The Library of Babel, by Jorge Luis Borges
This story is the one my blog is named after. It's about a really, really strange and terrifying library. (The reason I named the blog after the story is that the Library in Borges's tale is said to contain all possible books, which, while a bit of an exaggeration, does a decent job of getting across the idea that this is a blog about basically anything.) I'm no Borges superfan, but just about everything I've read by him is either solid or utterly amazing, and almost always surprisingly weird. Like most of his stories, this one mixes the real with the fantastic in a compelling and unusual way.
Notes:
Lord, I haven't actually listened to these recordings in years. I guess I was worried I would be embarrassed. And I was right, though there's still some good to be found here.
I like the first part of the introduction here; I assume I intended it as something that would be repeated at the start of each episode, but I apparently became immediately embarrassed by it (the "and get someone to listen" is a bit cringe-inducing even now). The rest of the intro is pretty pretentious. I'd forgotten that I went out of my way to find relevant quotes for the subject, but it's clear to me that while I was trying to sound like I'd extensively researched and read on the subject of Borges, I probably just cobbled together whatever I found most readily on the internet. Sidenote: I promise my ability to speak Spanish in real life is less abysmal than this recording makes it seem. Maybe I was nervous at the time, but it's virtually unintelligible and, again, utterly pretentious. I could just as easily have used the quote by itself.
I've always liked the music for this one. It goes on way too long, as the music I wrote tended to do throughout the podcast. I left the metronome clicks in, which I thought sounded like water dropping. Eerily. I still think this was a solid idea.
The editing on this is pretty terrible. I'm still not a great editor, but on this episode there are a number of places where I had to go back and re-record something and insert it in the main recording, and these moments are extremely obvious to my ear.
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