in general. Only the books/movies that actually tell some story last. The rest are like etudes in music, good for practice, but not sustaining to a listener.

Donny does 1.) fantastic sentences and 2.) ideas. That's about it. I really can't generate a mental image of a single one of his characters. Great if you're in the mood. Guess you weren't. Fair enough. Personally, I turn to Nabokov in such times.

This Borges book is twisting my melon man...

some of the short stories are a bit tedious in a Poe manner, but whne they are good they are good, and concise!

I HATE to brag but I'm sort of an expert on Borges.

Did you know Borges was deaf? And he worked at a library in Brazil, as a janitor I think. Great irony: he worked in a library, and yet he couldn't hear anyone read to him!

Also, he had unusually small hands. Many critics think this is why he wrote such short stories.

And did you know he was about to be executed but the President or Governor or whatever changed his mind at the last minute? Crazy shit.

I have a ton of facts on the man. I'm thinking of writing a book.

I did read that he went deaf before age 45 or so and that he never learned to read Braille, so that is depressing as fuck, especially for someone like him who read widely and deeply.....

maybe his hands were too small for Braille?

i thought you had aimed your comments at delillo who is often acused of that


i have plenty of mental images of white noise, which i loved, and read twice

i'm now different than i was then though. it's "ideas" that i often see as a distraction. long story for another time.


i first read him when i was 12, ran into him by pure chance in an ANTOLOGIA DE LA LITERATURA FANTASTICA, which he edited with bioy casares.

got his first book at 13-- the "obras completas" with the green cover. what he did to my brain was way more potent than hallucinogenics.



i hope you devote a chapter on how he rode giraffes in his family's ranch in brazil, and how he had to give it up due to a spinal lesion which consumed him until his last day. in fact he died of heat stroke in a park bench in austin, tx, because he couldn't walk up from it and get a drink of water

===

reading bits of ulysses today because obviously. free now at project gutenberg

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4300

Read.
Book of the New Sun.
Now.

They'd have to be really Fucking small man. Children learn to read using Braille. They'd have to be the size of kitten paws.

Out of curiosity, why would deafness require one to learn or use Braille?

I have a feeling the answer is going to make me feel very stupid indeed, so pleas keep in mind that I had a 12 hour work day after 3 hours of sleep.

Fuck news.

ha ha ha! yes man, it was a joke started by evollove-- full of fake references like borges himself did so many times

but where borges was very subtle in sneaking in false sources, evollove & robigator took more of an absurdist or surrealist approach though--hence the giraffe ranch i added in response



that there is borges with his injured spine, and his mother in the foreground, who had a peg leg she used for smuggling cocaine during her wild youth

;) Borges went blind at age 55.

I think Borges used those fake references because it did not matter if he used real ones, as most of the people who read his work were in no way as widely read on the antiquities as he was. Of course, there are also tons of actual, real references!

I finished up the New Testament volume of Asimov's Guide to the Bible.

http://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/2016/0...spects-of.html

Little Boy Blue by M J Aldridge. Lurid sadistic crime thriller of recurring character DI Helen Grace. This is about an S&M/bondage killer.

My friend who is 77 orders these from the UK and then gives them to me.

yeah that's what's so great about him. his falsifications are wonderfully camouflaged.

here's my proposition though-- if you're an idealist (not in the colloquial sense, but a philosophical idealist)-- does it make a difference what is "real" and what is "imagined"?

in some cases you could say no, because all those things are equal in the dream that is the world and therefore "true".

in other cases, like if you're a neoplatonist or a gnostic (schools that fascinated borges) the dream of the dream comes out degraded.

either way, fair game for an artist.

e.g check out LAS RUINAS CIRCULARES.

stuff I read lately

I read Planet Hulk, and Fall of the Hulks and am now halfway through World War Hulk.

Now reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. So far so tedious. So far so boring.

I'm reading Stephen Kins oh wait bachmans Thinner and it's fucking WANK

thinner sucks.