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What are you reading? June 30, 2023 [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-06-30  

I am reading:

Hermit in Paris by Italo Calvino - I’ve read 2 long-ish essays and two short-ish essays in this volume. I’m not reading them in order (which is basically chronological).

I did read most of “American Diary 1959-1960”; a diary that Calvino kept during a visit to the U.S. but I must reread it.

I spent most of my time absorbing “Political Autobiography of a Young Man.” The material perfectly fits the title but...Calvino’s political world is strange but instructive with lots of influences ranging from his parents to the Fascist and anti-Fascist movements of the times to what seems to be his primary influence; the city of San Remo, Italy, the city he grew up in. Complex and I think it would require some understanding of Italian politics of the time to describe it (in terms of being a Communist, Calvino was much more oriented, for a time, with a sort of industrial Communism).

Calvino wasn’t naive at all, as he describes it, but even he recognized that as a young man, he had so much to learn.

So we grew up jealously guarding a cult of individuality which we thought was exclusive to ourselves, despising the youth of the big cities whom we considered a spineless lot; we were ‘hard guys’ from the provinces, hunters, snooker-players, show-offs, proud of our lack of intellectual sophistication, contemptuous of any patriotic or military rhetoric, coarse in our speech, regulars in the brothels, dismissive of any romantic sentiment and desperately devoid of women. Now I realize that what I was constructing was a shell in which I intended to I've immune from every contagion in a world which my pessimism led me to imagine would be dominated forever by Fascism and Nazism.

Valis by Philip K. Dick - Honestly, I am liking this novel even if it’s sort of like studying ancient philosophy with the assistance of a powerful drug cocktail. (In fact, I have studied ancient philosophies...but sans the drug cocktails...although I do think that I could have understood some of of them better with the drugs!)

The distinction between sanity and insanity is narrower than the razor’s edge, sharper than a hound’s tooth, more agile than a mule deer. It is more elusive than the merest phantom. Perhaps it does not even exist; perhaps it is a phantom.

That’s 100% true, BTW.

Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan by Darryl Pinckney

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/6/30/2178484/-What-are-you-reading-June-30-2023

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