“a magazine must be like a human being. if it comes into the home, it must contribute. it just can’t lie around. a magazine must have… blood. and brains, and pizazz. this is just paper, and if i send paper to the american woman i would be letting her down!”
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bonus: bonjour paris! (of sartorial note: hepburn’s trench. agh)
because what i want for you is to feel, around the story, a saturation of other stories that i could tell and maybe will tell or who knows may already have told on some other occasion, a space full of stories that perhaps is simply my lifetime, where you can move in all directions, as in space, always finding stories that cannot be told until other stories are told first, and so, setting out from any moment or place, you encounter always the same density of material to be told. in fact, looking in perspective at everything i am leaving out of the main narration, i see something like a forest that extends in all directions and is so thick that it doesn’t allow light to pass: a material, in other words, much richer than what i have chosen to put in the foreground this time, so it is not impossible that the person who follows my story may feel himself a bit cheated, seeing that the stream is dispersed into so many trickles, and that of the essential events only the last echoes and reverberations arrive at him; but it is not impossible that this is the very effect i aimed at when i started narrating, or let’s say it’s a trick of the narrative art that i am trying to employ, a rule of discretion that consists in my position slightly below the narrative possbilities at my disposal.
said italo calvino (who turns out to be a good friend of georges perec, and it is obvious why, too).
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