IdleRich

IdleRich
Weird, I know Andrew Dehaney, we both temped at London Underground in about 2003, he got fired within a couple of weeks though.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Lots of nice in-jokes to make one feel smart in there....

As they passed through the secret guts of the Library, Penrose asked ‘Are these the Hermetic Order’s tunnels? Are you a member of the Secret Societies? The Acorn Order? Or the Secret Order of the Members of Secret Societies That Are Not Members Of Themselves? Are you?’

That's a joke on Russell's paradox I guess.

‘It means,’ the Librarian sighed, ‘Llareggub.’

Which is the Welsh town in Under Milk Wood I believe... or "bugger all" backwards if you prefer....

.... and so on.
 

version

Well-known member
On Exactitude in Science
Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley.

...In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a
single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety
of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the
Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and
which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so
fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map
was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the
Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are
Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is
no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

— Suarez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658
 

forclosure

Well-known member
seeing that there's a Borges thread reminds me that when i finally got around to Ficciones(which is basically the same stories but in a different order tell me if i'm mistaken)

I was actually quite surprised at how accessible the stories were, not to say that there wasn't any depth to his stories but it felt like to me he was doing a smiliar thing to what Lovecraft, Robert E Howard and Clark Ashton Smith were in the pulps around the same but with a more literate style and esoteric frame of reference.
 

woops

is not like other people
I think Fictions & Labyrinths have a lot of the same stories with a few different ones in each
 

woops

is not like other people
Either way you have to read em all and the Universal History of Infamy too.

as far as comparing him to the other writers i haven't read Conan or CAS but for sure Lovecraft saw himself as a serious philosopher/thinker, Borges probably had a wider frame of literary reference and they end up in very different places.
 
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forclosure

Well-known member
Either way you have to read em all and the Universal History of Infamy too.

as far as comparing him to the other writers i haven't read Conan or CAS but for sure Lovecraft saw himself as a serious philosopher/thinker, Borges probably had a wider frame of literary reference and they end up in very different places.
Smith is probably the closest cause he was a poet before he did short stories.

he's his own kettle of strange fish
 

woops

is not like other people
he's the guy who extended and i think named the chthulhu mythos after the death of lovecraft right. took it in some non-lovecraftian directions, where for example good and evil exist, etc
 

forclosure

Well-known member
he's the guy who extended and i think named the chthulhu mythos after the death of lovecraft right. took it in some non-lovecraftian directions, where for example good and evil exist, etc
nah i think that was August Derleth but he was one of the guys who worked within the mythos and did his own set of stories which were defined by the landscapes and cycles he set them in Hyperborea,Zothique etc etc
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Smith is probably the closest cause he was a poet before he did short stories.

he's his own kettle of strange fish
The artist and weird fiction author Clark Ashton Smith was good mates with H. P. Lovecraft, despite being a sort of anti-Lovecraft in his personal life (big drinker and smoker, something of a ladies' man), and when he was commissioned to illustrate HPL's story 'The Lurking Fear', he decided to troll his prudish friend by drawing trees that looked suspiciously like they had breasts or genitals, and with various suspiciously phallic 'plants' and 'fungi' sprouting from the ground:

View attachment 7240

However, the intended joke fell flat, because Lovecraft was so uninterested in sex that - as far as we know - he never even noticed.
 

version

Well-known member
For over a decade, a Chinese woman known as “Zhemao” created a massive, fantastical, and largely fictional alternate history of late Medieval Russia on Chinese Wikipedia, writing millions of words about entirely made-up political figures, massive (and fake) silver mines, and pivotal battles that never actually happened. She even went so far as to concoct details about things like currency and eating utensils.

Using four puppet accounts, Zhemao—who wrote in an apology via her English Wikipedia account that she was a housewife with a high school degree—created one of the largest hoaxes in the history of Wikipedia, earning her the online nickname, “Chinese Borges.”

 

IdleRich

IdleRich
On Exactitude in Science
Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley.

...In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a
single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety
of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the
Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and
which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so
fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map
was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the
Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are
Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is
no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

— Suarez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658
The map IS the territory.
 
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