Italo Calvino

There's an infinite repetition of each show's universe referencing each other.

Last year, I read the postmodern novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino.

The structure of the book itself is recursive, where the narrative follows the reader, you, attempting to read a book called If on a Winter's Night a Traveler.

It's written in the second person, so the protagonist is you, trying to read the book that you're reading.

The Soviet repression of the Hungarian Revolution was the final straw.

So people like E.P. Thompson, the great historian in Britain, Italo Calvino in Italy, even Jean-Paul Sartre, who was usually wrong about absolutely everything, condemned the Soviet invasion of Hungary and said that just shows the Soviet Union for what they are.

So I think up till 1956, there were loads of left-wing idealists who were still idealizing the Soviet Union, romanticizing it, But after 1956, never again.

Eric Hobsbawm does, doesn't he? I think Eric Hobsbawm does.

And so this book in some way is a symbolic of that, right? As you pointed out earlier, The bulk of the case studies that I work on come from the Italian canon, the modern Italian canon in particular, meaning a canon that is typically not associated with the word horror in its highest echelons.

In fact, the Italian canon itself you know, through some of its most prominent figures, such as Italo Calvino, rejected the horror genre as this kind of like trivial, you know, facile form of entertainment, right? And the wager of the book is, you know, that if you shift perspective just a tiny bit, right, while remaining within the realm of ordinary language, so, you know, the way that we use word in everyday speech, right, And instead of thinking about horror as a genre, you think of horror as an experience.

My wager is that the Italian canon is actually entirely submerged or pervaded or infused with horror, with what I call ordinary horror.

So the book kind of starts from this point of departure and provides a non-canonical reading of the modern Italian canon.

Number 64.

If on a Winter Night's Traveler by Italo Calvino.

Have you read it? I have DNF'd it.

Ooh, okay.

And so I had this craving one day to go out and climb a tree.

I was also I'd also been reading Calvino's The Baron in the Trees.

I don't know if you guys know that book, but it's this beautiful ode to tree climbing.

It's about a boy who climbs a tree and never comes back down and spends his entire life in the forest or hopping from tree to tree.

And he himself wanted to be a novelist when he was young.

And he was... at the beginning of his career, part of a group of young writers in the circle of Italo Calvino, very influenced also by Raymond Queneau.

And when you know all those things... you know that for him, and he eventually later said it, writing functioned as a cognitive tool.

So it's not just the questions that you ask that convert a set of facts into evidence.

Because he does talk a lot about beauty and he talks a lot about love and also about nothingness, which I want to talk about quite specifically in a minute.

I mean, the whole thing about the moon has me thinking of Italo Calvino and Cosmic Comics.

And I had a conversation about that with Cecilia Charlton on this podcast.

And also very recently, I Qian Qian spoke with curator Becca Paddy Fry about that, which specifically led to talking about the moon and cleaning the moon and being able to draw the moon closer, these ideas around thermodynamics.

because there's nothing.

As I mentioned before, Brian Swim refers to this as no-thing-ness.

Again, going back to Italo Calvino, and he gives this fantastic example of if you take a single atom from a person and make it as large as the Yankee Stadium, I don't know how big the Yankee Stadium is, very large, I'd say, it will consist almost of empty space.

So we are more emptiness than anything else.

That's just the name of the book.

It's by a guy called Italo Calvino.

Okay.

If you love books, that book is a love letter to books.