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🦋 Control and relaxation

In the Gnostic cosmogonies, demiurges fashion a red Adam who cannot stand; as clumsy, crude and elemental as this Adam of dust was the Adam of dreams forged by the wizard's nights.
Seduced further into Ficciones -- "The Circular Ruins" makes me think I was wrong in calling Borges a control freak, though I still think that description might hold some water when talking about "Herbert Quain." Borges' prose is (necessarily) much more tightly circumscribed than Saramago's, there is not the same reliance on rhythm, it is cerebral rather than physical. But that is not at all the same as saying "You are only allowed to hear it in one particular way."

This looks like an interesting web site devoted to "The Circular Ruins".

posted evening of Monday, August 4th, 2008
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I felt somewhat like you did about Borges. I couldn't read all of Ficciones, not because I did't like the way he wrote, but because it left me somewhat cold. It's admirable how he can create an entire world including the fake bibliography, and the stories are VERY clever, but I found them lacking in the emotional area.

posted morning of August 5th, 2008 by Jorge López

The stories do have that philosophical abstraction to them, don't they? (I've only read a bit of Borges, though, and that was long ago.) Have you read Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others? Chiang is, I think, mining some of the same kinds of ideas, from a very different stylistic perspective.

posted morning of August 5th, 2008 by Randolph

I was extremely happy with Borges when I first read his stories, in college; and I think (based on reading "The Circular Ruins" last night) that I would be into them again now. It just requires a radically different approach from the reader, than anything I've been reading lately.

I haven't read anything by Chiang -- not sure I have even heard his name before. Interesting title.

posted morning of August 5th, 2008 by Jeremy

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