With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else. December 2012 marks the 40th anniversary of
Invisible Cities -- the sublime metaphysical travelogue by author-journalist
Italo Calvino. In a series of pensive dialogues with jaded emperor
Kublai Khan, the explorer
Marco Polo describes a meandering litany of visionary and impossible places,
dozens of surreal, fantastical cities, each poetically reifying ideas vital to language, philosophy, and the human spirit. This gracefully written love letter to urban life has inspired
countless tributes, but it's just the most accessible of Calvino's fascinating literary catalogue. Look inside for a closer look at his most remarkable works, links to English translations of his magical prose, and collections of artistic interpretations from around the web -- including
this treasure trove of essays, excerpts, articles, and recommended reading.
[more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Dec 30, 2012 -
26 comments
Twelve Tales of Christmas is a podcast
just launched by The Guardian featuring notable modern authors, such as Jeanette Winterson, Ali Smith, Colm Toíbin and Julian Barnes, reading one of their favorite short stories, by authors including JG Ballard, Katherine Mansfield, Italo Calvino, Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver. A story will be posted daily for the next 12 days. The first author and story is
Philip Pullman reading The Beauties by Anton Chekhov (
mp3).
[rss, iTunes]
posted by Kattullus
on Dec 10, 2010 -
8 comments
Paris: Ville Invisible. "This work seeks to show how real cities resemble the '
invisible cities' of Italo Calvino. As cluttered, saturated, and asphyxiating as it is, one can breathe more freely in Paris, the invisible city." The renowned French sociologist
Bruno Latour presents a "virtual sociological book" that explores the limits of social theory for the understanding of urban life. The Flash interface is somewhat rickety, but there is a text-only
PDF of the English version.
(via)
posted by nasreddin
on Dec 28, 2008 -
11 comments
Italo Calvino's
Invisible Cities is so called because it asserts that what makes up a city is not so much its physical structure but the impression it imparts upon its visitors, the way its inhabitants move within, something unseen that hums between the cracks. This, however, has in no way dissuaded people from attempting to give form to his
works. One such example is the
Hotel Tressants, a building in Menorca, Spain containing 8 rooms named after and
inspired by various cities from the novel. Meanwhile, artists offer illustrations
1,2,3, installations
1,2,3,4,5, music
1,2,3,4,5,6 and
dance, hypertexts
1,2, computer
programs and
animations, even View-Master
slides, while intellectuals offer readings and commentary
1,2, lectures
1,2, and critical texts
1,2,3 sparked by the man and his writings. It has been dubbed "The
Calvino Effect". Do you know of any more?
posted by Lush
on May 20, 2005 -
37 comments
100,000,000,000,000 Poems. In 1961, French writer and mathematician
Raymond Queneau published a work consisting of ten sonnets with the lines cut up so that they could be recombined in this number of ways.
Magnus Bodin's page offers all the variations (in English, French or Swedish). Queneau, who also wrote a book consisting of one small incident described in 99 different styles, was a member of the
OuLiPo group of writers, who chose to work under systematic constraints. Other members included
George Perec, who wrote a novel without using the letter E, (a
lipogram cleverly
translated by Gilbert Adair),
Italo Calvino, and
Harry Matthews.
Techniques to consider when filling that blog becomes a chore.
posted by liam
on Feb 13, 2002 -
10 comments
