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Saturday, October 8th, 2011
 I'd like to quote at length a paragraph from "t zero," below the fold -- so we can observe and appreciate and meditate upon the crystalline beauty of the writing and of the ideas, you and I, and so that I can briefly mount one of my favorite hobby horses.
So now that I have decided to inhabit forever this second t0 -- and if I hadn't decided to it would be the same thing because as Q0 I can inhabit no other -- I have ample leisure to look around and to contemplate my second to its full extent. It encompasses on my right a river blackish with hippopotamuses, on my left the savannah blackish-white with zebras, and scattered at various points along the horizon some baobab trees blackish-yellow with toucans, each of these elements marked by the positions occupied respectively by the hippopotamuses H(a)0, H(b)0, H(c)0 et cetera, by the zebras Z(a)0, Z(b)0, Z(c)0 et cetera, the toucans T(a)0, T(b)0, T(c)0 et cetera. It further embraces hut villages and warehouses of importers and exporters, plantations that conceal underground thousands of seeds at different moments of the process of germination, endless deserts with the position of each grain of sand G(a)0 G(b)0... G(nn)0 transported by the wind, cities at night with lighted windows and dark windows, cities during the day with red and yellow and green traffic lights, production graphs, price indices, stock market figures, epidemics of contagious diseases with the position of each virus, local wars with volleys of bullets B(a)0 B(b)0... B(z)0 B(zz)0 B(zzz)0... suspended in their trajectory, bullets which may strike the enemies E(a)0 E(b)0 E(c)0 hidden among the leaves, airplanes with clusters of just-released bombs suspended beneath them, airplanes with clusters of bombs waiting to be released, total war implicit in the international situation (IS)0 which at some unknown moment (IS)X will become explicit total war, explosions of supernovæ which might change radically the configuration of our galaxy...
I'm interested in what it means to take an instantaneous slice of reality this way. As Calvino/Qfwfq noted in the first volume of Cosmicomics, in the story "The Light-Years," every object is, to observers, a sphere expanding at the speed of light -- the observer perceives the object at the instant when the skin of that sphere crosses his/her location. The instant t0 has to be identified with Q0's location in space, and the subscript zero as applied to zebras, hippopotamuses, bullets, international situations, if it is to mean the same thing as the subscript zero applied to Qfwfq and his instant, has to refer to the surfaces of their spheres, all intersecting at locus Q. But at the moment when this happens (again, as pointed out in "The Light-Years"), that zebra over there is no longer Z(n)0, it has gone on to become some Z(n)a which will at some later tx become visible to Qx...
↻...done
posted morning of October 8th, 2011: Respond
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Sunday, October 9th, 2011
One of the big attractions for me about reading this edition of Cosmicomics was its completeness -- all the Cosmicomics stories Calvino ever published, including seven that have never previously been translated. The collector in me loves getting the opportunity to read and reread them all at once... And what about it? I'm nearly at the end of the book now, is it a good thing to have the stories all bundled up like this for reading together? I think it is. My memory of first reading Cosmicomics (just the first 12 stories) is of being excited and stimulated and pulled through the book -- that is very similar to what's happening this time with the 34 stories. While the first volume felt complete on its own, the subsequent additions certainly hold their own and complement it. The newly translated stories (translated by Martin McLaughlin, who also wrote the introduction to this collection) are seven stories from the 1968 collection World Memory and other Cosmicomics Stories. They are not all in the vein of the earlier stories -- some certainly are similar, such as "The Meteorites", and some are distinctly different, such as the exquisite "Solar Storm." The title story, "World Memory" (the only one that was already translated, by Tim Parks) is a... well a sui generis story, but sort of a murder mystery. They reinforce the themes and ideas of the earlier stories, and they branch out and diverge into their own stylistic innovations and subtleties.
posted evening of October 9th, 2011: Respond
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