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Friday, January 13, 2012

INVISIBLE CITIES XXXVI -- Thin Cities: OCTAVIA

from here
It's been months since the last IC entry.  An unexpected impetus, however, struck, and I'm back.  No need to dwell on it; let's just jump back into it.

This chapter offers an obvious knee-jerk reminder--certainly and thankfully ridiculous--of a Spiderman villain, and perhaps less so, one from The Lord of the Rings.  Maybe if I hadn't taken a four-month hiatus, I wouldn't have had to reread the exposition at the head of chapter 5 to get what's going on.  We examined a little bit over the previous four chapters the subtle shifting--or, at least, the unlabeled shifting--of narrators.  I'm not sure who's dream is Octavia, or, for that matter, that of the next two chapters (though I expect the entire chapter, whoever's dream it is, is the same), but clearly it's commentary on the unchecked expansion of the empire.

  • Assuming that Octavia is analogous to all of the Kublai's expansive territories, what do you make of the closing sentence?
by John Howe; from here

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