Labyrinhts (1962) - Jorge Luis Borges POLL

write-in for "inferno, i, 32"

http://i.imgur.com/UsCCX3M.png

oh yeah maybe a mod could change that or something.

in the meantime i want to put a word in for "three versions of judas." very chilling story, i suspect more so for people who have gotten sucked into theology in a meaningful way. i don't know which of these i will vote for yet but that one is certainly in the first rank.

you fucker my first thought was to talk about "Judas"

which in a bunch of ways is not in the front rank of his fictions i think, but as a metaphysical thought bubble it has ousted a lot of irl theology from that space in my brain

the same possible applies to "Lottery in Babylon". those two little hoonja-doonjas between them have come to define a lot of my perception of the world

but this morning the winner - for those kind of reasons plus extra salt, i think - is "Deutsches Requiem"

basically impossible

poll made me grab it this morning for the bus - even Emma Zunz, fairly minor in this company, thumps you at the end:

Actually, the story was incredible, but it impressed everyone because substantially it was true. True was Emma Zunz' tone, true was her shame, true was her hate. True also was the outrage she had suffered: only the circumstances were false, the time, and one or two proper names.

It is the actual best book.

maybe i should get challopsy and umm & ahh about the limits & shortcomings of borges.

no way fk that

possible limit: you cd probably remove 4 or 5 of these pieces and make the body even remarkabler?

I think you're right but what would you drop?

It's solid gold imo (except the circular ruins?) through to The Secret Miracle... then... maybe the theology/scholarship ones bleed into one another a bit (though I love them), & some of the realer ones don't have a place in my head.

I've got to stop pulling it out of my bag to skim stories, it really doesn't look like work.

i like how "Tlön" stands there at the beginning as the template for Borges' whole world

Circular ruins is great!

"Death and the Compass"

Every time I've taught "Pierre Menard," my students just Don't Get It. My fault.

I've seen published summaries of or allusions to it that seem to have not understood it on a quite literal level - they'll say Menard writes an updated version of Don Quixote or something.

(fwiw I'm not its biggest fan but i recognise it is essential borges.)

Death & the Compass, yes. That could definitely be my vote some days.

& xp right maybe I should reread it at lunch - it just doesn't stay in my head compared with what's around it.

Great idea, why haven't we done this before. I'll have a skim/re-reads bits and decide.

by the way those looking to read a writer in Spanish will fine Borges easy going.

Yup

even though it is nowhere near my actual favorite, I am tempted to vote for "The Immortal" as being the most 'fun' or 'accessible' or something of all these stories—I fondly recall reading it for the first time, genuinely anticipating 'what's going to happen next???'

Oh god, he's too good. Agony.

also glad to see the "Three Versions of Judas" and "Emma Zunz" love, so lemme just quickly rep for "The House of Asterion" among the 'minor' stories before submitting my predictable "Garden of Forking Paths" vote

yes! House of Asterion is incredible, just detail after strange detail. "There are roofs from which I let myself fall until I am bloody."

So much to chose from, but pretty sure which one I will vote for.

going with The Library of Babel

Death and the Compass rules, gotta show some love to The Shape of the Sword and Theme of the Traitor and the Hero as well.

I'm voting The Secret Miracle, which stuck in my head for some reason. A simple idea with lots of power.

i'm going either secret miracle or garden of forking paths. of the frontloaded big hitters the latter isn't as formally perfect as pierre menard or the literally crystalline library of babel but it's got more eerie atmosphere.

Garden of Forking Paths feels like the one where his English Edwardian DNA - Chesterton, Kipling, MR James even - is most visible. love that about it.

the longer I look the more I think I'm not going to vote. just too much.

funes ftw

Can't remember, what was that one about again?

This fkn run:

The Lottery in Babylon
Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote
The Circular Ruins
The Library of Babel
Funes the Memorious

All Labyrinths is missing is "The South".

Glad to see love for "The House of Asterion" - perfectly formed and I used to choke up at the ending.

Have you guys ever read the Stanislaw Lem takedown of Borges? He makes an interesting case for the prosecution, to which one reply is "yes, but..." In any case, it didn't want me to not read either of them, in other words it made me appreciate both of them more.

Do you have a link to that? Im not having much luck on google

microworlds

^^^ that Lem link reads like a Borges fiction!

Haha, exactly

I think "The Lottery in Babylon" is the best story ever written, so...

And i know it's the best story I've read.

Lem's def. of kitsch is very slavic.

Lem's got a critique of American sf in the same book. Basically his beef is that the genre opens up all sorts of possibilities but writers can't really hack it, they suffer from a kind of anxiety of choice and fall back on basic tropes borrowed from other genres such as the detective story and the fairy tale. Which is a fair enough criticism but neglects the idea that if one embraces this alleged deficiency there is a way in which the stuff becomes more aesthetically interesting. The common underlying motif is that other writers can't live up to the bold promises they come up with, they have to fall back on safety nets embroidered with interesting patterns. He alone can extrapolate without a net, without losing his logic, lucid clarity all the while hinting at an alien otherness of which he is not fool enough to follow the temptation of clomping foot of world-building nerdism to kill with over-explanation.

Basically Lem is one of those lovable Mandarins like Nabokov, you have to take his dislikes with a grain of salt.

love that Lem book. love most Lem books really.

Have gotten more than one screen name from this book.

You guys know that "Theme of the Traitor and the Hero" was made into a movie, The Spider's Stratagem, by Bertolucci. Worth seeing.

I did not know that. Am definitely going to check it out, thanks.

I saw it years ago; it was always available on VHS. Is it out on DVD?

Dunno

http://bit.ly/1itztm9

saw it years back - not my favourite Borges tbh, and since i don't remember much of it i'm guessing it's not my favourite Bertolucci either

sure it's worth seeing again tho - didn't mean to be sniffy

Gonna be either Garden of Forking Paths or Library of Babel

I read this book by a mathematician exploring the concepts raised in Babel which deepened my appreciation of it. Gets a bit heady at times but it was very approachable, definitely recommend it. For example iirc one of his conclusions was that the Library as described would be larger than the observable universe itself.

http://www.amazon.com/Unimaginable-Mathematics-Borges-Library-Babel/dp/0195334574

I've come across that book before--can't remember whether I ended up reading any or not. Both "Library" and "Garden" seem interesting primarily in an information-theory context--what constitutes a message, how much metadata is required to distinguish it from background noise...

One of *my* conclusions about the Library, back when I was younger & had days to spend idly pondering these sorts of things, was that its exhaustion of language corresponds to the regeneration of a second-level language, whose 'characters' would be the individual 410-page volumes of the library, arranged in combinations to form A la recherche du temps perdu, or the King James Bible, or any other work that exceeds 410 pages in length. Theoretically, there's no reason we couldn't use this new protocol to produce an episodic narrative work of indefinite length; but if we tried to draw it out too long, we would eventually be forced to repeat entire 'books' from earlier in the narrative.

... anyway, I got somewhat distracted from my original reason for clicking this thread, which was to renew my praise of "There Are More Things", a tragically unappreciated late Borges story that knocks the stuffing out of Danielewski's House of Leaves

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

just re-read the Lem piece, as a takedown (or at least, a delineation of Borges' failings) it's pretty cogent

In general agree, but think "failings" is too harsh a word, its more like a motif or trope or something. It's like saying it is a failing for Piet Mondrian to paint little colored rectangles or Hitchcock to use doubled characters.

whatta maroon, paint some circles already

lol

yeah failings is kind of harsh... limitations, maybe?

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Everything that got a zero was robbed. Everything that got a one too.

Feel like you get more insight, or aperçus, as Xgau used to call them, from a negative Lem writeup than from someone else's praise.

'nh' typo in thread title makes me think it is some kind of Portuguese word.

"The Immortal" is the only zero-vote-getter I would really miss if it were gone

http://i.imgur.com/ETLr6SV.jpg

On his partner/literary executor:

https://www.thedial.world/issue-7/jorge-luis-borges-legacy-maria-kodama

Haven't checked your link yet, but title reminds me of some discussion on another good old thread: Borges translation?

A month since finishing Boswell and I am seeing this.

https://www.nyrb.com/products/borges

Lovely pic of the man above, That Borges eh, he's so crazee, what is he like etc

The link for Lem on Borges above is broken, so here's a sampler and short analysis of it:

http://www.autodidactproject.org/my/borges35_lem05.html

Some quick, dirty thoughts on Lem's critique: Yes, you don't go to Borges for a revelation of the future, he is a chronicler of the deep past of culture, by which I mean its more esoteric elements, even if recent in time. ...” Borges is fundamentally a librarian. But this point of departure is obsolete: “Borges is located near the end of a descending curve which had its culmination centuries ago.” He extrapolates on the cultural heritage of the past, but he has nothing to say about the future.
Yes, but, it occurs to me that climate change is likely to make Borges more relevant in future. I think cults, superstitions, nature-worship, broken knowledge, cultural paradoxes and bizarreries are likely to proliferate, and the
technology that Borges reveres, the book, with its anecdotal/encyclopedic properties is likely to be necessary as a means of recording and communicating in a world where powering modern tech becomes more fraught. Parts of the world may become unexplored and unreachable again. There will be sightings of more creatures fit to inhabit the Manual de zoología fantástica as environment pressures evolutionary change.
Basically the future is going to look more like the past than Lem thought, though he says "For we are building newer, richer, and more terrible paradises and hells; but in his books Borges knows nothing about them." No Borges knows that there is nothing new under the sun, we have just forgotten the past. Maybe technology is Borges' blind spot, but I would argue technology is a replication of systems or sights already existing in nature (and even to some extent in ancient technology, whether we mean oral storytelling or hieroglyphics) and that's something Borges grasps. He understands that the infinite comprehends everything and so we can just as well look at the past in its spiraling infinities and that helps us to understand the present and the future, which are not really distinct.

That's how I see it anyway.

I expect to get ripped for this, but just some Saturday thoughts. Fuckit post

nah i agree Lem was talking nonsense the internet is wholly Borgesian