Review: If on a winter's night a traveler

Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler (1979) is one of those delightful books that arrived on my shelf unbidden and unknown, and proved to be exactly what I didn't know I was looking for.

The copy I read, a 1981 translation by William Weaver from the original Italian, was given to Michel by a coworker as a secret Santa gift, along with a copy of Yukio Mishima's The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea ("a novel of the homicidal hysteria that lies latent in the Japanese character," screams the deeply embarrassing 1965 cover). Both worn, yellowing paperbacks were excavated from my favorite Detroit treasure trove, the massive book store John K. King Used & Rare Books, so I found myself naturally endeared to each. But which to read? With Michel in the middle of a couple other books and just starting his semester, I had my pick. I was drawn to the Mishima first, since I was (obviously) curious to learn more about the "astounding masterpiece of taut violence" that exposed the murderous mania apparently hidden deep in the soul of the Japanese people, but then Michel said that I should read the first few pages of the Calvino if I hadn't already. I'll reproduce the first paragraphs so you can see what persuaded me to switch:

"You are about the begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on the in the next room. Tell the others right away, 'No, I don't want to watch TV!' Raise your voice--they won't hear you otherwise--'I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!' Maybe they haven't heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: 'I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel!' Or if you prefer, don't say anything; just hope they'll leave you alone.

Find the most comfortable position: seated, stretched out, curled up, or lying flat. Flat on your back, on your side, on your stomach. In an easy chair, on the sofa, in the rocker, the deck chair, or a hassock. In the hammock, if you have a hammock. On top of your bed, of course, or in the bed. You can even stand on your hands, head down, in the yoga position. With the book upside down, naturally."

Naturally, I was hooked. Calvino's novel is a smart, labyrinthine, postmodern adventure in bibliomania. (If you're overfamiliar with and/or suspicious of pomo trickery and reflexivity, it might not be for you. I've still sampled only selectively from the postmodern corpus, and only from the work of American authors, so I was sufficiently delighted and titillated.) And if the descriptor "postmodern" makes the book sound laborious or tedious to slug through, it's far from it. You can get a sense of Calvino's sly, playful style from the excerpted paragraphs; it's a joy to read.

The plot concerns you, the Reader. You're reading Italo Calvino's new novel If on a winter's night a traveler, about a mysterious man in a train station, and enjoying it quite a bit -- until you realize that after p. 32, the novel returns to p. 17. From there, it proceeds again only until p. 32, and then starts once more at p. 17. In fact, the whole book's like this. (Well, not the book you're reading. I mean the real you, not the fictional you. Calvino merely describes this maddening publisher's error; he doesn't make the real you actually read it.) Anyway, back to the fictional you: you're terribly upset that you can't finish the novel you're so enjoying, so you go to the bookstore where you bought it to demand a new copy. It's there that you meet the Other Reader, a young woman with huge eyes, exacting literary sensibilities, and a capacious memory for the details of the numerous books she loves. She too is there to demand a new copy of the botched Calvino novel, and you're immediately...intrigued.

And so the romance begins. You and the Other Reader seek out the rest of the text of If on a winter's night a traveler, but when you find it, you realize that it's not the same novel at all. As it turns out, the new text that you have your hands on is also quite good, but also incomplete, leading you to find the rest of that novel. You might imagine where this is going: If on a winter's night alternates between two threads: one follows you and the sometimes-aloof Other Reader on your increasingly disorienting quest to find a novel that keeps morphing into others, and the other consists of the first chapters of each of these incomplete novels (ten in all, each by a different fictional author, taking place in a different country, and all with vastly divergent plots). This Borgesian narrative maze might sound like it results in a frustrating reading experience, since you're being constantly yanked from each story right at the moment when you're really getting into it, but somehow it works. This is in part because the plots and styles of the different novels are so varied that you can't wait to see where the next one goes, and because the writing is so consistently good and the characters so singular and carefully sketched that it doesn't matter whether or not you finish the stories; it's a pleasure to spend any time with them at all. There's also the compelling adventure that's sustained in the parallel, second-person narrative, where you begin to realize that the baffling incompleteness of the ten novels is somehow deliberate, somehow connected.

This is a book lover's book (well, maybe a book fanatic's book) and just because it's a lot of fun doesn't mean that it doesn't ask important questions. It's interested in publishing, censorship, different ways of reading, different reasons for reading, choosing not to read, writing and its attendant anxieties, the relationship between text and reality, the relationship between author and text, and the relationship between reader and author (to start). But of paramount importance is the relationship between reader and text. Calvino (and Weaver, his translator) meditates in beautiful, ecstatic language about reading; it's the expansive, benevolent delight and pleasure the novel takes in the act of reading (again, recalling Borges) that left the strongest impression on me. For Calvino, reading is, among much else, "that invisible movement...the flow of gaze and breath, but, even more, the journey of the words through the person, their course or their arrest, their spurts, delays, pauses, the attention concentrating or straying, the returns, that journey that seems uniform and on the contrary is always shifting and uneven." I can't think of another book I've read about reading that was more satisfying to, well, read.

Oscar Wilde's tweets

"All good work looks perfectly modern."

"We should treat all trivial things of life very seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality."

It struck me recently that Oscar Wilde would have written the best tweets. I'd been giving some thought to Twitter, which has crept its way into my life and which I feel a little ambivalently about. I like the (constrained) opportunity for self-expression it offers, since that aspect, for better or worse, appeals to my confessional, writerly ways. I also enjoy its triviality; I like that it's a bit of nonsense to break up the day, a series of tiny glimpses into the whims and scattered insights of the handful of friends I follow. When it's used for more serious, structured purposes, like One Book, One Twitter, I find myself annoyed. It's 140 characters, people; let's not pretend we can engage in a substantive literary exchange. (Surely we can think of something more trifling!) Of course, being the relatively serious-minded young man that I am, it's not like all of my tweets are flippant, or that I disapprove of tweets that disseminate important information (the opening of a new vegetarian restaurant in Detroit, say, or the fact that another Golden Girl has died). But even if I attempt to impart something serious in a tweet, I know that the sentiment will be nestled among my friends' friends' jaunty dispatches. It seems impossible, as a result, to take Twitter too seriously, and that's something I can appreciate.

But it's the flip side of these aspects that worry me. Self-expression? Just what I need: more performance space. Triviality? Well, that's OK in moderation, but what happens when all the trivial thoughts of you and your friends are aggregated? How much total time in a day is eaten up by constantly refreshing the feed? This is a legitimate contemporary concern, I think: are too many of us spending too much time tweeting (and facebooking, for that matter)? Should we be worried that our light, frothy desserts might be taking the place traditionally reserved for a nutritious entree? What are the cognitive risks of constantly expending the mental energy it takes to jump from one bit of flotsam to another? Should I be worried about how many times a day I refresh the damn thing? (It's starting to feel a bit like a habit, not a conscious choice, and I find that a little troubling.)

Peggy Orenstein writes eloquently in the New York Times about the distancing of self from experience that's a necessary part of being an active tweeter. She wonders, too, how much her experience of tweeting is shaping her life (rather than her life shaping her tweets), and she worries about the performative aspect of Twitter, about what "encouraging self promotion over self awareness" does to a person. So here we are, tweeting suspiciously, tweeting and wondering if we really should be.

Anyway, back to Oscar Wilde. The more I thought about Twitter and its potential pitfalls, the more it seemed that while it's been adopted by millions of us, it's probably best suited to the talents of a select few: people, that is, with a Wildean sensibility. Wilde, the consummate modern man, is known for building a reputation (in letters and in society) out of epigrams. He had an unparalleled talent for spinning a brief turn of phrase that could delight as immediately as it could give pause or confound. This was his genius. He specialized in the pithy paradox ("My duty is the thing I never do, on principle."), and the platitude turned upside-down and emptied ("Whenever one has anything unpleasant to say, one should always be quite candid."). He could skewer in seven words ("The best play I ever slept through.") as deftly as he could dash out an incisive truth about art ("It is the spectator, and not life, that Art really mirrors.") or politics ("Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people."). His epigrams are the meat of his work. They're a universe unto themselves; in them, Wilde is wise, flip, callous, hilarious, compassionate, witty, somber, and frequently contradictory. They're the reason his plays soar and his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, can feel clunky and earthbound; surrounding all those elegant bons mots with exposition and description makes them sound a bit stilted and plotted.

What's remarkably modern or, maybe more appropriately, contemporary about Wilde's aphorisms, is how well they stand on their own. Flipping through my copy of Ralph Keyes' The Wit and Wisdom of Oscar Wilde, I'm dimly aware that each epigram comes from some larger work, whether a play, essay, or even a conversation some acquaintance had the good sense to write down, yet the majority of them feel complete. They don't seem decontextualized; I rarely wonder what the lines were that preceded or followed them in their original circumstance. In this way, they're like tweets, and in this way, they feel contemporary. Wilde was essentially tweeting 130 years before anyone else was; his work prefigures our age of atomized self-expression and fragmented, public self-construction (not to mention an age in which literary works can be divided handily by technology into constituent fragments). It points to us, now, who emulate his style, whether we know it or not. For the literary types on Twitter, it has come to make Oscar Wildes of us all.

Whatever its pitfalls (real or imagined) Twitter is, among much else, a contemporary literary form. And it's a form best suited to a particular kind of literary talent: a flair for brevity and wit that is, delightfully, descended from a man who died before the previous century really even began. Practically none of us are as good at it as he was, but that's because he invented it.

Review: "Bicycle Diaries" by David Byrne

David Byrne is an avid and longtime urban cyclist, and his career as a musician and artist regularly takes him to different countries, affording him the opportunity to explore some of the world's major cities by bike. "The Bicycle Diaries" collects his thoughts as he cycles through cities as diverse as Columbus, OH; Istanbul; Buenos Aires; Manila; New York; and San Francisco, to name a handful. He takes care to describe cycling culture in each of these places, noting which cities are particularly bike-friendly (Berlin, with its separate traffic lights for cyclists) and which cities' residents regard cyclists as a baffling anomaly (Istanbul, for one).

Byrne's observations and insights into the unique pleasures and pitfalls of urban cycling in each particular city are well worth the read, as are his broader discussions of cycling's social benefits. But what really animates the book are his digressions. Each place conjures a variety of subjects for him to ruminate on: in one deindustrialized American city, he explores the post-modern landscape, where there are "simulated streets" and industrial park landscaping that "refers to" a "memory of landscape," places that are really "places" in quotation marks. Berlin evokes notions of man's domination of nature, as well as collective and individual self-denial. In Manila, Byrne thinks about control, exploitation, and disco; in London, his thoughts turn to William Burroughs' "policeman inside," who permits us to think certain thoughts and forbids us from thinking others.

Skimming the book again in order to write this review, I was struck by how deftly Byrne navigates from subject to subject, and at how casually and informally he investigates them. In addition to everything he has to say about cycling in cities, he intelligently addresses some heavy topics, like colonization, urban decay, the connection between beauty and death, the way architecture can mirror culture, the absence of meaning in life, and the relationship of artists to art, but always in a somewhat disengaged, relaxed style, and usually in just enough depth to pique the reader's interest before hopping to another engaging topic. It's a delightful stylistic device, this restlessness, because it is reminiscent of the many fleeting impressions one gets while biking. His stripped-down, conversational tone belies the gravity of some of his subject matter, and gives the book a breezy feel: he's rarely moralizing, and never establishing and defending a thesis -- just asking interesting questions (and occasionally offering tentative answers).

The day I got stuck inside one of Sol LeWitt's open cubes

So speaking of Sol LeWitt:

I spent a few much-needed hours at the Detroit Institute of Arts this afternoon. My appallingly busy schedule during the semester usually prohibits casual strolls through Detroit's glorious Beaux Arts art palace, and I've been itching to check out a small video art exhibition that ends tomorrow, so I figured there was no time like the present. I mostly enjoyed the exhibition, and encountered a number of works in the Contemporary and African-American galleries that captivated or moved me, but nothing grabbed me the way LeWitt's "Modular Open Cube Pieces" ('76) did.

It's funny, because I've seen the piece on a number of other occasions and given it only the most cursory attention. This time, though, I felt an unexpected and immediate connection, something that held me in front of it for a good half hour, much longer than I typically spend with a non-narrative work of art in a museum. (I'll be an honest: I usually lack the attention span to stare at a static artwork for more than a few minutes.) Here's a picture of a similar piece (or maybe it's the same one; the website where I found it doesn't offer any details):

It's made of white-painted wood. (The cube at the DIA was, fortunately, displayed on a simple, white platform, not distracting the eye away from the piece as the floor above does.) Gazing at it, the eye is in constant motion. I have actually not seen that much LeWitt sculpture, and maybe for the first time, I really understood its potent connection to Lucinda Childs' minimalist dances: simple forms, repeated, and though still, somehow always in motion, aggregated into a complex, variable and engaging whole. One of the great pleasures of the piece was that the more time I spent standing in front of it (and crouching, backing up, walking around it, standing on my tiptoes) the more I saw, suddenly and with the force of a revelation. There are the basic building blocks, the simple pieces of wood; the complete, individual cubes that are stacked upon one another; the vertical and horizontal structures of varying height and length that are created by stacking the cubes; and the tunnels, straight and diagonal, that lead the eye directly into the piece's center. For a few minutes, I was just noticing the positive space, the actual wood, and then suddenly, I became aware of the dynamism of the negative space, the tunnels and holes that were certainly as engaging as the structure itself. Equally arresting were the shadows: pieces of wood cast shadows on other pieces, creating what appeared to be stripes or notches cut into the wood; these shadows increased in frequency as the eye moved closer and closer to the dense center of the piece. The top corners of the uppermost cubes had different shadows, tiny slivers of darkness that pulled gently down in short, diagonal lines. And suddenly, I became aware of the shadows the piece cast on the white platform upon which it sat, beautiful forms created out of light and darkness that echoed the wood forms: lines of varying intensity projected onto the blank base, again increasing in density and complexity as the eye moved inward.

The cube's innards were a wonder to behold: line after line, structure after structure, leading in and out and up and down. White and shadow alternately capturing and directing the eye, overwhelming it with the piece's unexpected depths. I felt an urge to dive inside it, to become tiny and crawl around, playing and climbing through the tunnels and along the wood until I would collapse in exhaustion. I also felt the surprising compulsion to destroy it, to hurl myself or something else into it, as if realizing a latent demand made by its fragility and delicacy.

I kept feeling like I should leave, which was silly, but I couldn't. I tried once, after about fifteen minutes, but then looked back, noticed another series of shadows I'd missed, and returned, staying for fifteen more. I felt that it was completely irrational to want to stay so long, but then felt the freedom of the holiday vacation, the absence of pressing obligations, and thought that there was nothing else I'd rather be doing than looking at this wondrous structure.

Ten or twelve people probably came and went during the time I was there. None stayed more than a minute, and I kept wanting to shout, "Wait! Don't go! You'll miss nearly everything!" But of course, this is what people do at museums. This is what I do at museums when a piece piques my interest and nothing more, and in fact, this is what I've done in the past when I encountered this particular piece. Their reactions were pretty wonderful: a toddler tried to dash toward it, presumably to climb on it, and was swiftly reigned in by his mother. He then stood obediently back, eying it and me in equal, fascinated measure. Some kids with an older woman talked about how much it looked like a building, and how they would love to see a building like that, where all the squares created by the cubes were windows. A teenage couple looked at it for about fifteen seconds, pronounced it "cool," and moved on. Two bright kids, who looked like a brother and sister, tried to calculate how many individual cubes comprised the whole structure. I think they eventually came up with a formula for figuring it out, but neither of them offered an answer.

Finally, and gradually, the piece released its uncanny grip on me, and I drifted away, wandering around the contemporary gallery. I thought I should probably leave the museum, but stuck around anyway. While I saw much else that excited me, I felt a little depleted, and my mind kept returning, insistently, to the intricacies of the open cube.

Dance

Words like "precise" and "controlled" certainly describe the movement quality of Lucinda Childs' 1979 work Dance, but they're insufficient and generalized; after all, they'd apply to the work of countless, very different choreographers. "Formal" comes a bit closer, if it's used to mean concerned primarily with form over content, but that word's other connotations belie the pure joy of watching the dance unfold for an hour and a half; in that way, "austere" falls short, too, though the dance could hardly be more stripped-down. There's that contentious old word, "minimalist," and with Dance's reduced formal vocabulary, its simple, repeated steps and phrases that add up to a complex whole, and its driving, near-constant momentum, that word admittedly fits the bill. (Of course, the case for "minimalist" is strengthened by the presence of two other artists who contributed to Dance, and whose own work has been irrevocably attached to that label: Philip Glass, whose urgent music seems to activate the movement, and Sol LeWitt, whose setting for the dance, a film projected on an almost transparent scrim that hangs in front of the dancers, articulates a clear vocabulary of shots, then repeats and modifies them in a deliberate, controlled fashion.) But "minimalist" fails the way it often fails: individual moments do seem minimalist, but the work in its entirety is so exuberant and full that, when it's over, nothing short of "maximalist" seems adequate. The truth is that Dance moves, delicately, between all these descriptors, and many (occasionally contradictory) others. It exists in what Susan Sontag, in her remarkable 1983 essay about Childs, "A Lexicon for Available Light" called an "ideal space, where ideal transactions and transformations take place," and so, perhaps, evades unsatisfactory attempts at labeling.

Dancing
Dance is structured in three sections: in the first and third, the dancing is propulsive, and the dancers leap and spin about the stage in focused bursts of repeated movement. Dressed simply in white, their arms at angles, and as kinetic as their legs, the dancers never touch. Their paths intersect, they mirror each other's movements, but each dancer, almost unaware of the others, traces an individual series of arcs and lines, as if fixed into a track. In an Artforum review of the original performance, Deborah Perlberg describes the dancers as being "spewed out of the wings from either side, converging momentarily to draw patterns with each other as they pass," and compares their movement to that of "atomic particles."

The second section, a solo, is slower and graver, and begins in complete stillness. The dancing remains repetitive, gradually adding and removing identical or related phrases, but its effect is quite different: rather than overwhelming the spectator with the stimulus of so many bodies rushing past, the solo work is focusing, gently hypnotic. A fundamental element is the surprisingly poignant repetition of a spin, which begins with the soloist downstage, and increases in speed as she moves up; only for her to move in a straight line back down; again spinning, faster, up. Again and again: six times, eight, ten? Easy to lose track. ("Repetition," Sontag writes, "is also a method of inducing bliss.")

Music
Each section of the dance is set to a piece of Philip Glass music: "Dance No. 1," "Dance No. 4," and "Dance No. 3," respectively. Aligned neatly with the structure of the dancing, #1 and #3 are close cousins, buoyant with restless, joyful purpose, while #4, from the same family, is nonetheless darker, more measured, and lonelier. #1 is scored for keyboard, voice (a soprano), flutes and piccolo; #4 for a mournful solo organ; and #3 for keyboard, voice, and saxophones. The music is unmistakably late '70s Philip Glass, from a period when the composer was uncompromising, unseasoned, and never romantic (or commercially viable), still embracing a fiercely avant garde sound that evokes singing circuit boards or, in the case of #1 and #3, duets between a soprano and a microprocessor. It's intensely focused, sometimes merciless in its rigorous unidirectionality and repetition, but can surprise the listener with a sudden pause or reversal (like a shift in an electrical current).

A fascinating contradiction I find in Glass' music of this period is that for all its furious, repetitive sound, for the remarkable number of notes that must be present on the pages of the scores, it manages to achieve a deep and mysterious stillness, like calm ocean water far below thrashing waves. Its marriage to Childs' dancing is remarkable, an effortless, complementary union that brazenly defies Merce Cunningham's notion that music and dance should exist independently, instead finding aesthetic strength in the structural unity between the two.

Film
Sol LeWitt reportedly resisted Childs' invitation to create a set for her dance at first, claiming both that her dancing was complex enough on its own, and that he didn't make art that served as a supporting element of other artists' work. But when she suggested that he make a film, one that would interact with the dancing rather that support it in a conventional sense, she won him over. The result is something that,thirty years after its conception, still manages to surprise and delight with the inventive new perceptual opportunities in affords the viewer.

LeWitt filmed the dancers in Childs' company performing Dance in 1979, shooting from several different perspectives, in medium shots, long shots and close-ups, and then edited it in such a way that particular shot styles repeat throughout. The black and white film is projected onto a scrim that hangs in front of the dancers. As the dancers move around the stage enacting their complex patterns, they dance with ghosts, spectral selves who enter and exit, mirroring the dancers' actions, always adding new layers of complexity, mystery, and beauty. Sometimes the dancers dance alone; sometimes they leave the stage and the film ghosts dance alone; but usually, the two move together. In a few instances, the ghosts dance on top of the dancers, presenting the illusion of a scaffold; sometimes they dance right beside one another, human whirling past specter, barely missing each other. Occasionally, the ghosts become huge, towering over the dancers like giants, and then return to a more human size, the dancers' physical equals. The camera is usually still, but occasionally mobile, adding another stirring layer of animation to choreography that's already breathlessly-paced. In a few remarkable moments, shots of the entire stage that were filmed from a high angle are projected on top of the physical stage space, and combined with the grid-like division of the filmed stage, the effect is vertiginous and exhilarating.

The film re-defines the stage space, expanding its dimensions and delighting the eye, but it adds emotional color to the dance as well. For one, it makes occasional, surprising use of still images, which poignantly contrast with the ferocious dynamism of the live dancers and music. These images open and close the performance, and appear intermittently throughout: they are close-ups and medium shots, freezing the ghosts mid-leap or step, arresting their otherwise continuous motion long enough for the audience to see the dancers' strained, individual faces, while around them, the movement continues. Deborah Perlberg writes about the formal implications of these stills: they "illustrat[e] the process of movement," revealing how "each completed gesture is made up of hundreds of...continuous elements," and how "an infinitesimal series of connecting movements...shape the flow from one gesture to another." (To that I would add: by achieving this via the still image, the film too is reflexively meditating on its nature as a flowing whole comprised of thousands of distinct image-units.)

Perlberg's analysis is astute, but this abstract, formal dance is not without emotional affect, and if it is ultimately "about" anything, perhaps it's about time: relentless, unyielding time, illustrated most movingly in the contrast between motion and stillness. 

"Life stand still here," the character Mrs. Ramsay demands repeatedly in Virginia Woolf's 1927 novel To the Lighthouse, and it is the familiarity and futility of her imperative that engenders the reader's sympathy. There is, we know, no stopping time, but for a few instances, LeWitt's film shows us what it would look like, and what it might feel like, if there were. Childs' exhilarating dancers are life itself, personified and framed; LeWitt's film is an echo of life, and his suddenly frozen images, like photographs, conjure our impossible desire for real stillness in a world of ceaseless forward motion.