INVISIBLE CITIES XIX -- Chapter 2, ..... 2

1. Considering what "an hourglass could mean," what are your thoughts on everything we've read to this point?  Has your interpretation changed?
2. Similarly, we've discussed a few times how getting to the root of an author's motives or the source of his creativity or his biography can assist the interpretation of a text, so here is Marco Polo an author.  Is it possible for his audience, Kublai Kahn, to get behind the stories?
3. How might Polo's stories, despite their general incomprehensibility yet provide a new avenue for Kublai to understand his own cities?
4. "The foreigner had learned to speak the emperor's language or the emperor to understand the language of the foreigner."  Is there a difference?
5. This exposition was an "aha" moment for me the first time I read it.  What is the great benefit of the charades over the "precise words"?  How do the verbal descriptions given by Calvino perhaps fit better the charades than whatever Polo may have actually spoken?

INVISIBLE CITIES XVIII -- Trading Cities: EUPHEMIA

1. The culturality (to use a new-ish and very iffy word) of Euphemia and its crossroads and the merchants who visit and trade there make me wonder how you see the legitimacy of Calvino's prose.  Does his stuff feel like he really understands the Old World dessert, trade, Spice Road, and Mongol elements he's professing to tell us about, or does it all feel like so much contrivance, or is this a non-issue for whatever reason?
2. I wonder why campfires are such natural centerpieces for storytelling (not that it would take much to lay such reason out and make sense of it, but it is a magical thing).
3. Something about the trade routes, the city at the crossroads, the storytelling and, in my mind, its natural "one-up-manship" remind me of Kim (a book that seems to get better the further away you are from the time you actually forced yourself to sit and read it--you know, as the concept of it takes over the terrible writing of it).  Thoughts?

INVISIBLE CITIES XVII -- Thin Cities: ZENOBIA

source here

Not much in the way of questions with Zenobia, but a couple thoughts, especially as they apply to what I said in the last post about the important I lay upon an author's creative source for a particular work: is it as pointless for me to do that as it is for a traveler to determine whether Zenobia is a happy or unhappy city?  While I can't full define it at the moment, these two questions, as well as the alternative Calvino offers on the second, seem strangely parallel.

So what do you think of Zenobia?  There are, of course, the typical questions I could ask.  Answer a question I haven't asked--whatever you think that might be?  I don't see everything--not by any stretch of the imagination; and my one limited viewpoint is in a bit of a rut.  What am I not touching upon, and what is the answer?
Why is Zenobia a Thin City rather than a City [of] Desire (and is my "of" rather than the given "and" significantly altering the meaning?)?

INVISIBLE CITIES XVI -- Cities and Signs: ZOE

source here

"Zoe" is Greek for "life," and is a name sometimes used by Greeks to refer to our Eve, whose name, by the way, means "breath."

In my own writing, names are very important, and I really enjoy reading a work where names and etymology are similarly significant and certainly far better and more poetically employed.  I wonder--and encourage your thoughts and hypotheses--how Calvino built up this book.  Did he start with a list of feminine names and searched out their meanings and connected these to the metaphoric constructs of his cities?  The point from where an author's work germinates is a target at which I'm constantly pitching guesses.  This, perhaps more than anything else save the words and narration themselves, for me contributes to the life of a text.

1. Interesting the unacknowledged assumption of the traveler here: that all cities have, unquestioningly, these certain features.  It's just the organization and situation of these in relation to these others that vary.
2. How does the "city of differences" that abides within every man connect, in counterpoint, as it happens, to the name, Zoe?  Along this line, what do you think about the sentence, particularly the second half: "This--some say--confirms the hypothesis that each man bears in his mind a city made only of differences, a city without figures and without form, and the individual cities fill it up"?
3. Perhaps the hardest question: What is then Zoe, the city?  This city is, for me, the hardest to grasp city so far, and I think it may indicate a turning point in the "story."  Thoughts?

INVISIBLE CITIES XV -- Cities and Desire: FEDORA

Fedora, as a name, comes from the Russian for Theodora/Theodore (the hat, from a cross-dresser in a 19th century play).

1. Fedora's description is not particularly dissimilar from many of the others in its goal, but, of course, the path that  gets us there is unique.
2. Brilliant noun of the moment: the Medusa pond.  How does the instantaneous image conjured here apply to the infinitude of once-potential-now-impossible Fedoras?  (And as yesterday's city reminded me of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, so this one reminds me of Rowling's Mirror of Erised, which, I think, could just as easily been named--or so nicknamed by those less selfless than Harry--the Medusa Pond.)
3. The last paragraph, Polo's suggestion (and is it perhaps tongue-in-cheek; or is it sincere?) to the Khan, beggars a question: perhaps, the cities, regardless of their realness, all have a degree, even a significant degree, of unreality.  How is the "real" Fedora possibly as imaginary (considering particularly what we've read of other cities) as those in the glass orbs?

If you're not doing this already, see if you can apply the concept behind each city not only to the other cities in the book, but also to your own cities and those others of your personal experience.

INVISIBLE CITIES XIV -- Cities and Memory: MAURILIA

1. Why do the inhabitants prefer the city represented in the postcards?  What influence does the nature of the postcard have--on the city, or, generically, on anything?  Is there a difference between a postcard and, say, a regular photograph in its ability to depict a time or place?  What would happen (stay with me here) if memory worked both directions, toward the future as well as the past, and there were postcards of present Maurilia available for past Maurilians to examine?
2. For some reason this reminds me (story and movie) of Benjamin Button.
3. The second paragraph of the vignette discusses how two cities can exist simultaneously--two cities which are one city: one place, one name (same citizenry??), two cities.  Maybe this is going out on a limb, but if each vignette is a puzzle piece, what clue might Maurilia offer toward anticipation of the final, completed picture?  Does it have to be just two cities in one, or could the number be even potentially infinite within the confines of one geographic space and one name?
4. By extension (and this against the end of the first sentence of paragraph two), is it possible for there to be two or more people with the same body and the same name (and no, this is not an issue of schizophrenia or multiple personalities)?  And further, families, schools, countries, teams, gods, etcetera?
5. The final lines of the vignette tie back to the first question: is it just the nature of the postcard, that it describes a fiction rather than a reality, or is there truly a second city existing in the same plane and plot as the other Maurilia?

INVISIBLE CITIES XIII -- chapter 2, ..... 1

Kublai Khan

1. Pattern would hold that the opening sequence of the chapter two holds a question to which the final lines of the chapters pose an answer.  What is/are the question/s?
2. When I first read this, I didn't get it very well.  The possibility that Kublai Khan and Marco Polo weren't even talking, but only imagining to talk made me wonder if they were both present at all.  Was Marco Polo, alone on some journey of his, imagining what it might be like to be explorer and official reporter to someone like The Great Khan?  From your perspective, what do you think?  I believe this makes sense on my second pass, but only maybe.  Considering the issues of nostalgia and memory, and past, present, and future, what is, at the very least, affecting, and at the most heavily tinting or obscuring, all of Polo's reports?
3. "You advance always with your head turned back?" and "Is what you see always behind you?" thus "He must go to another city, where another of his pasts awaits him": Is it possible to begin to gain access to a new culture--or a new anything--without using as initial framework/schema what you already know?  So no matter how far you travel, you ... what?  Experience the new only in context of the old?  And is this a reiteration of the same issue regarding two people of different languages and cultures talking to each other?
4. And what does the final line mean: "The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have"?  This echoes, I think (thoughts?), the last exchange between the men from the close of chapter one.  What's the connection?
5. Finally, back to the first paragraph here, what is the value Kublai Khan places on Polo's reports?  He doesn't want from him the information on taxes and politics and trade and treasure.