I am sitting here eating the candy intended for the children who never came to my house, thinking about Jorge Luis Borges. I will probably be simutaneously reading Borges and Bolano together once I get my hands on 2666, a posthumously published epic to be released next week or the week after… clocking in at 900 something pages. It majorly stinks that Bolano had to die and will not be around to explain it all to us. I bought Borges collected fictions at Mercer Street Books, impressing the man working there, who wanted to know why I was buying Borges, Thomas Lux, and The End of Mr. Y. He wanted to know if The End of Mr. Y was something he should know about considering the other books I was purchasing. Well, it turns out that Mr. Y is “chick lit for nerds” so I don’t know.
The book was really good, but I don’t know if he should be interested. I don’t know why it ended the way it did. I don’t know what goes through an author’s mind when they have to finish a book. Should the characters die, live happily ever after, return to reality, run off together, save the universe, or walk off into the sunset leaving things the way they are? In this book I think all of this happens. Ah, ruminations. Plot: young promisuous phd student finds book by person she is writing about. book cursed. reads book. figures out how to get to “Troposphere,” which is person’s consciousness. bad guys come after her to get the book. she runs away. tries to find professor who has also read the book. goes back into the “Troposphere” to destroy book. if she stays too long she’ll get stuck there. love interest follows her into the “Troposphere” after dreaming about how to do it. he has stayed too long. I won’t give away the ending.
Anyway, I am going to be reading through Borges collected works slowly… in the hopes of kindling an obsession. Borges was a Library Director! I have read, from 1935, 3 works from “A Universal History of Iniquity.” In his preface, Borges says:
“The learned doctors of the Great Vehicle teach us that the essential characteristic of the universe is its emptiness. They are certainly correct with respect to the tiny part of the universe that is this book. Gallows and pirates fill its pages, and that word iniquity strikes awe in its title, but under all the storm and lightening, there is nothing. It is all just appearance, a surface of images–which is why readers may, perhaps, enjoy it. The man who made it was a pitiable sort of creature, but he found amusement in writing it; it is hoped that some echo of that pleasure may reach its readers.”
The first story is called “The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell” and there was one passage that stood out to me.
“The Mississippi is a broad-chested river, a dark and infinite brother of the Parana, the Uruguay, the Amazon, and the Orinoco. It is a river of mulatto-hued water; more than four hundred million tons of mud, carried by that water, insult the Gulf of Mexico each year. All that venerable and ancient waste has created a delta where gigantic swamp cypresses grow from the slough of a continent in perpetual dissolution and where labyrinths of clay, dead fish, and swamp reeds push out the borders and extend the peace of their fetid empire. Upstream, Arkansas and Ohio have their bottomlands too, populated by a jaundiced and hungry-looking race, prone to fevers, whose eyes gleam at the sight of stone and iron, for they know only sand and driftwood and muddy water.”
I am trying to think of ways to bring together literature and library service. I know that I need to do both. I would like to get a 2nd masters in literature. I would like to work in archives. I would love to work in an archive of authors or something related. I would like to work and do research at the same time. Not sure how to do that just yet. Everything I read, hear, and do reminds me that I will not be doing public library service. That leaves a lot of options, but I am enjoying doing archive work at the ACA and I can’t wait to figure out a next project for the coming year.
More on Borges later when I continue to read…. Happy Halloween! (Isn’t that picture of him creepy?)
