“You get married, you go on loving a bit longer, you work. And you work so hard that it makes you forget love.”
From THE PLAGUE by Albert Camus.
Reads
“For while he himself spoke from the depths of long days of brooding upon his personal distress, and the image he had tried to impart had been slowly shaped and proved by the fires of passion and regret, this meant nothing to the man to whom he was speaking, who pictured a conventional emotion, a grief that is traded on the marketplace, mass-produced.”
From Albert Camus' THE PLAGUE.
“People linked together by friendship, affection, or physical love found themselves reduced to hunting for tokens of their past communion within the compass of the ten-word telegram. And since, in practice, the phrases one can use in a telegram are quickly exhausted, long lives passed side by side, or passionate yearnings, soon declined to the exchange of such trite formulas as: 'Am well. Always thinking of you. Love'.”
This passage from THE PLAGUE by Albert Camus brings to mind how interaction with friends and lovers with whom hours upon hours were once upon a time regularly spent laughing, discussing, and debating have now been reduced to likes and shares. An unintended consequence of suddenly being separated by time-zones, and the Defacto mode of communication being social media: instant yet far from substantial.
“Some few of us however persisted in writing letters and gave much time to hatching plans for corresponding with the outside world.”
THE SOLAR GRID #1 is completely sold out. Issues #2-8 are still in stock. I'm sure the time will come when I look upon these single-chapter editions as the strange time capsules that they are.
Started THE PLAGUE by Albert Camus. This being my third Camus, it's now very evident that Camus' writing appeals to me. Adequately sparse, just the right words in exactly the right places in a way that evokes more than what is being said. Something I don't find entirely true of most contemporary authors who lean towards the extra telegrammatic. The buildup of eerie over the first 30 pages in THE PLAGUE is really perfectly paced.
Not quite a collection of short fiction as much as it presents blueprints for approaching fiction, often very grand, interestingly-structured fiction. The reviews of fictitious non-existent books are my favorite in the collection, but there are only a handful of those, and the rest is mostly pretty straight fiction which I didn't get much out of. Not that I didn't like them... Full review of Borges' FICTIONS over at Ganzeer.Reviews.
Day lost to migraine. Will attempt to turn in early tonight and get a fresh start tomorrow.
In other news:
Lionsgate Inks Deal With AI Firm to Mine Its Massive Film and TV Library — The Hollywood Reporter: A new age of schlock is upon us.
Society of the Psyop — E-Flux: Wherever there's the smoke of a conspiracy theory, you better believe there's fire.
Michael Chabon on Israel's latest attack on Lebanon:
Finished Borges' FICTIONS and while I know I just read something great, I'm also not entirely sure how to feel about it. Full review coming to Ganzeer.Reviews soon. Moving on to César Aira's THE SEAMSTRESS AND THE WIND.
This will be my first Aira who I know nothing about. I found the cover-art delightful enough to nab a used ex-library copy off the interwebs though, and sure enough upon a read of the opening paragraph, it seems to fit squarely in the headspace I'm in these days:
These last weeks, since before coming to Paris, I've been looking for a plot for the novel I want to write: a novel of successive adventures, full of anomalies and inventions. Until now nothing occurred to me, except the title, which I've had for years and which I cling to with blank obstinacy: “The Seamstress and the Wind.”
Very Calvino WINTER'S NIGHT in a way.
Coffee after 4:00pm for me is usually a bad idea, guaranteed to keep me up until well after midnight. So I was surprised to find myself crashing immediately after a 7:00pm Americano, only to reemerge among the living at 1:00am. Circadian rhythm officially fucked.
Phase 1 of PROJECT BLOSSOM complete. Now I can put it aside before entering phase 2 later next week. PROJECT TWENTY-FIVE I must dedicate Monday to, do the whole thing start-to-finish in a single day. Hoping to have 3 full days assigned entirely to TSG next week, need to pencil in a minimum of 6 pages, but more if I can manage. This weekend is for my boy.
The second half of the Penguin edition of Borges' FICTIONS seems to be dedicated to more straightforward short fiction, but much of it still flies over my head regardless. Close to 70% into this strainful little book that I had no idea would be so difficult. Late night gyoza to help me power through.
On a completely different note, love this collection of Kafka covers by Peter Mendelsund.
Borges himself was a translator of some note, and in addition to the translations per se that he left to Spanish culture—a number of German lyrics, Faulkner, Woolf, Whitman, Melville, Carlyle, Swedenborg, and others—he left at least three essays on the act of translation itself.
From Andrew Hurley's A Note on the Translation, printed in the back of this Penguin edition of Borges' FICTIONS (which is oddly hard to find actually).
In “Versions of Homer” (“Las versiones homericas,” 1932), Borges makes it unmistakably clear that every translation is a “version”—not the translation of Homer (or any other author) but a translation.
This is one reason I have resolved to learn Spanish (aside from my desire to spend more time in Mexico City). Having been exposed to works by Arabic authors in both the original Arabic as well as in translation to English, I can see how a work in translation genuinely isn't the same as the original. If I could have things my way, I'd also be learning French, Mandarin, and Hindi, but as a man in his 40s who sucks at multitasking, I've only got so much time for so many battles, and it seems wise to start narrowing one's struggles down to just one or two, maybe three.
Now I get why they say Borges is a writer's writer.
“I had wondered how a book could be infinite. The only way I could surmise was that it be a cyclical, or circular, volume, a volume whose last page would be identical to the first, so that one might go on indefinitely.”
His FICTIONS is filled with these kinds of narrative hypotheses, a variety of which are sometimes presented on the very same page.
In all fictions, each time a man meets diverse alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the work of the virtually impossible-to-disentangle 'Ts'ui Pen', the character chooses—simultaneously—all of them. He creates, thereby, 'several futures,' several times, which themselves proliferate and fork. That is the explanation for the novel's contradictions.
Some story hypotheses are even given diagrams. Like this one:
But it is not the worlds proposed by 'April March' that are regressive, it is the way the stories are told—regressively and ramifying, as I have said. The book is composed of thirteen chapters. The first reports an ambiguous conversation between several unknown persons on a railway station platform. The second tells of the events of the evening that precedes the first. The third, likewise retrograde, tells of the events of another, different, possible evening before the first; the fourth chapter relates the events of yet a third different possible evening. Each of these (mutually exclusive) “evenings-before” ramifies into three further “evenings-before.” all quite different. The work in its entirety consists, then, of nine novels, each novel, of three long chapters.
It isn't so much a book of stories as much as it's a collection of thought experiments about what can potentially be done with stories, without actually attempting to put any of it to the test, not really. The influence on Calvino is very obvious, as is certainly the influence on, say, a Christopher Nolan. Especially in regard to his structurally interesting stuff: MEMENTO, INCEPTION, and INTERSTELLAR. And you can even see it a bit in his earliest work, FOLLOWING.
I'm beginning to think I'm not smart enough for Borges though, because only 86 pages into this unassuming volume and I can already feel my brain bleed.
The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. In the center of each gallery is a ventilation shaft, bounded by a low railing. From one hexagon one can see the floors above and below—one after another, endlessly.
Excerpt from The Library of Babel from Jorge Luis Borges' FICTIONS, which I can absolutely see being adapted into a graphic novella by the likes of François Schuiten (as an aside, check out this great scene from the film LE DERNIER PLAN directed by Schuiten's regular collaborator Benoit Peeters).
Like all the men of the Library, in my younger days I traveled; I have journeyed in quest of a book, perhaps the catalog of catalogs. Now that my eyes can hardly make out what I myself have written, I am preparing to die, a few leagues from the hexagon where I was born. When I am dead, compassionate hands will throw me over the railing; my tomb will be the unfathomable air, my body will sink for ages, and will decay and dissolve in the wind engendered by my fall, which shall be infinite. I declare that the library is endless.
Beautiful visuals, until Borges starts to break your brain with things like:
(Mystics claim that their ecstasies reveal to them a circular chamber containing an enormous circular book with a continuous spine that goes completely around the walls. But their testimony is suspect, their words obscure. That cyclical book is God.) Let it suffice for the moment that I repeat the classic dictum: The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any hexagon and whose circumference is unattainable.
Or maybe it's just too early in the morning for me to be reading this sort of thing.