Our first graphic novel – or better – graphic short story!
The major: a graphic short story.
My friend Matteo Bicocchi and myself have published a short graphic novel: see it here. Matteo did an amazing graphic work.
Stieg Larsson Millennium trilogy
I’ve just finished reading the third book of Millennium’s trilogy; I just couldn’t stop reading it. Is this just another low quality thriller?
The ambience of the events is close to contemporary Europeans ways of living, sligthly improved with intense sexual lives and frequent new encounters. It is more fanta-journalism than litterature: in this respect, quality is low. In the third book, the part about Fermat’s probem and the equation introductions is painfully badly done. But… there are several senses in which his writings have some quality.
Larsson brings the reader to identify strongly with the main characters and together with thriller-typical problems and a brief, essential writing style makes for unstoppable reading. There is one thing that I’ve noticed keeps coming and brings the reader closer to the events: breakfasts and coffees. Whenever there is a pause, a new character is introduced, a new course of action to be taken, breakfast comes. And this is a major rithm of office life, and a reason why we office workers identify so easily in the book.
Of course there is much more in Larsson writings, there is also some competence in diverse fields.
A theme which I find most interesting (and Larsson too) and which is a topic of his novels is the relationship with institutions. A constitutive factor of democracy is the possibility to examine and discuss the relationship between individual and institutions, and to examine and change the institutions behaviour. A crucial role in this examination should be played by journalists. If with respect to this I think about the current situation in Italy, I’m taken by a wave of desperation… .
Foucault: les mots et les choses
I just more or less survived to the end of this disastrous Foucaults’s writing. In a quite approximative trip along cultural history, he tries to put together a sort of model of language and semantics, not through argument,
The whole argument of the book is based upon the idea of historical concept evolution, including language. Ideas, concepts and language use evolve in parallel with intellectual’s reflections on them. He completely misses the combinatorial and non historical character of linguistic ability, which not only linguists are today familiar, but anyone who has had a child simply can’t miss.
The value of the book is zero, nothing. At page 262 (of the Gallimard tel edition) finally an interesting sentence:
“ces <<quasi-trascendentaux>> que sont pour nous la Vie, le Travail, le Langage.“
Here Foucault’s ontological fresh sensitivity awakes, but then again the river of arbitrary historical quotes restarts, and boredom again prevails.
Read anything by Foucault, but this one.
The major
This is my first attempt to a short story in English.
He was in a car queue. When he reached the stoplight, it turned red. Someone walking by recognized him, damn, damn. A tall guy, bent on his windshield, and spat on it. Then started gesturing menacing signs. Finally came the green light, he started moving without looking at the fellow, who was laughing and insulting. He was making somebody greedingly happy, at least.
Turned the wiper on to clean it, feeling sick. Sick. Parked behind the town hall, which was an old palace with a tower. “Morning, major”. The porter didn’t spit. Better. Reached the office in the tower. A pile of papers to review, mostly just to sign, a pile of protests, protests for everything, for any initiative taken, for any dismissed. And always the others, hanging on the idiotic side of the voters, which seemed to weight so much more than any other.
The secretaries found him with his face on the piles. “Major?” “Yes”, head still on the papers, slowly rotating towards them. “Something’s wrong, major?”. Just staring at them, blinking. He could no longer distinguish clearly between the secretaries and the papers to sign: they had become a unified ontological monster.
“We’ll be back later..”, a sudden show of delicacy, alone again.
Got up, silently closed the door. Put a chair against it, pulled the bookshelf, finally even the desk. Nobody seemed to notice, couldn’t hear a sound even with the ear pressed up against the door. Probably they were gone for their never ending coffees at the bar below.
Then he started handling the papers, finally. Folding airplanes with them. Folding, folding, folding. Then clipping the planes together, composing again a large plain shape, larger than himself with arms wide open.
Opened the window; few people in the plaza below. Windy today, good. Had to fold the plane a bit to make it pass through the window; then climbed on the window edge, unfolding the plane and holding it on his body, as a blanket. An old lady, a tourist, was watching below, increasingly alarmed. When he jumped, nothing came to his mind, but noticing that there was an instant when the plane gave him the feeling of sliding in the air; that was just great. The lady screamed.
It took two hours to a giggling fireman to disentangle him from the nets which had been put to stop the pigeons. He had just a few bruises, and a catatonic look. The secretaries where watching below, outside the bar, in awe. It was a great day for the journalists, a little crowd in the square.
Intellectual, creative work is hard
Haruki Murakami in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running:
“…Writing novels, to me, is basically a kind of manual labor. Writing itself is mental labor, but finishing an entire book is closer to manual labor. It doesn’t involve heavy lifting, running fast or leaping high. Most people, though, only see the surface reality of writing and think of writers as involved in quiet, intellectual work done in their study…But once you try your hand at it, you soon find that it isn’t as peaceful a job as it seems. The whole process – sitting at your desk, focusing your mind like a laser beam, imagining something out of a blank horizon, creating a story, selecting the right words, one by one, keeping the whole flow of the story on track – requires far more energy, over a long period, than most people ever imagine. You might not move your body around, but there’s grueling, dynamic labor going on inside you.”
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