Bleeping Borges

I had really hoped to get back to Tolkien Tuesday today, but right now I'm caught up in the fascinations of Jorge Luis Borges; I am reading Collected Fictions. His short stories are seldom more than five pages long, and reading them is like eating peanuts. What I think of as his 'prose tone poems' (setting out one idea, seldom dramatized by action) are hardly a page. It is easy to get caught up and lost in his mazes, mirrors, myths, and mysticism, and the ever-changing cast of characters, often with quite challengingly long names (in Spanish) glide before the eye like a kaleidoscope. There is one constant character, however, and that is Borges himself, or what the author sometimes calls 'this fellow Borges,' who is not quite the man who moved about in the real world. This gives the collection a strange dreamlike, almost fevered, threadlike continuity, as if you are reading tiny chapters in one enormous novel. There is no reason to stop at the end of one short story, and an almost hypnotic compulsion to continue reading. At the moment it has quite wiped away other considerations.

In the meantime, I do hope to work on Tolkien Tuesdays, maybe a bit at a time in the evenings, maybe even completing 'The Seige of Gondor' by next Tuesday. Hopefully announcing it here will give me more impetus to work on it. In many ways it is frivolous; the best 'map and guide', not to be improved on, after all, is the thing itself.