Double Flee A

One of my very favorite writers, and one I've had to defend as being in the same league as Borges to my near-expatriate friend Randy, who I haven't heard from in too long, now that I think about it, is Italo Calvino. Author of the unforgettable "If on a winter's night a traveler", "The baron in the trees", "Invisible cities", and "six memos for the new millenium", to name what I consider the essentials, Calvino died the year before Borges did, in 1985, before he could deliver the lectures he outlines in "six memos".
Calvino on Post-modernism, in his "Visibility" lecture: "the tendency to make ironic use of the stock images of the mass media, or to inject the taste for the marvelous inherited from literary tradition into narrative mechanisms that accentuate their alienation."

Just in case you wanted a good, working definition of post-modernism.

This, its surrounding paragraph, and all about Borges and Calvino's parallels are available in this staggeringly well-titled and worshipfully deferential:
"The Parallels!" Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges

posted by dale @ 8:35 AM