Some Borges observations ( Read more... )

From "Quain":

I regret that I lent a certain lady - irrecoverably - the first thing he wrote. This I have said was a detective novel called The God of the Labyrinth; I can add that it was published towards the end of November, 1933. By early December, the pleasing but laboured convolutions of Ellery Queen's Siamese Twin Mystery had London and New ( Read more... )

Is there a name for this particular story trope: some utterly innocuous-seeming detail at the start of a story that in fact, looked at very closely and perhaps with the benefit of hindsight, gives the whole game away. Obviously such keys can be camouflaged elsewhere, but the start has some unique advantages when it comes to hiding stuff ( Read more... )

Have you heard of this guy Borges' story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" all the cool people admire? It's like "Politics and the English Language" meets Pokemon Go!

"Shakespeare's Memory" is a lot more moving when you take it as being about Borges. That is, that he still had at 80 the memories of whoever it was that could write like he did c. 40, but was not that writer ( Read more... )

In Kafka you fail because of some awryness of your substance ( Read more... )

Jonescaseyward: From 23.5 pages into The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis:

[...] Yesterday there took place the funeral of Fernando Antonio Nogueira Pessoa, bachelor, forty-seven years of age, forty-seven, take note, born in Lisbon, studied literature at an English university, became established as a writer and poet in literary circles, on his ( Read more... )

Wasn't looking for them there, but found a couple exegetical hints like that Goethe one in Borges' An Introduction to English Literature.

1st: In [Browne's] greatest work, Hydriotaphia, Urne-Buriall, the subject is a mere pretext for learned and lengthy disquisitions on music in which what he says is far less important than what he implies.Borges ( Read more... )

I wonder if I have anything to say about Borges. I imagine many must have unlocked as much or more of Garden; maybe not Circular Ruins. If I wrote about him I'd write about fatherhood. Not the ideal subject for me right now, but that's what I see there.

Notes to self re. "Garden of Forking Paths":

Bender, on being rejected by the Globetrotters, before his show started to suck: My life, and by extension everyone else's, is meaningless.Something I think I missed in previous readings of "Garden" was that the narrator is referring to Albert when he says he has spoken for one hour with an Englishman ( Read more... )