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Jan. 7th, 2010 02:06 amThe Numbers in the Dark story is "World Memory"--title story of the third Italian volume of Cosmicomics, most of the contents of which haven't made it here yet; you can get them in The Complete Cosmicomics from amazon.co.uk if you have thirty-five spare dollars or so. Paperback will surely be out in a few months.
Reading Road to San Giovanni and Hermit in Paris right now, the latter of which is pretty damn fascinating. It consists mostly of various articles he wrote surveying his early life and especially his implication into and extrication from out of Marxism, transformations he then brooded over for decades.
Best might be the 100 page travel journal he wrote during his first trip to America ('59-'60), after leaving the Party but not communism. He grumbles Marxianly at America and its cities, while simultaneously falling in love with them--you see how Invisible Cities is born as much out of the experiences he's describing as it is from San Remo, Turin, Rome, and Venice. Seriously, the names of particular Cities pop into your head when you read some of these entries.
Most jaw-dropping, charming, troubling are his straightforward descriptions of things too famous or obvious for an American to really notice head on. He spends a number of pages in Ohio (Cleveland, but close enough) pretty much explaining my home and childhood to me--he makes some mistakes, or anyway eyebrow-raising judgments, too, but those are almost as fun. It's not even a work geared toward publication, exactly, which may add to its charm--it's a series of semi-public letters sent back to his coworkers at Einaudi in Turin, but which he clearly intended to use as a basis for a book on America.
He wrote that book but changed his mind and destroyed it before it could be printed, probably because America had unsettled his ideas. Not that he converted to Capitalism or anything, but I think this was around the time his sense of what an individual might accomplish through partisan activity started to take that final hit, the real hit that unravels any Marxism in the end: this all may happen, but essentially it happens without me, or, to the extent I'm even involved, on top of me. The lack of a true understanding of what's happening and how to change it are necessarily identical--i.e. if you're so smart why ain't everybody rich? The more you see it not happening, as you age, or the more you travel where something different, stranger than what was prophesied is going on, as Calvino did...the faith in process weakens, but much more acutely the absolute inability to match one's own step with the great march rumored to be somewhere in the mist becomes glaring. The small and large become irreconcilable, or at least the relations between them require the constant attention, hesitant revision and layered hypothesizing that especially characterize his later work. Maybe America's size, or the size of the snake uncoiling from its nest here, was what finally broke the floor for him.
Reading Road to San Giovanni and Hermit in Paris right now, the latter of which is pretty damn fascinating. It consists mostly of various articles he wrote surveying his early life and especially his implication into and extrication from out of Marxism, transformations he then brooded over for decades.
Best might be the 100 page travel journal he wrote during his first trip to America ('59-'60), after leaving the Party but not communism. He grumbles Marxianly at America and its cities, while simultaneously falling in love with them--you see how Invisible Cities is born as much out of the experiences he's describing as it is from San Remo, Turin, Rome, and Venice. Seriously, the names of particular Cities pop into your head when you read some of these entries.
Most jaw-dropping, charming, troubling are his straightforward descriptions of things too famous or obvious for an American to really notice head on. He spends a number of pages in Ohio (Cleveland, but close enough) pretty much explaining my home and childhood to me--he makes some mistakes, or anyway eyebrow-raising judgments, too, but those are almost as fun. It's not even a work geared toward publication, exactly, which may add to its charm--it's a series of semi-public letters sent back to his coworkers at Einaudi in Turin, but which he clearly intended to use as a basis for a book on America.
He wrote that book but changed his mind and destroyed it before it could be printed, probably because America had unsettled his ideas. Not that he converted to Capitalism or anything, but I think this was around the time his sense of what an individual might accomplish through partisan activity started to take that final hit, the real hit that unravels any Marxism in the end: this all may happen, but essentially it happens without me, or, to the extent I'm even involved, on top of me. The lack of a true understanding of what's happening and how to change it are necessarily identical--i.e. if you're so smart why ain't everybody rich? The more you see it not happening, as you age, or the more you travel where something different, stranger than what was prophesied is going on, as Calvino did...the faith in process weakens, but much more acutely the absolute inability to match one's own step with the great march rumored to be somewhere in the mist becomes glaring. The small and large become irreconcilable, or at least the relations between them require the constant attention, hesitant revision and layered hypothesizing that especially characterize his later work. Maybe America's size, or the size of the snake uncoiling from its nest here, was what finally broke the floor for him.
