Quick Sketch: Cities and Roger Moore

 she's always tell me how angry I am
you're telling me how angry I am of
course I'm angry. All these morons out
there people think Roger Moore's a
better James bond than Sean Connery of
course I'm angry ~ Bobby Slayton

I've been trying to use my attention span and it's been going really well. I'm like just ignoring messages pinging and dinging and notifying me while I read a book. I'm capable of writing thousands of words in one sitting. All that good shit.

 I gave a friend a piece of my writing to look at and he recommended Italo Calvino's "The Castle of Crossed Destinies" probably because I'd used a gimmick and that book probably used that gimmick well.

The thing was, reading is an investment. I probably at some point should come out and say "listen, if you recommend me something, I'll read it, but I'm going to judge you. You only have so much credit to recommend me shit, and if there isn't an occasional pearl among the turds, I'll stop taking your recommendations."

But you know, this has been going on for some time, so even though it was really the first time this friend had recommended I read anything, I've become sceptical, cynical, too jaded by life and its book recommendations.

For example, one of my dearest friends, he just wants to eat meat. Lots and lots of meat. I've known him for longer than I haven't known him and I remember going to central square in Ballarat which had a subway when he was convinced that different blood-types thrived on different diets and his blood type happened to commend eating a bunch of meat and he literally asked the sandwich artist which sub had the most meat, the most red meat and then he ordered that with extra bacon. Two decades on, he's asking me to watch a two hour interview about nutritional science and how the sugar industry dragged animal fats name through the mud and I am warning him that there are few subjects in the universe I am less interested in than nutritional science but he was all worked up because he wants to eat pretty much an all meat diet and I needed to watch it.

So he's done. 

Another friend I get in arguments with all the time. Quite heated arguments and it is often the case that she will end the argument by suggesting I need to read something. Obviously I'm a cunt, and one is not supposed to read onerous texts to understand another person's point of view, to mix metaphors it is a classic dick move. Almost without exception, I can't think of an exception, the books I have read to enlighten myself as to the argument we were having prove to be complete non-sequiturs. I think it reasonable for someone who reads probably 2~3 books in any given year, to implement a six recommends and you're done rule.

So she's done.

But this guy, he's nowhere near done. I plan to read the book he recommended and would have a copy in greasy little mit but for the local bookstore not having it in stock. But I did presearch his recommendation on the suspicion it would be crap.

I mean here's the thing, and it is relevant to the stimulus of this post. My impression of tertiary humanities courses, is that they are populated by morons in teaching positions that think there is an "it" to get.

An alarming number of people also clearly operate under the heuristic that if they don't understand something, it couldn't be because it is stupid, things you can't understand have to be intelligent.

Of course people operate on this heuristic. Because sometimes people don't understand something that works. I am fairly dazzlingly untalented at mathematics. I know people who could look at a quadratic equation, just the equation and tell the class where the stationary points were. I can't do that, I have no intuition for numbers, I really only know mathematics by rote, I have no idea how division works if I don't already know the answer from some mental table and all my mechanisms for surviving maths exams are well and truly rusty.

Our education and social system is going to produce a bunch of people that survived it by trusting that the teacher had a reason to be teaching them something and pretending to understand it while instead passing selection by simply memorizing what the teacher wanted to hear. These are the kinds of people that mistake a curated class about the subject of physics they don't understand, for some fucking knobjockey stressing it is essential they read Infinite Jest or they've never lived at a house party in Coburg where they are doing magic mushrooms.

And I know this friend was studying writing. A non-expert domain (or to use NNTs distinction it teaches episteme "know what" rather than techne "know how", only techne can be said to have experts) that is ripe for literary snobbery. The kind of institution that can inculcate a deep and abiding love for James Joyce and his books almost nobody has read because in some very real sense, while celebrated, they suck and to turn one's nose up at Dan Brown's canon, despite it being entertaining and highly readable.

So of course, I have to treat anyone who has gone to higher ed to study humanities somewhat like an ape that has broken quarentine, and in researching the recommendation I decided Italo Calvino while probably a writer's writer, might be a writer's writer of the good kind.

Furthermore, through serendipity I discovered that he'd written a book "Invisible Cities" that is right up my fucking alley such that it would likely tickle my prostate in a pleasing way.

Bringing me to the stimulus of this post:

I was reading and enjoying this book. Some of the prose is kind of dense, can get impenetrable or is easy to read without absorbing and needs must be reread. But it's easy because it is broken up, sometimes there are only one or two paragraphs on a page. But it's similar still to my experience of reading "Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad, where I can enjoy it while having no understanding of what is going on because the mood comes across and that is sufficient.

Because I knew I wanted this book when I bought it, I didn't bother to read the blurb until it was sitting on my desk face down. This blurb is dogshit intended for the consumption of morons. I found it so offensive I actually bowlderized it with a sharpie, which feels like the height of literary snobbery. The excised words in the blurb read:

gradually it becomes clear that he is actually describing one city Venice.

Spoiler alert, this is not a spoiler. These are the words of a pretentious knob thinking they are doing other pretentious people a favour by giving them a thing to say at the next dinner party gathering of pretentious douchebags. This is somebody saying "there's an it to get so you can sit in smug satisfaction that you are breathing that rarefied air of people who have climbed the mountain of getting it."

One could certainly arrive at this conclusion. But it's probably the dumbest of the conclusions available in so far as it is not even just the literal interpretation of the text. It's almost a conclusion drawn from not reading what is literally said.

"Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice."

That's probably the quotation that the blurb is derived from. But unless they literally mean actually figuratively, whoever wrote this blurb fails to notice that many if not most of the descriptions of invisible cities with women's names bare little to no resemblance to Venice. This quotation comes in an exchange between Marco "McChicken" Polo and  Kublai Khan that opens with Kublai taking Marco on an imperial boat through a newly conquered city in China that Italo describes exactly as one would be tempted to describe Venice and when asking if Marco has ever come across a city resembling this one Marco replies:

"No, sire...I should never have imagined a city like this could exist."

I get frustrated that people just cannot abide the idea, that something is open to interpretation, no matter how often life confronts us with this fact.

I like this book, thus far, because it speaks to my experience. I've done two exhibitions on cities - Melbourne and Genova, and this book speaks to my direct experience of trying to explain both the city I and the attendees of my exhibition were in, and a foreign city most of my attendees had never and will never go to.

I think in Kublai-Khan, Mongolian ruler of China, and the Mongolian Empire inherited from his father Ogedai and his uncle Genghis the conquerer is a very relatable character to me. And Italo's attempt to reconstruct the lost exchanges of two long dead historical figures also speaks to me.

That's why I like it. I am experiencing it as very good. Such that if on the last page it turns out Marco Polo says something as ham-mouthed as "actually Kublai, every city I described is Venice" I would say Italo Calvino as author is patently wrong in the characterization of his own work within his work. 

To the point that while not a review, I would recommend it. 

Like there's so many people who cannot fucking cope with pointlessness and futility and a lack of meaning, sure they can consider Jordan Peterson, David Brooks, Tom Holland, Michael Shellenberger et al. hypothesis that dumb-dumbs need Christianity to give their lives meaning, but so long as you are trying to make sense of an incoherent, unintelligible special anthology about the will of sky daddy; here's a well written highly readible incoherent and unintelligible book written by a mere mortal that might introduce you to the beauty of pointlessness, of meaninglessness.

There's also sports. If you get sports you are doing fine, and there is something to get with sports. 

Gradually one comes to realise that the "it" to get in getting sports, is "sports".