Jim was too short as was Myths of Cthulu.

The Insufferable Gaucho : 7

A lawyer Héctor Pereda departs Buenos Aires to become a rancher.

Not familiar enough with Borges (mea culpa) to appreciate what this story is going for.

Police Rat: 8

Dudes rock-ass story. So fun. Police as rats. Rats as police. Much to think about.

Alvaro Rousselot’s Journey: 7.5

Argentine writer keeps getting clipped by a Parisian director who turns his books into movies without permission lol. Feel like this story is somehow about colonial extracitionism. Or maybe just a pissed off writer.

Catholic Tales (Vocation and Chance): 7.75, 7.25

Discernment and a schizo who escapes from an asylum. The first is very Catholic, and the second notsomuch.

Literature + Illness = Illness: 8.25

Essay or collection of essays about writing, sex, illness, travel, poetry. These were so so good.

The only things in life are fucking and reading, and after awhile once they get boring, all you have left is travel. If u say so, rob.

The poem also says:

Tell us what you've seen!

And the traveler, or the ghost that represents the traveler and his companions replies by listing the circles of Hell. Baudelaire's traveler clearly isn't saying that the flesh is sad or that he has read all the books, although he just as clearly knows that entropy's gem and trophy, the flesh, is more than merely sad, and that once a single book has been read, all others have been read as well. Baudelaire's traveler has a full heart and a mind ablaze with rancor and disgust, which means that he's probably a radical modern traveler, although of course he's someone who, understandably, wants too come through; he wants to see, but he also wants to come through it alive. The voyage, as it unfolds in the poem, is like a ship or an unruly caravan headig straight for the abyss, but the traveler, to judge form his disgust, desperation, and scorn, wants to come through it alive. And what he finds in the end, like Ulysses or the patient traveling on hius gurney who confuses the ceiling with the abyss, is his own image:

It is a bitter truth our travels teach!
Tiny and monotonous, the world
has shown – will always show us – what we are:
oases of fear in the wasteland of ennui!

In that line alone there is more than enough. In the middle of a desert of ennui, an oasis of fear, or horror. There is no more lucid diagnosis of the illness of modern humanity. To break out of ennui, to escape from boredom, all we have at our disposal–and it's not even automatically at our disposal, again we have to make an effort– is horror, in other words, evil. Either we live like zombies, like slaves fed on soma, or we become slave drivers, malignant individuals, like that guy who, after killing his wife and three children, said, as the sweat poured off him, that he felt strange, possessed by something he'd never known: freedom, and then he said that the victims had deserved it, although a few hours later, when he'd calmed down a bit, he also said that no one deserved to die so horribly, and added that he;'d probably gone a little crazy and told the police not to listen to him. An oasis is always an oasis, especially if you come to it from a desert of boredom. In an oasis you can drink, eat, tend to your wounds, and rest, but if it's an osais of horror, if that's the only sort there is, the traveler will be able to confirm, and this time irrefutably, that the flesh is sad, that a day comes when all the books have indeed been read, and that travel is the pursuit of a mirage. All the indications are that every oasis in existence has either attained or is drifting toward the condition of horror

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