I’m giving these books to @longislandfnb (Long Island Food Not Bombs). For right now, though, they’re in my car.
I was checking the Amazon page of my book to send it to a friend, and saw that my brother some awed stranger wrote a review.
(Call it a Window’s current ranking: 2,688,243.)
I thought my dream-poem kick was over, but that changed this weekend, and now this:
“… your sleep is an intermittent, jammed flow, like the reading of the novel, with dreams that seem to you the repetition of one dream always the same. You fight with the dreams as with a formless and meaningless life, seeking a pattern, a route that must surely be there, as when you begin to read a book and you don’t yet know in which direction it will carry you.”
Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler
Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.
—Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler
It’s not that you expect anything in particular from this particular book. You’re the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst. This is the conclusion you have reached, in your personal life and also in general matters, even international affairs. What about books? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of books, where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn’t serious.
(Italo Calvino, Chapter one If on a winter’s night a traveler)
You derive a special pleasure from a just-published book, and it isn’t only a book you are taking with you but its novelty as well, which could also be merely that of an object fresh from the factory, the youthful bloom of new books, which lasts until the dust jacket begins to yellow, until a veil of smog settles on the top edge, until the binding becomes dog-eared, in the rapid autumn of libraries. No, you hope always to encounter true newness,which, having been new once, will continue to be so. Having read the freshly published book, you will take possession of this newness at the first moment, without having to pursue it, to chase it. Will it happen this time? You can never tell. Let’s see how it begins.
(Italo Calvino, Chapter one of If on a winter’s night a traveler)
Spring Break, Day 8:
Hours reading the New York Review of Books — hours!
“The book reader of the future” (April, 1935 issue of Everyday Science and Mechanics)
For whom is the funhouse fun?
Paper books may be the only media remaining that don’t report your behavior back to anonymous aggregators.
—(via wwnorton)
