I'm literally shaking right now

>if you want incredibly interesting ideas including paradoxes, recursion, etc., Philip K. Dick is better
He isn't really though.

Borges' stories pre-empted stuff like the death of the author, the open text, and Sapir-Whorfian linguistic relativism well before they were anywhere near the public (or even academic in some cases) consciousness.

That ridiculous DUDE reductionism can be applied to any work to make it seem trivial.

>Borges' stories pre-empted stuff like the death of the author, the open text, and Sapir-Whorfian linguistic relativism

So a bunch of po-mo gimmicks everyone is already bored of, not impressed

>po-mo gimmicks everyone is already bored of
Speak for yourself friend, but yes Borges was certainly part of the transition from modernism to post-modernism.

You're that dude complaining about how Einstein's a hack scientist because people have built on his work since.

>literature becomes progressively built on like a science

Guess how I know you're a pseud

>Kafka and his Precursors
Borges has an enlightening angle on this debate :^)

Guess how I know you're retarded.

I read the Aleph a while ago and remember thinking it had some goodness to it

You okay there?

>the death of the author, the open text
This is going to sound harsh and stupid, but in my true opinion, these gimmicky ideas don't at all matter.

Sapir-Whorfian linguistic relativism is very, very interesting, but both Wittgenstein and Gurdjieff were more "prophetic" (or intuitively understood it) than Borges in that respect (incidentally, I think I read somewhere that Borges happened to study with Gurdjieff groups/groups that did readings of Gurdjieff's works (although without the man himself, of course), something I wasn't too surprised to find since some of Borges's works really remind me of Ouspensky/Gurdjieff).

I don't mean to downplay on anyone's opinions, obviously I can't make you retrospectively NOT enjoy a work you already enjoyed, and looking back on it I think recommending other authors was stupid, I don't wanna talk about authors I think are better than Borges, that's subjective. But i just don't think Borges was that revolutionary. The Arabian Nights, Don Quixote, The Canterbury Tales --- don't even these "classics" have aspects of metafiction that Borges simply embroidered, embellished, and expanded upon? (although there i go again, recommending works I think are better and more original than Borges)

>But i just don't think Borges was that revolutionary.
>works I think are better and more original than Borges
I'll just pick up on this point because it seems to be the crux of your evaluation of Borges (I think we can leave aside the debate of how gimmicky or influential of certain specific ideas that appear in his stories and essays are).

Regarding originality, Borges himself would be the first to agree with you that his ideas were not new or revolutionary but were appropriated from themes recurrent throughout literary history. Hence his consistent return to several key themes and texts throughout his body of work. I'll quote Alberto Manguel on what one can gain from Borges:
>Vladimir Nabokov said that on first reading Borges he thought he had come upon a new and marvellous portico, but that behind the facade he found nothing. Poor Nabokov! What he took to be nothing is, in fact, everything or the possibility of everything: every story, every reflection, every thought and every event are all contained in what Borges called, in one of his best stories, the Library of Babel, the recipient of every book, past, present and future. What Borges offered his readers was a philosophy, an ethical system, a method (but these words are too mechanical) for the art of reading that is to say, for the craft of following a revelatory thread through the labyrinth of the universe.

I think dubbing it a 'philosophy' or 'ethical system' is a bit dramatic but the point is that Borges picks up on ideas and themes and presents them in neat, concise stories (often with a meta-fictional flair that ushered in post-modernism). His work facilitated an approach to competitive literature studies. The problem with that daft HURR DUDE approach is that the ideas were never meant to seem amazingly original, or revolutionary but Borges' extensive influence (and perhaps the perceived triviality of some of his stories) is a testimony to his presentation of the ideas.

>competitive
Obviously I mean comparative.

Just spent a couple of minutes browsing the blurbs of my Borges collection looking for this Howard Bloom quote which I think sums up Borges' value nicely:
>If you read Borges frequently and closely, you become something of a Borgesian, because to read him is to activate an awareness of literature in which he has gone further than anyone else.

libraryofbabel.info/browse.cgi
>yfw greatest book of all time is already written, but you can't find it

to be honest phams House of Asterion is my favourite Borges

Borges made relatively appealing particular artisanal pieces of metaphysical craftsmanships

>being this incapable of thought
I bet you hate Kafka too

There's always a longer book

All books have the same length and use the same alphabet. However, the number of variations far outweighs the number of atoms in our universe, so it's effectively infinite.

>If you want something like both, Nabokov is great
so what would you recommend

I can't remember that but I trust you

>There are five shelves for each of the hexagon's walls; each shelf contains thirty-five books of uniform format; each book is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each line, of some eighty letters which are black in color. There are also letters on the spine of each book; these letters do not indicate or prefigure what the pages will say.

There's a philosophy in it. Have you ever read books for reasons besides decorating your bookshelf?

A book of infinite length would eventually start to repeat itself. Imagine a book that uses a two-letter alphabet with only three letters on each page. The number of three-letter combinations of two letters is demonstrably infinite.
>aaa
>aab
>aba
>baa
>abb
>bab
>bba
>bbb
To be specific, it's n^x where n = letters in alphabet and x = length of each string. In this case you could only have 8 unique pages before you started having to repeat yourself. A book constructed from a twenty-five letter alphabet, each page containing 3200 letters would clearly have a significantly greater number of possible unique pages (25^3200), but still a finite amount.

Consider that a book of any length could be found in the library, although split into separate volumes; the library is still finite.

*demonstrably finite

it's all coming back to me
>Consider that a book of any length could be found in the library, although split into separate volumes; the library is still finite.
Yes, but only if a single tome can be both, say, volume 1 and 2 of the same book.

>There are also letters on the spine of each book
Are these included in the total number of characters of each book? In other words, can you have two books identical on the inside, but with different "titles" on the spine?

>when you think you've discovered a new masterpiece but it's gotten a unnecessary nonsensical epilogue just to reach the word count

Just pretend that the postword was done by Joyce.
Seriously, though, how infinitesimally small would be the chances of finding a book with one coherent, grammatically correct sentence?