Word: pinnings
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...that Italo Calvino, revered author of If on a winter's night a traveler and other classics of post-modern literature, began by writing neo-realistic stories of the Italian Resistance. In the recently retranslated and re-released The Path to the Spiders' Nests, Calvino tells the story of Pin, a street urchin. Pin, mischievous and impish and all those other cute things we expect of urchins, lives a difficult life. (This too we expect, although Pin's life has cruder aspects than most...
Nominally a cobbler's apprentice, his master is in jail so often that Pin never works. His older sister is a prostitute whose most frequent customer is a German soldier. This makes her an unpopular figure in certain quarters of Italy during World War II. Pin sleeps in the same room that his sister conducts her business in, and so is precociously knowledgeable about sex. He unhesitatingly shares this with peers, who are fascinated, but find him too different to befriend. Shunned, Pin hangs around a bar and tries to entertain the adults with bawdy songs and neighborhood gossip, rewarded...
Calvino does his best to avoid these traps and usually succeeds. I am pleased to note, for example, that Pin learns nothing in the course of the novel. In writing about Calvino upon his death in 1985, Gore Vidal said, "He looks; he describes; he has a scientist's respect for data (the opposite of the surrealist or fantasist)." He is here absolutely right; nothing that happens is unbelievable (although a prison escape strains credulity), but it is all quite weird and foreign to a life lived outside of wartime...
...preface, Calvino also discusses his ownexperiences fighting in the Resistance andthoughtfully examines his relationship to the bookas a whole and to Pin in particular. He writesabout his influences; he talks about his politicaland literary ideals. He is not altogether honesthere, however; although he gently rebukes hisyouthful self for his politics, he fails to notethat he was a member of the Communist Party for 10years after the novel's publication and wouldwrite about politics from an intelligentlyleftwing perspective for his whole life...
Sure, things looked a lot like last year-even Harvard's shoddy special teams play. Freshman punter Jesse Milligan, the reigning Ivy League Rookie of the Week, averaged only 26.3 yards per punt, including a 25-yarder when Harvard needed to pin Cornell deep on its last possession. Junior placekicker Jonathan Patton missed an extra point and a 25-yard field goal...