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.

I'm aboot 1/3 of the way through and it just seems like King released it as Bachman because he knew it was bollocks. Also soft porn?! I've already saw the film: i don't know what i'm doing

Thinner is the worst of the Bachman ones.

I read them all back in the day. I still have my Bachman Books collection that has the "banned" story Rage, where the kid arranges to kill his teacher and holds the class hostage. That one was one of my faves! BUt King got freaked out after the Columbine middle class white kids used it as inspiration.

My faves are the Long Walk (amazing story.) and Running Man, which is way different than the Arnold S. film that was "based" on it.

Roadwork is very standard....

Wow I didn't know about the Rage columbine connection. I just looked this up and came across some really interesting stories I look forward to reading when I can focus. FOCUS! bleh

I always wondered whether the running man would be anything like the movie: i look forward to the day the wondering ends and ....wondering lolz

I have given up on Blood Meridian. What a fucking boring piece of shit. I have never had my eyes swim so much trying to read turgid prose.....
How in the FUCK is this horrible writer adored by so many? How? It is like reading the ramblings of a near-incoherent old coot telling pointless tales to his mule.

What a fucking waste of my life.

Severian, As soon as it arrives at my library (I have it on request) I am diving head first back into book of the new sun. I need to wash my brain and be rid of the shit-spew that is Cormac McCarthy's "prose."

I haven't hated something I read this bad since I read Andre Breton's Anthology of Black HUmor.

Wait, I thought you had Shadow & Claw (which contains he first two books) but had only read Shadow of the Torturer?

Just get her done, man. You'll thank me. No more Fucking about with Cormac or any other dystopian poser. You don't even have the smallest freaking inkling as to what Book of the New Sun is actually about yet. When this is all over, you will laugh at yourself for even thinking to pause between books.

Make it happen cap'n

surprising, don't you like DeLillo?

Hah!

I'm re-reading old favorites and classics because that is how motherfucking bored I am with books right now. I never re-read. Only a small bundle of books have ever met my eye twice. Even if I LOVE something, I simply consider it a complete waste of my time to read it again until at least 10 years have passed. There are maybe 2 or 3 exceptions to this.

But that's how fucking bored I am goddammit. I'm bored as piss.

Currently re-reading Great Expectations, which is simply a pleasure and a phenomenal story, but everyone knows this and has known this since the dawn of fucking time.

Ugh!

tried any Hawthorne? Or maybe Sartre.......

Dude... come on.

I'm looking for new stuff anyway. That's the problem. Nothing new has caught my eye or grabbed my attention. I plodded my way through some weak ass Sci fi from this year, and it was horrendous. I like to keep an eye out for new interesting fiction. I need the shit.

Well, you were talking abt classics (and there's a reason they're called that in addition to their ages) but, if you haven't read all of Bolano another excellent current author is Andres Neuman, a good one there is Traveler of the Century. For a real strange read, I still highly recco Michael Brodsky, if you can dedicate some concentration to his "unusual sentence structure", the universality, richness and humor is unsurpassed.. One of my favorites of his is Detour.

reddit then

Y'know, I just don't really get Reddit. I know it's a massive platform and a just a labyrinth of information, but it's got a hideous interface and feels like the world's biggest deep web dark corner. I've tried to dig in a few times, but each time I've ended up saying fuck it after less than 24 hours.

Then read auerbach's "mimesis" and read every book that's discussed there

3rd Hunger Games book.

Nope I do not enjoy DeLillo

Great Expectations was an excellent stop gap reading affair, by the way. I highly recommend that anyone who's bored with modern lit revisit it when time allows.

Hey Severian, I dropped Blood Meridian like a bad bean pie. That shit sucked so bad. I just checked out Claw of the Conciliator from the Library.

This is progress.