I started tinkering around with the format of the site, and I started losing all my entries, etc. I had to reset the template.

Yesterday I read through Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. It is a short book, but very interesting. It is fiction, but it is neither a novel or short stories. It takes the form of a series of reports from Marco Polo to Kublai Kahn over the different cities in the empire. The Great Kahn is trying to understand what makes up his realm. The reports he gets cannot be synthesized into a coherent image of the empires territoriality. Cities, in general, are elusive. People mistaken the city for its institutions (churches, schools, palaces, etc.), or for its historicity (does it preserve the past or is it in flux), or its energy (is it a place where people live or where they act), for their ability to satisfy human desires, etc. They are many wonderful reflection in this book. I would recommend that all travellers read it.

Quotes:
"Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages: the city says everything that you must think, makes you repeat her discourse, and while you believe you are visiting Tamara [name of fictional city] you are only recording the names with which she defines herself and her parts. However the city may really be, beneath this thick coat of signs, whatever it may contain or conceal, you leave Tamara without having discovered it." (page 14)

Kublai Kahn: "From now on I will describe the cities and you will tell me if they exist and are as I conceive them."
Marco Polo: "Cities also believe that they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls. You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours. (pages 43-4)