Word: palomar
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...Palomar takes us to the zoo in wandering pursuit of order. There, instead of a great white whale at the end of his epic, he stumbles on the world's only albino gorilla, Copito de Nieve, holding an old rubber tire to his chest...
This is Calvino-speak, a language that is always looking for and talking about language, a model of words to fight the entropy of things. Calvino leaves us with a cozy picture of the outcome of evolutionary time, the image of the modern mind: Mr. Palomar falling asleep holding in his dreams the image of a great white ape holding an old rubber tire...
CALVINO PROVIDES US with no photograph of Mr. Palomar, only a hyper-assemblage of words shifting to reveal observations and insights. If we see faceless Mr. Palomar at all, it is usually by looking through his eyes. We know of Mr. Palomar what we know of the sky-wheeling flock of starlings that he observes...
Like this flock of birds, Mr. Palomar is himself a whirlwind of observations...
What better locale for high-speed writing on the symbol-strewn walls of modern culture than in a cheese shop in Paris? Calvino enters wielding pen like bludgeon or scalpel, a bull in a cheese shop, breaking all the codes. He leaves the Reader with a picture of Mr. Palomar, balancing notebook on knee, pen on paper, scribbling down names, sizes, colors, mold formations, as if his frantic doodling could create another map of the stars, a gastronomy of everyday life. Mr. Palomar does take on a persona, and at the same time becomes a recognizable character, when he sonic...