Boxall's 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die discussion

Today on the Chicago (Ill.) radio station WFMT they will be playing classical music inspired by the works of Jorge Luis Borges. For more information: http://blogs.wfmt.com/fiesta/?p=2123

Wowee. That's fab. For once, a music tip which isn't telling me to follow some boy-band. Someone..somewhere, is still composing classical music and musicians are playing it. Bravo!

Definitely, I recently listened to a BBC Composer of the Week who is still living. A remarkable woman. (And so much better than John Adams whose stuff I can't stand.)

I know that composer (Adams). At least he has ideas. One composition from him describes a dream he had of a supertanker taking flight. I'll take it.

Anyway. Thank God for the Brits. American non-culture is killing me. Binge-tv watching nimrods yapping about their weekly addiction as if it is a virtue, something to be proud of. Television-watching! Yeah real big accomplishment there!

Yes, he has ideas! His operas have interesting plots. But I just can't listen to his music. It just grates.

On BBC Radio 4 Extra yesterday:

Libraries and Labyrinths: Borges and Me

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00kdtpy

Description:

Peter White gets to grips with Jorge Luis Borges, the much-loved Argentinean poet, essayist, and short-story writer, whose tales of fantasy and dreamworlds are classics of 20th-century world literature.

As he did to great effect with our Milton documentary, 'Visions of Paradise', Peter uses his own blindness as a way of probing a great writer's experience of his loss of sight. It's a novel and compelling way of opening up Borges' work.

Labyrinths, intricate puzzles and game-playing characterise Borges' short stories such as 'Fictions', 'The Aleph', and indeed 'Labyrinths'. We'll relate this to his years of close reading of world literature, his playfulness, and the fact that through his long years of myopia, he stocked his mind with books, preparing for the blindness that he knew would come.

Borges detested the regime of the dictator General Peron. So it wasn't until the end of Peronism in 1955 that the author was appointed Director of the National Library in Buenos Aires. By then he was almost completely blind: "I speak of God's splendid irony in granting me at once 800,000 books and darkness," he noted. We visit the National Library and find out how Borges' work is currently being converted into Braille for the country's blind readers.

To compensate for his loss of vision, Borges turned again to poetry, a form of writing that he could more easily revise in his head than on paper. He also continued his pursuit of knowledge, acquiring a taste for the old Anglo Saxon language and Old Norse.

Producer: Mark Smalley.

I am going to read Borges in Danish translation. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings is a specific English collection. Comparing that and Ficciones and
Fiktioner og andre fiktioner I noticed that most but not all of Ficciones is contained in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. Isn't that a little strange to have two book with some identical content on the list?

If there are any Danes around: Read all of Fiktioner in Fiktioner og andre fiktioner and the following from “Aleffen”
Den udødelige
Teologerne
Historien om krigeren og den fangne kvinde
Emma Zunz
Asterions hus
Deutsches requiem
Averroés' søgen
Zahiren
Gudens skrift
Ventetiden
then both the list book are covered.

I will probably read all of Fiktioner og andre fiktioner.

Hi, J. I encountered similar confusion when I decided to read Borges. I ended up with Collected Fictions, which seems to be pretty much all his prose fictions. But it's not that simple: it's chronological, in sections for each publication, but what is generally listed as Dreamtigers is given as The Maker, and Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings is a different combination again.

Nevertheless, I'm loving it, and hope you do too.

J_BlueFlower wrote: "I am going to read Borges in Danish translation. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings is a specific English collection. Comparing that and Ficciones and
[book..."

All of the stories in Labyrinths come from two original collections: Ficiones, and The Aleph. Collected Fictions has both as well as other stories. It's very confusing. I have Collected Fictions in English, and Cuentos Completos in Spanish, and I'm just going to check each story off one by one, comparing with a table of contents for Labyrinths -- but no sense in buying Labyrinths, as all of the stories are already in the other volumes I own.

This probably belongs in the separate Labyrinths discussion thread.