Quick, the paywall guards aren't watching!

I don't know why or how, but my favorite story from last week's New Yorker is available outside the magazine's paywall right now. Burkhard Bilger's profile of neuroscientist David Eagleman involves amusement park thrill rides, how drummers experience time differently, Eagleman falling off a roof, and something called the oddball effect. There's also mention of a Calvino book that remains on my must-read-someday list.

In Eagleman's essay "Brain Time," published in the 2009 collection "What's Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science," he borrows a conceit from Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities." The brain, he writes, is like Kublai Khan, the great Mongol emperor of the thirteenth century. It sits enthroned in its skull, "encased in darkness and silence," at a lofty remove from brute reality. Messengers stream in from every corner of the sensory kingdom, bringing word of distant sights, sounds, and smells. Their reports arrive at different rates, often long out of date, yet the details are all stitched together into a seamless chronology. The difference is that Kublai Khan was piecing together the past. The brain is describing the present — processing reams of disjointed data on the fly, editing everything down to an instantaneous now. How does it manage it?

The whole story is fascinating. Plus, you learn the ridiculous lengths to which Coldplay apparently goes to sound less studio-ish in concert.

(Unintended bonus: If you want to try processing "reams of disjointed data on the fly," try reading the mag's chat with Bilger and Eagleman. Between the lack of design and some odd sequencing issues, you can practically feel your brain churn to stitch together the page's flow.)

Finally sat tonight to read Paris Review's Kay Ryan interview, something that turned up this weekend. This interview was the first from the mag I'd read in full. Last fall, there was a cool Atlantic story about how the interviews are done, over a number of sessions and with collaborative, heavy construction. But I still didn't expect the results to be this good.

Two answers in, Ryan mentions Calvino, who always blows me away, and this quote from his "Lightness" essay, which does so particularly. "Lightness for me goes with precision and determination," she recites, "a verbal texture that seems weightless, until the meaning itself takes on the same rarified consistency." Wonder how this applies to people.

And six answers in…

INTERVIEWER

How did you come up with what you’ve called recombinant rhyme?

RYAN

When I started writing nobody rhymed—it was in utter disrepute. Yet rhyme was a siren to me. I had this condition of things rhyming in my mind without my permission. Still I couldn’t take end-rhyme seriously, which meant I had to find other ways—I stashed my rhymes at the wrong ends of lines and in the middles—the front of one word would rhyme with the back of another one, or one word might be identical to three words. In “Turtle,” for instance, I rhyme “afford” with “a four-oared,” referring to a four-oared helmet: “Who would be a turtle who could help it? / A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet, / she can ill afford the chances she must take / in rowing toward the grasses that she eats.” The rhymes are just jumping all around in there, holding everything together.

What’s recombinant rhyme? It’s like how they add a snip of the jellyfish’s glow-in-the-dark gene to bunnies and make them glow green; by snipping up pieces of sound and redistributing them throughout a poem I found I could get the poem to go a little bit luminescent.

If you remember, a while back I was reading Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium, on lit's greater choices, and trying to write one post on each essay. I was on track, until the last essay, "Multiplicity." Had to reread late tonight, with music off and the lights almost out.

The essay, basically, looks at writer versus universe — our narrative humanity, incomplete and mortal, yet still driven to capture the infinite world. Futile? Calvino describes various writers, some obscure, others notable, striving to meet the challenge in different ways. Among them is Carlo Emilio Gadda, struggling "to represent the world as a knot, a tangled skein of yarn; to represent it without in the least diminishing the inextricable complexity or… the simultaneous presence of the most disparate elements that converge to determine every event." Calvino compares him to Robert Musil, for whom exactitude and soul battled.

If we compare these two engineer-writers, Gadda, for whom understanding meant allowing himself to become tangled in a network of relationships, and Musil, who gives the impression of always understanding everything in the multiplicity of codes and levels of things without ever allowing himself to become involved, we have to record this one fact common to both: their inability to find an ending.

A page later, Calvino cites a passage from Proust. As translated:

And I realised the impossibility which love comes up against. We imagine that it has as its object a being that can be laid down in front of us, enclosed within a body. Alas, it is the extension of that being to all the points in space and time that it has occupied and will occupy. If we do not possess its contact with this or that place, this or that hour, we do not possess that being. But we cannot touch all these points. If only they were indicated to us, we might perhaps contrive to reach out to  them. But we grope for them without finding them. Hence mistrust, jealousy, persecutions. We waste precious time on absurd clues and pass by the truth without suspecting it.

Introducing the excerpt, Calvino informs us: "knowledge, for Proust, is attained by suffering this intangibility." But all in life isn't pain. Further examples in the essay examine experiences beyond suffering. Ending, Calvino points to the benefits of reaching inside ourselves, as infinite as the universe. And he wonders if, when we do try to go beyond our lives and abilities, we aren't trying to give voices to the voiceless, and not just segments of society but emotions, objects, systems, seasons.

Previously, at the gas station: "Fantasy is a place where it rains."

Returning to Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Milennium… We've talked about he approaches how lightness, quickness and exactitude meet storytelling. Now it's time for us to tackle visibility. When Calvino says "visibility," he means imagination. How do we move past what's visible? The task is harder than ever. Images fill the world to the brim.

To name essay highlights for me, it's best to move backward. Calvino, writing in 1985, discusses his concerns for the future near the essay's end: "We are bombarded today by such a quantity of images that we can no longer distinguish direct experience from what we have seen for a few seconds on television. The memory is littered with bits and pieces of images, like a rubbish dump, and it is more and more unlikely that any one form among so many will succeed in standing out."

That outlook isn't too good, right? But Calvino is no pessimist. "I have in some possible pedagogy of the imagination," he writes in the next paragraph, "that would accustom us to control our own inner vision without suffocating it or letting it fall, on the other hand, into confused, ephemeral daydreams, but would enable the images to crystallize into a well-defined, memorable, and self-sufficient form, the icastic form."

(more…)

As you know, Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium has entranced me this year. The first essay was "Lightness," and Calvino sought balance between capturing difficult reality and his dreamlike aspirations. The next, "Quickness," explored narrative aerodynamics. Both essays spoke near-directly to my life in the weeks I read them.

In the third essay, "Exactitude," I didn't expect to connect as deeply as with the first two. "Exactitude" was such an anal-retentive word, and a glance at my apartment shouted the opposite. This guess was wrong, of course. While I didn't connect as personally, the depth was there.

Speaking to the topic, Calvino didn't act as a friend. He was a ride. I imagined the space elevator. He telescoped in and out. Exactitude, to him, was a dichotomy in writing. Did a writer use the primacy of words to find form in the world? Or did a writer use the primacy of the world to inspire words to catch up? For as much as a writer could measure actions to try and capture the infinite, the writer could also describe the seemingly finite to an infinite extent. Zooming out, zooming in.

Exactitude, for Calvino, began with precision but lived on exploration.

He raised a metaphor of a crystal and a flame. A crystal appeared to be a rigidly structured object but was only as such because of its life inside. A flame seemed to be wild and uncontrollable but was only as such because of its steady, mathematical, thermodynamic engine.

Putting aside some beautiful extended quotes Calvino used (among them, a meditation on how we observe indirect sun and moonlight), this was the first of two favorite "Exactitude" passages for me:

The fact is, my writing has always found itself facing two divergent paths that correspond to two different types of knowledge. One path goes into the mental space of bodiless rationality, where one may trace lines that converge, projections, abstract forms, vectors of force. The other path goes through a space crammed with objects and attempts to create a verbal equivalent of that space by filling the page with words, involving a most careful, painstaking effort to adapt what is written to what is not written, to the sum of what is sayable and not sayable. These are two different drives toward exactitude that will never attain complete fulfillment, one because "natural" languages always say something more than formalized languages can — natural languages always involve a certain amount of noise that impinges upon the essentiality of the information — and the other because, in representing the density and continuity of the world around us, language is revealed as defective and fragmentary, always saying something less with respect to the sum of what can be experienced.

Here was the second, again dueling with descriptive dichotomy:

There are those who hold that the word is the way of attaining the substance of the world, the final, unique, and absolute substance. Rather than representing the substance, the word identifies itself with it (so that it is wrong to call the word merely a means to an end): there is the word that knows only itself, and no other knowledge of the world is possible. There are others who regard the use of the word as an unceasing pursuit of things, an approach not to their substance but to their infinite variety, touching on their inexhaustibly multiform surface. As Hoffmannsthal said: "Depth is hidden. Where? On the surface." And Wittgenstein went even further than this: "For what is hidden … is of no interest to us."

I would not be so drastic. I think we are always searching for something hidden or merely potential or hypothetical, following its traces whenever they appear on the surface. I think our basic mental processes have come down to us through every period of history, ever since the times of our Paleolithic forefathers, who were hunters and gatherers. The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss.

A week after reading, I love that image. I sit here at the beach, wondering when to be the crystal and when to be the flame.

Italo Calvino always fits in moments for me. A shared love of narrative forms and impact likely explains this, but I'm still surprised each time.

Following the lessons last month from "Lightness," the first of Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium, I picked up the book again last night and read his second memo, "Quickness." It fit the moment perfectly.

Calvino tells an old story of Charlemagne and a magic ring. He notes different methods in which the story moves before focusing on one.

The real protagonist of the story, however, is the magic ring, because it is the movements of the ring that determine those of the characters and because it is the ring that establishes the relationships between them. Around the magic object there forms a kind of force field that is in fact the territory of the story itself. We might say that the magic object is an outward and visible sign that reveals the connection between people or between events. It has a narrative function, whose history we may trace in the Norse sagas and the chivalric romances — a function that continues to surface in Italian poems of the Renaissance. In Ariosto's Orlando furioso we find an endless series of exchanges of swords, shields, helmets, and horses, each one endowed with particular qualities. In this way the plot can be described in terms of the changes of ownership of a certain number of objects, each one endowed with special powers that determine the relationships between certain characters.

In realistic narrative, Mambrino's helmet becomes a barber's bowl, but it does not lose importance or meaning. In the same way, enormous weight is attached to all the objects that Robinson Crusoe saves from the wrecked ship or makes with his own hands. I would say that the moment an object appears in a narrative, it is charged with a special force and becomes like the pole of a magnetic field, a knot in the network of invisible relationships. The symbolism of an object may be more or less explicit, but it is always there. We might even say that in a narrative any object is always magic.

Quickness enters this picture for Calvino as the special forces around objects, characters, phrasing, or other narrative tools bring continued meaning with concision. For a story's moments or a moment's assets, the speed of their imparting adds to their power, which adds back to speed. Both effects help understanding. It's narrative aerodynamics.

Fourteen stories up, sitting cross-legged on the neighboring tower's concrete deck, thin and without chairs but shady, Blackberry nearby but resting, holding Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium, spending a needed hour slow-reading the first essay, "Lightness."

When I began my career, the categorical imperative of every young writer was to represent his own time. Full of good intentions, I tried to identify myself with the ruthless energies propelling the events of our century, both collective and individual. I tried to find some harmony between the adventurous, picaresque inner rhythm that prompted me to write and the frantic spectacle of the world, sometimes dramatic and sometimes grotesque. Soon I became aware that between the facts of life that should have been my raw materials and the quick light touch I wanted for my writing, there was a gulf that cost me increasing effort to cross. Maybe I was only then becoming aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world"“qualities that stick to writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them.

At certain moments I felt that the entire world was turning into stone: a slow petrification, more or less advanced depending on people and places but one that spared no aspect of life. It was as if no one could escape the inexorable stare of Medusa. The only hero able to cut off Medusa's head is Perseus, who flies with winged sandals; Perseus, who does not turn his gaze upon the face of the Gorgon but only upon her image reflected in his bronze shield. Thus Perseus comes to my aid even at this moment, just as I too am about to be caught in a vise of stone"“which happens every time I try to speak about my own past. Better to let my talk be composed of images from mythology.

Via TMN, a London Times look at how Italo Calvino's writing flew.

Certainly, Faulkner was working towards simple structural brevity and lightness in his magnificent novel As I Lay Dying (1930) but Calvino's own inner urgent necessity, away from any weight of narrative, took him farther than Faulkner towards the potential of spinning tiny bytes of text all at once and leaving the reader, not the narrative or the writer, to hold everything together mentally, and in movement. This, he felt, was real realism, because science had knocked out the weighty Newtonian Universe to reveal a world made of nothing at all. The endlessly dividing atom is empty space and points of light. If it all sounds post-modern — that is, relative, fragmentary, shifting — it is, but because Calvino is a great writer it is also satisfying and solid, in the curious way that art allows.

You knew the article was going to be good when up front you saw the Contributors list: "Katherine Boo ("Opening Night" p. 22), a staff writer, has spent the past fourteen months reporting from the Mumbai slums, for a book to be published next year."

If you've kept up with your New Yorkers better than me — easy to do — you've read the piece in the February 23 issue. If you haven't read it, "Opening Night" is what you have to read after you've seen Slumdog Millionaire. The article is based on the night of the movie's premiere in Mumbai, but the setting is across town in the slums where Boo writes reality the way Danny Boyle's movie carried out a script. 

[Thirteen-year-old Sunil looks for good metal.] The ceilings of the garage were low. All the lights were off, including some blue ones that looked like spiders. During the day, sparrows skittered around the garage; but sparrows didn't skitter at night, so he wasn't sure which animals were making sounds. Not rats, he decided; he had never encountered them here before. Guards he had often encountered, but tonight he couldn't hear where they were. He moved carefully to a stairwell, which, instead of exterior walls, had steel slats with spaces in between them. The slats let in the white light from the newly renovated terminal, where families were still waving to departing passengers. The light increased the risk of his being seen by one of the guards, but it was essential to making an appraisal.

Also a must-click: The fiction piece from the same issue, Italo Calvino's "The Daughters of the Moon," where naked girls go chasing the moon as it dies, previously unpublished in English. You reach a certain point in the story, about a page in, where you can't help but run alongside.

Will Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium make it off my counter this week, after sitting there the last few months? We hope and wait.

After listening to Demolition early last week, Ryan Adams' new one and his Whiskeytown work Strangers Almanac arrived in the mail near week's end. I'm not sure if the new one, Easy Tiger, beats Cold Roses for me. I don't think it does. But the best of the new bunch are the kind that draw you in like Come Pick Me Up. When you break them apart from the album's noise, I put Sun Also Sets and Pearls on a String up there so far. They're open but obscured, where Cold Roses was open and unadorned. Both moods are viable, and the former is harder to write. Not harder to write alone, but with a narrative.

Strangers Almanac is good there. There's not a bone in its wax that would let it ignore the narrative, because the narrative is everything. Music's just a way to get there, and obscured and unadorned are whatever it takes. Excuse Me While I Break My Own Heart Tonight has been the song on my lips the last week or so, pretty much since the moment Demlition night ended in a forfeit. It's the version from the Faithless Street reissue, but the Strangers cut — newer to me — fortifies it. It's the anchor on the first listen, and it's destruction for a purpose.

The comments here were on their way back almost from the second they left, and I think I got it pretty quick but not quick enough to hold up the whole thing. Couldn't have if I tried, or wouldn't have wanted to. Some days you just lower your arms. Yesterday I archived the old comments, preserving them, and put in Blogger's comment system. The old one, YACCS, had stopped upgrades and support a year-plus ago, bowing to systems like Blogger's and desiring to invest time elsewhere. It was great while it lasted. But I was ready for it to go too and was glad to get the high sign to walk away. The new system offered comments on a per-post basis, which was what I needed.

When I write in Blogger now, the interface has passed me by. The words hit the keyboard a couple letters after my head, and they hit the screen a few more frustrating letters behind. By the time all the letters are down and they with the words are in the right order, the feeling to get them out the door is strong. If that feeling was the feeling sitting down to write, the emotion is double. In those times, I don't want to stick around and I don't want to come back. I want to push the chalkboard into the street and let an unexpected big-rig smash it to bits. It's a different contract of interaction, building and clearly noting an exception. Turning a post's comments off, every once in a while, satisfies the clause.

When comments weren't here, I went looking for them. If only mentally before cutting myself off, I checked. They had never come in bunches, but the chance was there. They'd also predicated my yesterday. I went to bed Saturday not knowing what I'd done, and woke up today with at least the interactive contract in hand. It would've been helpful a day or a week earlier, and it was too late except to go forward. I spent the day with Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler, recommended in comments here by a couple friends. The book, the best about reading I've ever read, was what I needed to come back to zero.

You need it too, as long as you can sit still long enough to read every word. Maybe you can read it, find your legs stretched at full extension and wonder with the sensation how long it'd been since you'd let them do as much. You then switch positions and spots dozens of times; as much as you enjoy the stretched feeling, you're doing what you can. You watch the reflection of the sun go down, especially gold on the cap of the new high-rise down the street, and you remember that poem and how it was sad. You wait for the thunderstorm and type out the excerpts that mess with your head, the ones on comments and control that begin to sample the book. None of them describe anything fully, and you know you have to do better than description.

And just as I watch her while she reads, suppose she were to train a spyglass on me while I write? I sit at the desk with my back to the window, and there, behind me, I feel an eye that sucks up the flow of the sentences, leads the story in directions that elude me. Readers are my vampires. I feel a throng of readers looking over my should and seizing the words as they are set down on paper. I an unable to write if there is someone watching me: I feel that what I am writing does not belong to me any more. I would like to vanish, to leave behind for that expectation lurking in their eyes the page stuck in the typewriter, or, at most, my fingers striking the keys.

How well I would write if I were not here! If between the white page and the writing of words and stories that take shape and disappear without anyone's ever writing them there were not interposed that uncomfortable partition which is my person! Style, taste, individual philosophy, subjectivity, cultural background, real experience, psychology, talent, tricks of the trade: all the elements that make what I write recognizable as mine seem to me a cage that restricts my possibilities. If I were only a hand, a severed hand that grasps a pen and writes … Who would move this hand? The anonymous throng? The spirit of the times? The collective unconscious? I do not know. It is not in order to be the spokesman for something definable that I would like to erase myself. Only to trasmit the writable that waits to be written, the tellable that nobody tells.

Perhaps the woman I observe with the spyglass knows what I should write; or, rather, she does not know it, because she is in fact waiting for me to write what she does not know; but what she knows for certain is her waiting, the void that my words should fill.

—

Idea for a story. Two writers, living in two chalets on opposite slopes of the valley, observe each other alternately. One of them is accustomed to write in the morning, the other in the afternoon. Mornings and afternoons, the writer who is not writig trains his spyglass on the one who is writing.

One of the two is a productive writer, the other a tormented writer. The tormented writer watches the productive writer filling pages with uniform lines, the manuscript growing in a pile of neat pages. In a little while the book will be finished: certainly a best seller — the tormented writer thinks with a certain contempt but also with envy. He considers the productive writer no more than a clever craftsman, capable of turning out machine-made novels catering to the taste of the public; but he cannot repress a strong feeling of envy for that man who expresses himself with such methodical self-confidence. It is not only envy, it is also admiration, yes, sincere admiration: in the way that man puts all of his energy into writing there is certainly a generosity, a faith in communication, in giving others what others expect of him, without creating introverted problems for himself. The tormented writer would give anything if he could resemble the productive writer; he would like to take hm as a model; his greatest ambition now is to become like him.

The productive writer watches the tormented writer as the latter sits down at his desk, chews his fingernails, scratches himself, tears a page to bits, gets up and goes into the kitchen to fix himself some coffee, then some tea, then camomile, then reads a poem by Holderlin (while it is clear that Holderlin has absolutely nothing to do with what he is writing), copies a page already written and then crosses it all out line by line, telephones the cleaner's (though it was settled that the blue slacks couldn't be ready before Tuesday), then writes some notes that will not be useful now but maybe later, then goes to the encyclopedia and looks up Tasmania (though it is obvious that in what he is writing there is no reference to Tasmania), tears up two pages, puts on a Ravel recording. The productive writer has never liked the works of the tormented writer; reading them, he always feels as if he is on the verge of grasping the decisive points, but then it eludes him and he is left with a sensation of uneasiness. But now that he is watching him write, he feels this man is struggling with something obscure, a tangle, a road to be dug leading no one knows where; at times he seems to see the other man walking on a tightrope stretched over the void, and his is overcome with admiration. Not only admiration, also envy; because he feels how limited his own work is, how superficial compared with what the tormented writer is seeking.

On the terrace of a chalet in the bottom of the valley a young woman is sunning herself, reading a book. The two writers observe her with the spyglass….

—

You fasten your seatbelt. The plane is landing. To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in any place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and the when in which you vanished. Meanwhile, what do you do? How do you occupy this absence of yourself from the world and of the world from you? You read; you do not raise your eyes from the book between one airport and the other, because beyond the page there is the void, the anonymity of stopovers, of the metallic uterus that contains you and nourishes you, of the passing crowd always different and always the same. You might as well stick with this other abstraction of travel, accomplished by the anonymous uniformity of typographical characters: here, too, it is the evocative power of the names that persuades you that you are flying over something and not nothingness. You realize that it takes considerable heedlessness to entrust yourself to unsure instruments, handled with approximation; or perhaps this demonstrates an invincible tendency to passivity, to regression, to infantile dependence. (But are you reflecting on the air journey or on reading?)