Borgesian Bibliophilia

Forgive me for writing a serious blog.  It's my nature to find seriousness in everything, even in poop jokes.  And so i decided to write a literary blog, a place where i can quietly, silently, and under the radar of the Audience (because as we know, no one reads blogs: "Nowadays books are written by the public and read by no one,' said Wilde) post my trivial thoughts on my readings.

And who knows, perhaps this will help me write my grad thesis.

Maybe.

I chose a subject broad enough to cover more than just the writings of Jorge Luis Borges—Borges who has blindly kept company with a neophyte this whole year—but to still retain him at the center of my meditations.

Borgesian bibliophilia refers not only to my maddening obsession with the books Borges published (and didn't publish), it also refers to the books Borges himself loved: the intimidatingly long list of books he read in Spanish, English, German, Latin, and Old English, ranging from authors such as Julio Cortazar, GK Chesterton, William Faulkner, Paul Valéry, Lady Murasaki, Ray Bradbury, and Søren Kierkegaard.

Borgesian bibliophilia also alludes to the material, physical object called a book, an object that seared its image into the mind of Borges from so much reading and from being around the tomely presence of books at the National Library of the Argentine Republic, where he was director from 1955 through 1973.

He even dreamt and continually hallucinated books in stories like "The Library of Babel" and "The Book of Sand," and "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."  But he also dreamed the book as something else—as something virtual, something existing in hyperspace and in our reality.  Who knows...maybe he was the first to envision the digital, electronic book.

But enough of this.  I will leave these thoughts for another post.  Whatever I have intimated or said by the way will be explained in detail later.

This is all I can give for now.