“How many years has it been since I could abandon myself to a book written by another, with no relation to what I must write myself?”
From IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELLER by Italo Calvino.
Image above is a screen grab showing one of Calvino's mad manuscripts, from a great 1985 interview conducted with him on the BBC's Bookmark show.
“If reading attention reaches certain highs with a certain continuity, the product is viable and can be launched on the market; if attention, on the contrary, relaxes and shifts, the combination is rejected and its elements are broken up and used again in other contexts.”
What would essentially become the Netflix model described by Italo Calvino as far back as 1979 in IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELLER.
“There's a boundary line: on one side are those who make books, on the other are those who read them, so I take care always to remain on my side of the line. Otherwise, the unsullied pleasure of reading ends, or at least is transformed into something else, which is not what I want. This boundary line is tentative, it tends to get erased: the world of those who deal with books professionally is more and more crowded and tends to become one with the world of readers. Of course, readers are also growing more numerous, but it would seem that those who use books to produce other books are increasing more than those who just like to read books and nothing else.”
Not gonna lie, sometimes my mind drifts off to a world where overnight I obliterate all trace of my online presence and pick up and move someplace I can slip into anonymity. Mexico perhaps, someplace I know no one and no one knows me, and where I don't even know the language. Set aside any semblance of professional pursuit from my creative endeavors and instead get a job waiting tables or tending to a bar or working at a bookshop, a day-to-day affair that requires no longview, all while speed-learning Spanish and spending my free time doing nothing but reading and sketching till the end of my days.
The excerpt at the very top is from Italo Calvino's IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELLER, which may just be the most post-modern book I've ever laid hands on. It's about an apparently misprinted book, whereby every other chapter seems to belong to a completely different book. In that regard, it can be quite challenging to get into, but in so doing it held up a mirror to me and reminded me of a thing I did in THE SOLAR GRID, in which I relegated the half of each chapter to what may seem like a completely new story, until much later you discover that it is all in fact one story. Which made me realize how challenging I must've made it for readers too.
Sticking with Calvino pays off though, because by around the 75-page mark, you're hooked, and the brilliance of Calvino's ploy begins to dawn on you like eureka.
Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out:
the Books You've Been Planning To Read For Ages, the Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success, the Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment, the Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case, the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer, the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves, the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified.
How appropriate to come across these lines after having splurged on an order of 10 books (Ten?! What brand of demented gluttony is this?).
The excerpt is from Italo Calvino's IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELLER which I've had shelved for a while waiting to hear its call. Having just finished Dylan's contemplative CHRONICLES: VOLUME ONE (which may just be the best autobiography I ever read) and spent the afternoon lost in play and laughter with the little one—now sound asleep—I feel in the right frame of mind to drift away with Calvino.
A man's mother dies. That right there puts you in the state of mind he might be in. Camus doesn't tell you what state of mind that is, nor does he tell you a lot of things.
Full review at Ganzeer.Reviews.
“I started reading articles in newspapers on microfilm from 1885 to about 1865 to see what daily life was like. I wasn't so much interested in the issues as intrigued by the language and rhetoric of the times. Newspapers like the Chicago Tribune, the Brooklyn Daily Times, and the Pennsylvania Freeman. Others, too, like the Memphis Daily Eagle, the Savannah Daily Herals and the Cincinnati Enquirer.”
And it occurs to me that everything I know about slavery or the time that slavery existed is through contemporary eyes, contemporary retellings. Nothing beats going to primary sources, and there are clearly plenty. Something I oughtta remedy.
“There were news items about reform movements, antigambling leagues, rising crime, child labor, temperance, slave-wage factories, loyalty oaths and religious revivals. You get the feeling that the newspapers could explode and lightning will burn and everybody will perish. Everybody uses the same God, quotes the same bible and law and literature.”
From Bob Dylan's CHRONICLES: VOLUME ONE.
“Plantation slavecrats of Virginia are accused of breeding and selling their own children. In the Northern cities, there's a lot of discontent and debt is piled high and seems out of control.”
This is the great thing about this book. Dylan doesn't only relay what he was up to and who he met, but every so often he'll go on a tangent about things he'd been reading and conversations he was having and how it affected his state of mind.
“There are riots in Memphis and in New Orleans. There's a riot in New York where two hundred people are killed outside of the Metropolitan Opera House because an English actor has taken the place of an American one. Anti-slave labor advocates inflaming crowds in Cincinnati, Buffalo and Cleveland, that if the Southern states are allowed to rule, the Northern factory owners would then be forced to use slaves as free laborers. This causes riots too.”
Having lived in both the south and northeast, it's easy to see how similar population divides still very much stand today. The crux of the divide may be different, no longer really about want for subjugating others as much as it's a schism between “the faithful” and “the godless”. Not enough reason to go to war against one another, you need starkly different economic systems for that kind of ignition. Although the rhetoric that might fan the flames would most certainly lean on varying versions of righteousness, with “believers” of the South not taking too kindly upon the infidels of the North, and vice versa for sure.
“Lincoln comes into the picture in the late 1850s. He is referred to in the Northern press as a baboon or giraffe, and there were a lot of caricatures of him. Nobody takes him seriously. It's impossible to conceive that he would become the father figure that he is today. You wonder how people so united by geography and religious ideals could become such bitter enemies. After a while you become aware of nothing but a culture of feeling, of black days, of schism, evil for evil, the common destiny of the human being getting thrown off course. It's all one long funeral song, but there's a certain imperfection in the themes, an ideology of high abstraction, a lot of epic, bearded characters, exalted men who are not necessarily good. No one single idea keeps you contented for too long. It's hard to find any neoclassical virtues either. All that rhetoric about chivalry and honor—that must have been added later. Even the Southern womanhood thing. It's a shame what happened to the women. Most of them abandoned to starve on farms with their children, unprotected and left to fend for themselves as victims of the elements. The suffering is endless, and the punishment is going to be forever. It's all so unrealistic, grandiose and sanctimonious at the same time. There was a difference in the concept of time too. In the South, people lived their lives with sun-up, high noon, sunset, spring, summer. In the North, people lived by the clock. The factory stroke, whistles and bells. Northerners had to 'be on time.' In some ways the Civil War would be a battle between two kinds of time. Abolition of slavery didn't even seem to be an issue when the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter.”
And a few lines later:
“Back there, America was put on the cross, died and resurrected. There was nothing synthetic about it. The godawful truth of that would be the all-encompassing template behind everything that I could write.
“I crammed my head full of as much as this stuff as I could stand and locked it away in my mind out of sight, left it alone. Figured I could send a truck back for it later.”
Picked it up used for 5 bucks, and boy am I glad I did. The bits above worth the price of admission alone.
“I wanted to understand things and then be free of them. I needed to learn how to telescope things, ideas. Things were too big to see all at once, like all the books in the library—everything laying around on all the tables. You might be able to put it all into one paragraph or into one verse of a song if you could get it right.”
— Bob Dylan, CHRONICLES: VOLUME ONE
Finding much resonance in Camus' BETWEEN HELL AND REASON, essays written for the “resistance newspaper” Combat between 1944-1947. This bit however had the exact opposite effect:
Things have clearly changed in that regard. My sense is that the greatest issue of today, very broadly speaking, isn't so much one of clear-thinking in as much as it relates to a widely adopted practice of insincerity.
“We make love by telephone, we no longer work with material but with machines, and we kill and are killed by proxy.”
— Albert Camus, 1946