Calvino’s Italian Folktale s is now my favorite folktale collection. It is a huge paperback with hundreds of stories in it, which average about two pages each. Calvino collected Italian folktales, sometimes building on previous folktale collectors’ work, and made slight changes - which he makes note of, unlike the Grimms - for continuity or even aesthetics. I would not have noticed the...
... can anyone confirm if this is still the case: "After two and half months in which - incredibly for a European - I have never seen a prostitute on the streets, here in some black districts I rediscover the sight familiar to all Western European cities: prostitutes. There are some in the white areas too, but they are usually in certain cafes, and in any case they are very few. The most astonishing...
Apologies for the lateness of this update, life seems to have got very hectic recently. We met (ages ago) to discuss 'Alice in Wonderland' by Lewis Carroll . To be honest there wasn't much to discuss! I think we were thinking that there might be some adult themes and hidden messages but it was exactly the same story I remember from childhood. I forgot to take a vote, but no one particularly hated it....
It's really too soon to be thinking about reading plans for next year, but I find myself doing so anyway. Mostly I want to have very few plans and just see where my reading takes me, but there are a...
I had to do a quick run down to Tesco to pick up some lunch supplies earlier, and happened therefore to be in the car with Radio 4 on between 11:30 and 12 o'clock. This enabled me to catch a few brief snippets of a programme about Oulipo , the French experimental literature group (it's a portmanteau word formed from " ouvroir de littérature potentielle "). I'm vaguely familiar with...
The Trumpet: Directors: Chen Kaige , Werner Herzog , Victor Erice , Spike Lee , Jim Jarmusch , Wim Wenders , Aki Kaurismaki . Nicolas McClintock , on the genesis of the film: "I was reading Italo Calvino's collection of lectures, Six Memos For The Next Millenium, that quoted one old Sicilian folk-story-teller saying something that jumped out at me: "Time takes no time in a story." In...
Art Matters, the innovative nonprofit foundation, is pleased to announce 23 grants ranging in amounts of 3,000 USD to 10,000 USD to artists focusing on communication and collaboration across national borders: Mark Blankenship Support for the collaboration with artists from Iceland and Germany on new video works as part of the artist’s web project The Critical Condition. Jane Callister Support...
It’s about time someone came up with the concept of the Treehouse Hotel. This temporary structure, perched upon and within and between the multiple bowers of Lisbon’s shady Jardim de Estrela park, realizes every child’s dream: a house amid the trees. To my knowledge, only one figure has previously postulated and acted upon the notion [...]
Once upon a time, a man started to have weird dreams. And stories sprang forth from his brow, as once wise Athena from the head of her father, mighty Zeus - or, in adapting the metaphor to a more postmodern setting, we could say that stories started seeping from his brain, oozing like slime from the bottom of undisturbed oceans where ancient squid gods lie asleep until their time to wake and rule Earth...
In 1985, Primo Levi was known in Britain and America for a single book, If This is a Man, his memoir of survival in Auschwitz. Then came The Periodic Table, which arrived in this country garlanded with eulogies from Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco.
Thin Cities 3 Whether Armilla is like this because it is unfinished or because it has been demolished, whether the cause is some enchantment or only a whim, I do not know. The fact remains that it has no walls, no ceilings, no floors: it has nothing that makes it seem a city except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be:...
Named after Italo Calvino's meta-fiction If On a Winter's Night a Traveller, this is Sting's second album for the German classical label, following his 2003 collection of lute music Songs from the Labyrinth.
1) The Manual of Detection has drawn a lot of comparisons to various authors: from Friedrich Dürrenmatt to Dashiell Hammett, via Kafka and Paul Auster, taking in Italo Calvino. Which, if any, of these authors were an influence? All these authors to some extent, though Italo Calvino most substantially. While in college I studied Calvino with [...]
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