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Ready to write again

2017 was the year I stopped writing.

I was head-underwater in weekly newsletter campaigns for two different collectives—this isn’t meant to be expostulatory—and I was pulling derivative copy from the unfurnished spaces behind my eyes.

Between the hours staring cross-eyed at email + social media analytics and the time spent actually crafting emails and social media posts, I had hardly any mental pulp left by day’s end to wind down in my own writing. I’d dedicate my intermissions, instead, to nights out with the duchess, basketball, and streaming video games to a mostly European following.

I’m an impulsive Oxford comma user, but it’s not usual of me. To not write, unusual of me as well.

In years prior my workload was the same, yet I craftily figured out how to make time for each of my hobbies plus some semblance of personal writing which I convinced myself was satisfactory: book reviews. These write-ups never feel like work because, for me, reading is voluntary to begin with. Writing my thoughts down after folding the book closed is a sequentially natural act.

But one project changed all that…

I pitched an Italo Calvino book review to The Last Bookstore and they upgraded that assignment to an author overview, which is a sort of personalized online pocket guide to a large selection of—in my case—Calvino’s books. Okay, yeah. I can do that. What’s a few more books to read and a reasonably longer article to write? I can do that.

Well, it turns out I couldn’t.

Not in 2017 anyway. Italo Calvino is notoriously challenging to read, and the silly thing is that I knew this. My first Calvino sortie was a philosophical high tide called Invisible Cities—a cleverly dramatized interaction between Italian explorer Marco Polo and Chinese emperor Kublai Khan—and reading it felt like being introduced to someone important at a cocktail party while in the mid-chew phase of eating an hors d’oeuvre.

Let’s just say it isn’t the ideal way to become acquainted with the raconteurial author.

The next Italo Calvino book on my list reads like an actual sortie, given that the protagonist (Italo?) was drafted into the Italian youth brigades during World War II in service to the country’s fascist dictator Mussolini. Into the War is more straightforward than Invisible Cities, narrated by a tenderfoot soldier as if he was monologuing his own mud-stained war journal on open mic night at an Italian cafe.

Nothing much happens. A lot of it.

There are apprehensive spikes of tumult here and there, but mostly nothing happens. Enough time passes for the main character to whittle away at the splinters of his own thoughts. The book is ironically named, perhaps intentionally so, its events an autobiographical memory of pedestrian routine and anticlimactic patrols that presumably occur far away from any sort of battlefront.

I liked it. Reading Into the War felt authentic to the tempo of warfare — at least so far as I can guess — not unlike the continuously tensioned tapping of snare drums underlying the gated suspense of restless troops, marching in place.

And march I did, to my next Calvino engagement: The Nonexistent Knight, a tale that more or less returns to the author’s allegorical style at the core of Invisible Cities’ prose. Knowing what I went through with that first novel, my approach was a cautioned one…

My initial impression?

Italo Calvino knew how to write timelessly.

His sentient suit of medieval armor is the kind of character that is societally relatable to now, mere months from the advent of 2020. Agilulf, a name that genuflects the barbaric creativity of a world pre-dating the romantic nomenclature of Arthurian times, (phew—take a breath) represents the collective existential dilemma of our modern day.

We’re all suits of armor: heavy, idealistic shells of humanity confused about how to navigate the immediate future, let alone further out

Two-point-five books in and I’m less than halfway finished with this Calvino overview. It’s taken me so long to get to this point that I am uncertain if I’ll see it through at all. Other novels have already distracted me, spirited me away. I want to collect thoughts around the things I read, but not if doing so reveals the task of reading to be, well… tasking.

I’m not done reading The Nonexistent Knight but I’m curious about how it ends. Not going to think of this as an assignment, not going to let it cut my fuel line.

I’m not done writing.

It’s time I begin to do that again.