#william weaver

[garadinervi]

Italo Calvino, (1965), Cosmicomics, Translated from the Italian by William Weaver, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, NY, 1968

Cover Art: M.C. Escher, Andere wereld, (wood engraving and woodcut in black, reddish brown and green, printed from three blocks), 1947 [Collectie Kunstmuseum Den Haag. © The M.C. Escher Company, Baarn]

[oleworm]

I magma, I magma, I magma, shlup shlup shlup, I flow, fluid, plop plop splupp, I bubble bub bub, I sizzle, spittle, spatter, patter, platter. Plap.

Umberto Eco, trans. William Weaver. The Island of the Day Before.

[literarymeals]

Then the monks brought us wine, cheese, olives, bread, and excellent raisins, and left us to our refreshment. We ate and drank heartily. My master did not share the austere habits of the Benedictines and did not like to eat in silence. For that matter, he spoke always of things so good and wise that it was as if a monk were reading to us the lives of the saints.

Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose tr. William Weaver

[jeannepompadour]

"Miss Rhododendron", one of a set of different flower girls designed by William Weaver for an unidentified production

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Ronnie Spector, Dee Dee Sharp, Cassius Clay, Dionne Warwick, and Stevie Wonder backstage at The Apollo. 1963.

* * * * *

“It is not only the body that is, in you, the object of reading: the body matters insofar as it is part of a complex of elaborate elements, not all visible and not all present, but manifested in visible and present events: the clouding of your eyes, your laughing, the words you speak, your way of gathering and spreading your hair, your initiatives and your reticences, and all the signs that are on the frontier between you and usage and habits and memory and prehistory and fashion, all codes, all the poor alphabets by which one human being believes at certain moments that he is reading another human being.” Italo Calvino (tr. William Weaver), If on a winter’s night a traveler

[merulae]

Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could end only in two ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

[northwest-by-a-train]

CITIES AND DESIRE • 4

IN THE CENTER of Fedora, that gray stone metropolis, stands a metal building with a crystal globe in every room. Looking into each globe, you see a blue city, the model of a different Fedora. These are the forms the city could have taken if, for one reason or another, it had not become what we see today. In every age someone, looking at Fedora as it was, imagined a way of making it the ideal city, but while he constructed his miniature model, Fedora was already no longer the same as before, and what had been until yesterday a possible future became only a toy in a glass globe.

The building with the globes is now Fedora’s museum: every inhabitant visits it, chooses the city that corresponds to his desires, contemplates it, imagining his reflection in the medusa pond that would have collected the waters of the canal (if it had not been dried up), the view from the high canopied box along the avenue reserved for elephants (now banished from the city), the fun of sliding down the spiral, twisting minaret (which never found a pedestal from which to rise).

On the map of your empire, O Great Khan, there must be room both for the big, stone Fedora and the little Fedoras in glass globes. Not because they are all equally real, but because all are only assumptions. The one contains what is accepted as necessary when it is not yet so; the others, what is imagined as possible and, a moment later, is possible no longer.

Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino, 1972

(Translation by William Weaver)

[wishmachines]

You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (translated by William Weaver)