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Feb. 28th, 2011 08:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoception32. If on a winter's night a traveler
Read this last year to teach it, then reread the ten first chapters (not first ten chapters) to grade the students' assignments. So this time I just read the other parts, the main narrative - whether that's the bones or flesh of the book I can't say.
Calvino as much as admits in it that the book's the product of writer's block, probably of the close analysis of that block while suffering from it. It's one of the world's most wonderful books, though still only takes second or third place among his. As he also states in the book, Calvino made a career out of radical departures from himself, and this is one of them, but aspects of the framing narrative are anticipated in his early story "Adventure of a Reader," the Theodora parts of The Nonexistent Knight, and the end of Baron in the Trees. The aborted novels themselves sometimes have a faint whiff of the cosmicomical, but they're essentially a whole new genre of writing - despite being to various extents recognizably parodic of certain authors or novel types, and despite their debt to the outlines of Quain.
The book comes across as less crazy without the nov'lets, though it's still pretty insane. The main narrative has plenty of its own distractive attractions - which here are new, not quite finished explanations of what our vulnerability to distracting attractions means. Reading is both gnosis and deliberate ignorance: we strip ourselves down to our simplest to best take on everything. What we know is that by some provided means, perhaps this book of this author, everything's out there to be taken on. He stops on something of a shark analogy - we keep moving or we die, we don't ever both stop and live - but I wonder if he believed it. At the very least what you find on your travels (in this case another reader) helps you travel better, makes where you are a good place to keep returning to.
Hence the what do you call it, recursion, of the original hardback cover and hinted at in the Silas Flannery chapter, where the Snoopy-tormented novelist proposes to write the very book you're reading (which of course is largely about your inability to read it).
If we knew what we were doing we'd be done.
When I was a kid my father had this routine, vaguely along the lines of the 'remind me of a babe' one from The Bachelor and the Bobbysoxer that they recycled in Labyrinth - and apparently a lot of other fathers have a similar one:
(http://recycledknowledge.blogspot.com/2006/05/zanzibar.html)
But I don't know anything about its origin. He'd say something like,
It was a dark and stormy night outside the gates of Paris.
I met a man [I'm missing something here].
I killed a man, said I.
What was his name, said he.
Zanzibar, said I.
Zanzibar, said he, He was my brother. We must fight this out!
I think there was something violent after that - what sounds closest among those other versions is 'A shot rang out' but I don't think that was quite it. And then it loops. Good way to put a kid to sleep.
Read this last year to teach it, then reread the ten first chapters (not first ten chapters) to grade the students' assignments. So this time I just read the other parts, the main narrative - whether that's the bones or flesh of the book I can't say.
Calvino as much as admits in it that the book's the product of writer's block, probably of the close analysis of that block while suffering from it. It's one of the world's most wonderful books, though still only takes second or third place among his. As he also states in the book, Calvino made a career out of radical departures from himself, and this is one of them, but aspects of the framing narrative are anticipated in his early story "Adventure of a Reader," the Theodora parts of The Nonexistent Knight, and the end of Baron in the Trees. The aborted novels themselves sometimes have a faint whiff of the cosmicomical, but they're essentially a whole new genre of writing - despite being to various extents recognizably parodic of certain authors or novel types, and despite their debt to the outlines of Quain.
The book comes across as less crazy without the nov'lets, though it's still pretty insane. The main narrative has plenty of its own distractive attractions - which here are new, not quite finished explanations of what our vulnerability to distracting attractions means. Reading is both gnosis and deliberate ignorance: we strip ourselves down to our simplest to best take on everything. What we know is that by some provided means, perhaps this book of this author, everything's out there to be taken on. He stops on something of a shark analogy - we keep moving or we die, we don't ever both stop and live - but I wonder if he believed it. At the very least what you find on your travels (in this case another reader) helps you travel better, makes where you are a good place to keep returning to.
Hence the what do you call it, recursion, of the original hardback cover and hinted at in the Silas Flannery chapter, where the Snoopy-tormented novelist proposes to write the very book you're reading (which of course is largely about your inability to read it).
If we knew what we were doing we'd be done.
When I was a kid my father had this routine, vaguely along the lines of the 'remind me of a babe' one from The Bachelor and the Bobbysoxer that they recycled in Labyrinth - and apparently a lot of other fathers have a similar one:
(http://recycledknowledge.blogspot.com/2006/05/zanzibar.html)
But I don't know anything about its origin. He'd say something like,
It was a dark and stormy night outside the gates of Paris.
I met a man [I'm missing something here].
I killed a man, said I.
What was his name, said he.
Zanzibar, said I.
Zanzibar, said he, He was my brother. We must fight this out!
I think there was something violent after that - what sounds closest among those other versions is 'A shot rang out' but I don't think that was quite it. And then it loops. Good way to put a kid to sleep.
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Date: 2011-03-01 09:21 am (UTC)Am glad we talked about hairdoes:
He stops on something of a shark analogy - we keep moving or we die, we don't ever both stop and live - but I wonder if he believed it. At the very least what you find on your travels (in this case another reader) helps you travel better, makes where you are a good place to keep returning to.
The whole passage reminded me of this quote (even if in danger of being slightly off topic):
"Nothing sweeter than to drag oneself along behind events; and nothing more reasonable. But without a strong dose of madness, no initiative, no enterprise, no gesture. Reason: the rust of our vitality. It is the madman in us who forces us to adventure; once he abandons us, we are lost; everything depends on him, even our vegetative life; it is he who invites us, who obliges us to breathe, and it is also he who forces our blood to venture through our veins. Once he withdraws, we are alone indeed! We cannot be normal and alive at the same time. If I keep myself in a vertical position and prepare to fulfill the coming moment - if, in short, I conceive the future, a fortunate dislocation of my mind is involved. I subsist and act insofar as I am a raving maniac, insofar as I carry my lunacies to their conclusion. Once I become reasonable, everything intimidates me: I slide toward absence, toward springs which do not deign to flow, toward that prostration which life must have known before conceiving movement. I accede, by dint of cowardice, to the heart of all things, clinging to an abyss I would not dream of relinquishing, since it isolates me from becoming. An individual, like a people, like a continent, dies out when he shrinks from both rash plans and rash acts, when, instead of taking risks and hurling himself toward being, he cowers within it, takes refuge there: a metaphysics of regression, a retreat to the primordial!"
(all emphases by the author)
E. M. Cioran, "On a Winded Civilization"
from The Temptation to Exist,
translated by Richard Howard, pp. 62-3
that I lately quoted to another well-read LJ-friend (warmly recommended, btw) on a not too similar topic here: http://pomposa.livejournal.com/36913.html
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