reading 'a universal history of iniquity' a few years ago, which is short vignettes of criminals and murderers.

It was when i was in a big Bolano phase and he said he based his own 'Nazi literature in the Americas' (short portraits of different nazis in S.America basically) on that one.
 

catalog

Well-known member
yeah that was the one that was made into it's own whole book, carlos weider? (from memory). that's a great little book that one. terrifying towards the end, with the fucked up party, which is apparently based on an entirely true story.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Yeah my friend is a lecturer in Latin literature and he gave me some background to that book which I'd assumed was total fantasy.
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
Let's do it. I got a paperback. Where do we start
tough question isn't it. but you've already made a thread about the garden of forking paths. and bc i do everything in life at a glacial pace, i've only read the first three stories. so i say we start with Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.


plus, maybe these threads will converge somewhere...
 
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mvuent

Void Dweller
love the opening observation that mirrors become unsettling in the dark, and then the whole concept of them becomes unsettling by extension. it's true and surely thematically significant.
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
sometimes when you read a story, it's helpful if you can envision a path of imagination that could have led to its being created. over quarantine i've been skimming through an old architecture textbook i found at a university book store years ago, and some of the claims it makes about the worldviews of ancient civilizations are so strange. you wonder if people could really have practiced those customs, or if what you're reading is merely the product of some historian's overactive imagination. i can almost envision reading a paragraph about Tlön in it.
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
we learn a lot about the insane(?) perspective of the imaginary people of Tlön, and the consequences of that perspective, but we never really get to experience it for ourselves. what would these epics set in Tlön be like if they were translated into our language? are there any writers whose work operates in a comparable way? joyce maybe? luke davis? tite kubo???
 

luka

Well-known member
love the opening observation that mirrors become unsettling in the dark, and then the whole concept of them becomes unsettling by extension. it's true and surely thematically significant.

Borges is creeped out by mirrors. Both the mirror and the encyclopaedia exist as extensions of the world as reproductions of the world but also as other worlds and doorways into other worlds and things get odd when they start to diverge, your own reflection starts acting independently, refuses to mimic your movements, the encyclopaedia sprouts new regions of the world, meticulously accounted for, from their poetry to their mathematics.

Dreaming in books, dreaming in and round and with words, is a huge part of what Borges is about. This is a story which dreams of world building without being crass enough to actually do it. It's the kind of dreaming you get from suggestion, to read the place name Nineveh and be transported.
 

luka

Well-known member
Portals opening and closing. The antique shop you wander into, almost in a trance one torrid afternoon, walk out with a wild ass' skin wrapped in brown paper, when you try to return the terrible object, the shop is no longer there, and no one can remember having seen it.
 
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