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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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“How many years has it been since I could abandon myself to a book written by another, with no relation to what I must write myself?”

From IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELLER by Italo Calvino.

Image above is a screen grab showing one of Calvino's mad manuscripts, from a great 1985 interview conducted with him on the BBC's Bookmark show.

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“If reading attention reaches certain highs with a certain continuity, the product is viable and can be launched on the market; if attention, on the contrary, relaxes and shifts, the combination is rejected and its elements are broken up and used again in other contexts.”

What would essentially become the Netflix model described by Italo Calvino as far back as 1979 in IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELLER.

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“There's a boundary line: on one side are those who make books, on the other are those who read them, so I take care always to remain on my side of the line. Otherwise, the unsullied pleasure of reading ends, or at least is transformed into something else, which is not what I want. This boundary line is tentative, it tends to get erased: the world of those who deal with books professionally is more and more crowded and tends to become one with the world of readers. Of course, readers are also growing more numerous, but it would seem that those who use books to produce other books are increasing more than those who just like to read books and nothing else.”

Not gonna lie, sometimes my mind drifts off to a world where overnight I obliterate all trace of my online presence and pick up and move someplace I can slip into anonymity. Mexico perhaps, someplace I know no one and no one knows me, and where I don't even know the language. Set aside any semblance of professional pursuit from my creative endeavors and instead get a job waiting tables or tending to a bar or working at a bookshop, a day-to-day affair that requires no longview, all while speed-learning Spanish and spending my free time doing nothing but reading and sketching till the end of my days.

The excerpt at the very top is from Italo Calvino's IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELLER, which may just be the most post-modern book I've ever laid hands on. It's about an apparently misprinted book, whereby every other chapter seems to belong to a completely different book. In that regard, it can be quite challenging to get into, but in so doing it held up a mirror to me and reminded me of a thing I did in THE SOLAR GRID, in which I relegated the half of each chapter to what may seem like a completely new story, until much later you discover that it is all in fact one story. Which made me realize how challenging I must've made it for readers too.

Sticking with Calvino pays off though, because by around the 75-page mark, you're hooked, and the brilliance of Calvino's ploy begins to dawn on you like eureka.

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Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out:

the Books You've Been Planning To Read For Ages, the Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success, the Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment, the Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case, the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer, the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves, the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified.

How appropriate to come across these lines after having splurged on an order of 10 books (Ten?! What brand of demented gluttony is this?).

The excerpt is from Italo Calvino's IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELLER which I've had shelved for a while waiting to hear its call. Having just finished Dylan's contemplative CHRONICLES: VOLUME ONE (which may just be the best autobiography I ever read) and spent the afternoon lost in play and laughter with the little one—now sound asleep—I feel in the right frame of mind to drift away with Calvino.

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A man's mother dies. That right there puts you in the state of mind he might be in. Camus doesn't tell you what state of mind that is, nor does he tell you a lot of things.

Full review at Ganzeer.Reviews.

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