If in a continuous city a traveler

Quotes from and a couple of notes on Calvino's 'Hermit in Paris', in the autobiographic collection of the same name:

Occasionally I decide spontaneously to set totally imaginary stories in New York, a city in which I have lived only a few months in my life: who knows why, perhaps because New York is the simplest city, at least for me, the epitome of a city, an kind of prototype of a city, as far as its topography, its visual appearance, its society is concerned. Whereas Paris has huge depth, so much behind it, so many meanings.

Paris (and perhaps other old-European cities?) as a sedimentary accretion of so many literary references that it's hard to write anything new without feeling the heavy burden of (literary) history. On the other hand, New York as a template, a machine for generating city-stories (remember that Umberto Eco picked the NYC phone directory as his book on Desert Island Discs for exactly this reason: he could use the list of names as a computer for generating all possible stories).

And besides, cities are turning into one single city; a single endless city where the differences which once characterized each of themare disappearing. This idea, which runs trough my book Invisible Cities came to me from the way that many of us now live: we continually move from one airport to another, to enjoy a life that is almost identical no matter what city you find yourself in. [...] You could say that at the rush hour when the city streets are blocked by traffic, I can get to Italy more quickly than, say, to the Champs Elysees. I could almost commute; we are now close to a time when it will be possible to live in Europe as though it were one single city.
At the same time, we are close to the time when no city will be able to be used as a city; you waste more time on short trips than on long journeys. [...] That's it: international journeys as much as short journeys in the city are no longer an exploration of a series of different places; they are simply movements from one point to another between which there is an empty interval, a discontinuity, a parenthesis above the clouds if it as air trip, and a parenthesis beneath the earth it is a city journey.

Live in Europe as though it were one single city: Someone (perhaps J.G. Ballard in Cocaine Nights or Super-Cannes?) writes about a 3,000 mile, endless linear European city that emerges every summer along the Mediterranean cost. City streets are blocked by traffic: Calvino's own traffic congestion piece in 'The Chase', in Time and the Hunter ("the line moves in little, irregular shifts of position, I am still prisoner of the general system of moving cars, where neither pursuers nor pursued can be distinguished"). No matter what city you find yourself in ... a parenthesis above the clouds/beneath the earth: the an airline map rendered down into an underground map, and the hand's route on a train.

And we finish with IC dipping into a library, surfing a network of stories, as if he's using the IBM 705, whose memory "is like a piece of cloth you would wipe with, all made up of tiny threads" (from 'American Diary 1959-1960', in Hermit in Paris) ... and this triggers memories and thoughts onwards and outwards - and backwards in our own history - to Freud's Mystic Writing-Pad, to Leibniz, to Joyceware, and to Borges ...:

well here's what Paris is: it is a giant reference work, a city which you can consult like an encyclopaedia: whatever page you open gives you a complete list of information that is richer than that offered by any other city. [...] I have to draw the conclusion that Paris for me is the city of my maturity: in the sense that I no longer see it in the spirit of a discovery of the world, which is the adventure which belongs to youth. In my relations with the world, I have moved from exploration to consultation, that is to say that the world is a collection of data which is there, independent of me, data which I can compare, combine, transmit, maybe even occasionally enjoy, but always slightly from the outside.

Update: More architecture and stories. Datacloud references cities in Koolhaas (as site of production) and Tschumi (as place of the invention of ourselves). Which reminds us of Superstudio's imaginary cities from 'Twelve cautionary tales for Christmas' in the Life Without Objects book (reviewed here). In their third city, New York of Brains, a matrix of 10m brains "pulse slowly, immersed in their interminable meditations ... perhaps to reach absolute knowledge" - and perhaps from that totality generate all possible stories, the ones that are shelved in Borges 'Library of Babel'; whereas in the twelfth, The City of the Book, citizens wear a book on a chains round their necks, a book which sets constitutional constraints, and surely limited stories.

Comments

[John Gargano]

I wanted to submit for your consideration that I have a sort of a BLOG here:

http://www.garganoart.com/dupree/DuPree_v2/index.htm

This is a photo web log of a piece I am currently working on. I originally created this site to communicate with the patron, and they suggested that I make it public - so I did.

Thanks
John Gargano

[Giovanni Gargano]

Dear John,
Are was know Alfredo Gargano?