Sean

The Idle Book Club 8: Cosmicomics

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In a bizarre coincidence the great podcast Selected Shorts is reading The Distance to the Moon this week read aloud by a broadway actor Liev Schreiber and introduced by the hosts of Radiolab. You can find it here...

iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/selected-shorts/id253191824?mt=2

XML: http://selectedshortspri.pri.libsynpro.com/rss

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I believe that out of everything of Calvino's I've read Cosmicomics plays the heaviest into dealing with woman as objects. I'm wary of saying that this was done on purpose, and also that it might make things worse for Calvino, but I do believe that it was done out of a desire to get as close to the colloquial attitude of old folk tales as he could. Although Calvino was decidedly irreligious throughout his life, he had a dense obsession with the way stories are told. He even released a book intended to follow the Brothers Grimm, but for Italian folk tales. The times when I remember him letting loose are incredibly interesting then because of this. There are quite a few tales where woman are legitimate characters in The Castle of Crossed Destinies, which is a collection of stories told by Calvino playing tarot with himself. And in Difficult Loves there is specifically a short story in which a little girl completely shatters for a moment the gang warfare of two groups of swimming boys who are so enthralled with their nonsense they don't even realize she isn't playing.

 

On the other hand, Calvino is good at fitting into a lot of stereotypes of the time for how men saw woman.

He definitely never fully gets away from that. It's a shame.

Although it's also a good thing that we don't read Calvino because he's a bit predisposed to terribly draconian gender ideas. Calvino is special because, more than any other writer I can think of, he explored what it means to tell stories and take away from them within the context of his own beautiful prose.

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1. Option Cosmicomics and write a script.

2. Re-title the film "Spore"

3. Possible profit.

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Really enjoyed the cast guys! Although, the comparison of Cloud Atlas and Cosmicomics was maddening, probably because of how accurate it was. Mitchell really rode that line of becoming too gimmicky for his own good, but I still love that book.

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Inspired by Sean's confession on why he read Cosmicomics in the first place, I'll confess that in college I read a series of Phillip Roth books because one of my professors (who I had a huge crush on) said Roth was his favorite author. It's hilarious to me now, because here I am criticizing Calvino for his objectification of women, when the way Roth writes his female characters is so much worse.

 

Anyone else have some good (bad?) books they read because a crush told you to?

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I am reading a copy of the complete Cosmicomics which contains more stories he wrote. It is another 200 pages/ 21 stories written after the intial bunch.

 

Totally agree on how women are objectified in the stories.

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I first read Grendel when a crush told me about it. I had just started exploring philosophy too. It was a maddening experience.

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This is sort of banal, but the light years perfectly predicts the experience of using the internet, socially, particularly in the transmission/agony of wait sense.  Am I experiencing it right now?!

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Indeed, Calvino is more interested in using the outlandish settings to more literally represent emotions and relationships that exist in our own lives, albeit in more subtler forums. For example, one of the stories depicts the transition of some species from the land to the sea—but struggling with relatives who have refused to make the change, and seem stuck in their ways yet still insist on their own wisdom.. Our narrator's girlfriend is thoroughly habituated to the land, and he fears of the consequences if he introduces her to his great-uncle. Even if we aren't amphibian, can't we recognize this tale?
 
This sort of panpsychism pervades the stories, with our narrator Qfwfq taking the form of a dinosaur, a mollusk, pre-creation matter, and more. Calvino's painstaking efforts to depict the sensory experiences of these creatures are what lends the book a poetic edge, since you rarely see those kinds of explorations in prose. There are exceptions of course, like Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?", but they tend to be specialized forms and not general fiction.

This was an interesting tension I saw in this collection. The experiences of the characters resonate with human experiences, but Calvino never stops at the easy point of resonance. He always pushes it farther. That's common in most of the stories, at least. They build upon a kernel of human truth (to use your example, because it was one of my favorite stories, worrying about introducing a new girlfriend to your family), but add layer upon layer of unrelatable experiences (What must it be like to have the kind of time-spanning consciousness that can experience evolution firsthand?). Calvino's real magic trick in this collection is making the unrelatable relatable by building it upon familiar structures. Also the prose, etc.

 

I must say, though, that while I liked this collection a lot, it still didn't move me as much as two of Calvino's other books that I've read, Mr. Palomar and Invisible Cities. I still need to read If on a winter's night a traveler, but if it's anywhere near as good as people say it is, Italo Calvino's final three books may represent one of the most significant literary slam dunks of all time.

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I spit out my thoughts on this book here.

 

In a nutshell, I loved it.  Unlike Sean I really liked the dinosaur story.  The only one that lost me was The Form of Space, which started out well enough but ended a little weak.  I think Calvino even references his loss of control of the story.  "What you might consider straight, one-dimensional lines were similar, in effect, to lines of handwriting made on a white page by a pen that shifts words and fragments of sentences from one line to another, with insertions and cross-references, in the haste to finish an exposition which has gone through successive, approximate drafts, always unsatisfactory..."

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