Fictional Texts

Message Bookmarked

Bookmark Removed

Cuba Libre asks "What would an insufferable snob's 12 books be?" Ess Kay triumphs by listing texts imagined by Borges and Calvino, which is even funnier given who asked the question.

What are your favorite imaginary texts?

― nabisco%%, Tuesday, 21 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

(The beauty of this is that if you don't have a good answer, you can just make one up.)

― nabisco%%, Tuesday, 21 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

The Library of Babylon of course

― anthony, Tuesday, 21 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

The Library of Babylon by Borges

― anthony, Tuesday, 21 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

yellow river by i.p. freely

― Ron, Tuesday, 21 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

"to all the girls I've loved before" by Ron Atkinson

― chris, Tuesday, 21 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

The Junior Woodchuck Guidebook! I'd LOVE to have a copy of that!

Beyond that: The second volume of Aristotle's "Poetics" (the one dealing with comedy). And Shakespeare's "Love's Labour's Won." Also, the collected volume of Raymond Shea and Walt Feinberg's run on "Tales from the Black Freighter" (wouldn't mind seeing the Joe Orlando issues, either).

― Douglas, Tuesday, 21 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Ditto the Black Freighter stuff. & The First Encylopedia of Tlön.

& of course "oh no!! write!! OH NO!! : The Collected Works" by Mark S & "Blown A Wish : A History Of Shoegazing" by Ned Raggett!

― Ess Kay, Wednesday, 22 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

All the stuff Foucault wanted to write after solving that bothersome sex thing for all of us.

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, 22 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

there's an entire book of Lem short stories that are written as reviews of books that don't actually exist. "Non Serviam" is one of these concerning the discovery of living entities inside a computer, sort of Sim/Civ style, and the moral/ethical dimensions implied.

― Alan Trewartha, Wednesday, 22 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

childrens book- you're different and thats bad

― Menelaus Darcy, Wednesday, 22 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

The Theory & Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism

The Necronomicon

The King In Yellow

― DV, Wednesday, 22 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Necronomicon, natch. Purely because of the entertainment value it's given bookshop workers worldwide when explaining to Goths that it doesn't exist. Favourite made-up book is The Darkening Ecliptic by invented Aussie poet Ern Malley. Written as a piss-take by two bored men it acheived enormous fame and was taken very seriously (to the extent of one critic arguing, even after the wind-up was rumbled, that the two jokers had subconsciously written a much finer piece of work then they could ever normally manage)

― Matt, Wednesday, 22 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

RUBY, PRIDE OF THE RING

― the pinefox, Wednesday, 22 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Yes, Alan, the Lem's great.

― nabisco%%, Wednesday, 22 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

NB I made a joke in this thread that I, not having read certain other threads, didn't realize wasn't funny! Sorry.

― nabisco%%, Wednesday, 22 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Seconding the Lem book. Need to reread that. Aren't they remaking Solaris?

"Blown A Wish : A History Of Shoegazing" by Ned Raggett!

If someone pays me the money, sure. ;-)

― Ned Raggett, Wednesday, 22 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

The Library of Babylon, containing every book ever possible, is surely a copout. Copout copout copout. I would like copies of Chad C. Mulligan's 'You're an Ignorant Idiot' and 'The hipcrime vocab', pls.

― thom, Wednesday, 22 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

The Collected Works of Edwin Mullhouse, with a new introduction by Jeffrey Cartwright.

Also, I would v., v. much like a sequel to the Shelf Salesmen! thread.

― felicity, Wednesday, 22 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

The Library of Babylon by Borges

Does this contain that 1:1 map of the world?

― j.lu, Wednesday, 22 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Okay it was a cop out, but can you imagine the eternal pleasure of being stuck in something that looks like the British Musuem Reading Room but infinte ? Everybook that Everyone wrote, thought they might write, included as a peice of fiction,lost and all the printed matter as well- sheet music, post cards, maps, magazines.

― anthony, Wednesday, 22 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

And you have to submit what you want to read on a little ticket and they bring it to your 19th c. fold-out reading easel several hours later. Classic.

― felicity, Thursday, 23 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

what is this several hours and bringing it to you ?

― anthony, Thursday, 23 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Glad you asked. Back in the day when I was at the Courtauld, I did a lot of research in the British Library (before the renovation). In the main Reading Room (the big, domed one where Marx and Orwell wrote), they would bring you your books. You looked up your book in their weird cataloge which followed not Dewey Decimal or whatever but some obscure British Library-specific cataloguing system and the listings were pasted with rubber cement into these giant bound volumes. Obviously, you could not remove anything from the library (hey, if you were even chewing gum or eating hard candy they made you spit it out), nor were you allowed access to the stacks themselves. Once you figured out what you wanted, you went to a window and wrote the listing of your book on a piece of paper along with your location in the library. Every seat and table location had a number and some were arranged in roughly concentric circles that had these neat little reading racks that folded out of the tables so you had an angled reading surface to read from. After turning in your requests, it took anywhere from half and hour to a couple hours for them to find and bring you your book(s), so you could go have lunch or whatever (I particularly loved the soup and homemade croutons at the British Museum cafeteria) and you'd come back and (with luck) your books would be in a neat little stack at your "place." You would have loved it, Anthony.

I have heard that after the renovations they no longer utilize the main reading room under the dome but some modern building and that your books come shooting to you in pneumatic tubes rather than from a British Librar-ian.

― felicity, Thursday, 23 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I read in that reading room for 3 hours, mostly 17th century poetry

― anthony, Thursday, 23 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

If we tried that kind of library service around here, I don't know whether I would kill myself or celebrate. All depends on whether I'd be fetching the books or just reading them. ;-)

― Ned Raggett, Friday, 24 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

(The actual Library of Babel would of course be complete rubbish insofar as a near-100% number of the books therein ["the Library is total ... its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite)"] would contain random strings of characters and the titles on the spines would provide no indication of the infinitely-small number of titles that might be coherent -- neverminding which no text could ever be stably coherent because every possible variation on its form exists elsewhere in the library - - are you people mad?)

It is true that the most ancient men, the first librarians, used a language quite different from the one we now speak; it is true that a few miles to the right the tongue is dialectical and that ninety floors farther up, it is incomprehensible. All this, I repeat, is true, but four hundred and ten pages of inalterable MCV's cannot correspond to any language, no matter how dialectical or rudimentary it may be.

― nabisco%%, Friday, 24 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

library of babel = ile shockah!!

― mark s, Friday, 24 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

All I care about is that they don't shoot the soup to me in a pneumatic tube.

― felicity, Friday, 24 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

What if the soup were in a thermos?

― Ned Raggett, Friday, 24 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

It's all about the croutons. They get soggy.

― felicity, Friday, 24 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Mmm...croutons.

― Ned Raggett, Friday, 24 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

eleven months pass...

Good thread concept.

― the pinefox, Thursday, 24 April 2003 11:29 (twenty-two years ago)

You must be logged in to post. Please either login here, or if you are not registered, you may register here.