Borges ...

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

a suitably somewhat incomplete essay on the master:

http://sun025.sun.ac.za/portal/page/portal/Arts/Departments/english/Documents/Charne%20Lavery.pdf

with which a few minutes can seem like ....

Funes, Immortal and Tlon are explored ....

[umslopogaas]

M1 Calum Da Jazbo

Phew! Thanks for that link, I did actually get to the end, but it was hard work and I must admit, I skipped quite a lot. Here's a flavour:

"The only real is the unreal, or to use a Saussurean metaphor, the sytagmatic Tlon gives way to the paradigmatic, a causative, logical reality to a psychological, associative world." (P30)

"Derrida shows that the transfer of signifiers will never leave the signified untouched, a proposition which Borges dramatises by showing that the total referent of a world-sized encyclopaedia, the world itself, is not left untouched by a global act of translation. A materialist world becomes an idealist one, because it is penetrated by an idealist language." (P36)

If you like that sort of thing, dive in, there are more than forty pages of it. Wittgenstein, Derrida, Barthes, Saussure, Schalkwyk (who?). I feel rather dizzy. But Borges really is an amazing writer, he can produce a most powerful sensation of the unreal, as if the ground is starting to dissolve under your feet. 'The Zahir' is one of the spookiest: the idea of an inanimate but inescapable object which is predestined to take over your life ... brrr!

[umslopogaas]

M2 me

Looks like I killed this thread, though I had no intention to do so.

Sorry, typo in the first quote, the spelling is 'syntagmatic', not 'sytagmatic'. Not a word I use very often.

Oh, look it up yourself!

Oh, all right. Chambers: See syntax q.v. 'a systematic body, system, or group; a word or words constituting a syntactic unit.'

Hope I've got that right.

Oh, and by the way: Happy New Year!

[french frank]

Looks like I killed this thread, though I had no intention to do so.

Not so much you as the quote! But if you say it's worth the effort ... <sigh> ...

[umslopogaas]

M4 french frank

Apologies, I meant to respond, but forgot. Having struggled right through this article, I have to say I dont really think it is worth the effort. I learned a few new words, but I suspect they will be of limited application, and I dont think I learned much about Borges. I think your time would be much more profitably spent reading, or re-reading, some Borges!

[french frank]

Thanks for resuscitating the Borges thread.

Q. You have an evening free: do you prefer to

a) play your new Palestrina/Bach/Haydn/Mozart/Beethoven/Schumann &c. (you get the idea) CD? or (that's OR)

b) settle down with a few Borges stories that you haven't read properly/for some time/in Spanish &c?

I think my 'low enthusiasm' for music is showing here ...

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

..i thought that article was an example of the impossibility of the library ....... [i did feel that i had got something out of it when i read it but i am the antimatter to Funes and can not now recollect a thing ....] .... reading in spirals of of reference with queasy slippages of meaning ..... and loss of placement ...... as if you can not return to the same book [paragraph sentence word] ..... the Mozart has finished tho ...

[2LO]

A non-stop week of readings, re-readings and discussion of everything Borges wrote, on R3, would be a curious test of one's stamina. Add a provision of the Listen Again facility in perpetuity and even this thread would soon implode.

Accompany these readings with an uninterrupted but soft rendition of all-inclusive [I]Mozak[I] in the background, and you'd have a near-perfect Borgesian entity.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

the world is a nightmare .... if we are living it how can we sleep? if we are dreaming it how can we wake? Borges wrote documentaries