Italo Calvino’s Literature Machine

Various aesthetic theories maintain that poetry is a matter of inspiration descending from I know not what lofty place…something intuitive, immediate, authentic and all-embracing that springs up who knows how. But in these theories there always remained a void: how does one arrive at the written page? IMAG2364Just as we already have machines that can read, machines that can perform linguistic analysis of literary texts, machine that make translations and summaries, will we also have machines capable of poems and novels? IMAG1997The true literature machine will be one that itself feels the need to produce disorder, as a reaction against its preceding production of order: a machine that will produce avant-garde work to free its circuits when they are choked by too long a production of classicism.*

(*From Italo Calvino’s Cybernetics and Ghosts)

Ice Friday: Cormac McCarthy’s World

What is wrong with this story is that it is not a true story. Men have in their minds a picture of how the world will be. How they will be in that world. Ice Friday: Cormac McCarthy's WorldThe world may be many different ways for them but there is one world that will never be and that is the world they dream of. Do you believe that? (From Cormac McCarthy’s Cities of the Plains)