Reading Journal-Assignment 1

Calvino’s Invisible Cities

Name of the city:
a. favorite phrases or passages from stories
b. theme/s I thought the city represented

1. Diomira:
a. “silver domes,” “crystal theater,” “multicolored lamps”
b. déjà vu and contentment

2. Isidora:
a. “wild regions,” “spiral staircases,” “spiral seashells,” “city of his dreams,” “dreamed-of city,” “desires are already memories”
b. reminiscent

3. Dorothea:
a. “girls of each quarter marry youths of other quarters”
b. logistics and realizing truths

4. Zaira:
a. “relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past”
b. concept of identity

5. Anastasia:
a. “one morning your desires waken all at once and surround you”
b. contradictory enjoyment

6. Tamara:
a. “In the shape that chance and wind give clouds, you are already intent on recognizing figures”
b. illusionary reality/identity

7. Zora:
a. “a city that no one, having seen it, can forget”
b. unforgettable imagery

8. Despina:
a. “already he sees himself at the head of a long caravan taking him away from the desert of the sea”
b. escapism

9. Zirma:
a. “Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.”
b. mind over matter

10. Isaura:
a. “an invisible landscape conditions the visible one”
b. yin and yang

11. Maurilia:
a. “It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old post cards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one.”
b. constantly inconstant

12. Fedora:
a. “every inhabitant visits it, chooses the city corresponds to his desires”
b. predestination and idealism

13. Zoe:
a. “The man who is traveling and does not yet know the city awaiting him...wonders what the palace will be like, the barracks, the mill, the theater, the bazaar.”
b. reality vs. make-believe

14. Zenobia:
a. “those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it.”
b. subliminal messaging/brain washing

15. Euphemia:
a. “the city where memory is traded at every solstice and at every quinox.”
b. fellowship

16. Zobeide:
a. “the pursued woman”
b. trying to capture the unobtainable

17. Hypatia:
a. “the alphabetical order of vanished alphabets” “there is no language without deceit”
b. confusion and uncertainty

18. Armilla:
a. “it has nothing that makes it seem a city”
b. lacking according to criteria that constitutes a “city,” but not unfilled in being enjoyed and utilized

19. Chloe:
a. “seeking other eyes, never stopping” “an exchange of glances like lines that connect one figure with another and draw arrows, stars, triangles” “without a word exchanged”
b. the power of visual contact with one another

20. Valdrada:
a. “the one Valdrada...the other Valdrada” “inhabitants know that each of their actions is, at once, that action and its mirror-image”
b. prevention through symmetry

21. Olivia:
a. “there is always someone who busts out laughing in the darkness” “Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.”
b. the power of speech and destruction of our commodities

22. Sophronia:
a. “two half-cities” “the half-Sophronia”
b. amusement is temporary

23. Eutropia:
a. “the traveler sees not one city but many”
b. all dynamics come together to make a whole

24. Zemrude:
a. “You cannot say that one aspect of the city is truer than the other”
b. wanting one and not the other counterpart

25. Agulaura:
a. “what was bizarre has become usual, what seemed normal is now an oddity”
b. stereotypes, false reputation, and identity

26. Octavia:
a. “the spider-web city”
b. the entangled design does not assure indefinite existence

27. Ersilia:
a. “relationship of blood”
b. manipulation of each other leads to our own destruction/downfall

28. Baucis:
a. “Nothing of the city touches the earth except those long flamingo legs on which it rests”
b. alienation/solitude causes distain towards others

29. Leandra:
a. “unable to tell them apart”
b. dual, contradictory ownership

30. Melania:
a. “you find the same dialogue still going on”
b. perpetual tradition

31. Esmeralda:
a. “tortuous optional routes”
b. mix and matching with similar dynamics creates unique and diverse lives

32. Phyllis:
a. “at every point the city offers surprises to your view” “Your footsteps follow not what is outside the eyes, but what is within, buried, erased.”
b. false reality, not seeing what is actually there

33. Pyrrha:
a. “obviously the name means this and could mean nothing but this.” “names that bear with them a figure or a fragment or glimmer of an imagined figure”
b. does a label or imagined identity makes something real?

34. Adelma:
a. “If Adelma is a real city, inhabited by living people, I need only continue looking at them and the resemblances will dissolve”
b. the mind and imagination is more powerful and real than the truth of reality is

35. Eudoxia:
a. “all of Eudoxia’s confusion...is evident in the incomplete perspective you grasp” “It is easy to get lost in Eudoxia”
b. the city will corrupt the proper functions of your mind and the universe is confusing and alluring as this city is

36. Moriana:
a. “its alabaster gates transparent in the sunlight” “dancing girls with silvery scales swim beneath the medusa-shaped chandeliers.” “rusting sheet metal, sackcloth, planks bristling with spikes, pipes black with soot”
b. where there is absolute beauty there is disgusting monstrosities

37. Clarice:
a. “almost nothing was lost of Clarice’s former splendor; it was all there, merely arranged in a different order” “ancient Clarices, fragmentary and dead.”
b. change is necessary in order to achieve restoration to the original form

38. Eusapia:
a. “make the leap from life to death less abrupt”
b. everyone is connected because of one ideal

39. Beersheba:
a. “if the terrestrial Beersheba will take the celestial one as its model the two cities will become one.”
b. change/the city can only truly be itself by departing from itself

40. Leonia:
a. “The city of Leonia refashions itself every day”
b. full fledged materialism and consumer over-dose

41. Irene:
a. “they wonder if it would be pleasant or unpleasant to be in Irene that evening”
b. things look and are anticipated differently when they are far away or into the future, than they do in actuality

42. Argia:
a. “it has earth instead of air”
b. having faith is believing in something you cannot see

43. Thelka:
a. “So that its destruction cannot begin”
b. what is created is inevitably destroyed

44. Trude:
a. “but you will arrive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail”
b. every place/setting is essential the same

45. Olinda:
a. “you may find somewhere a point no bigger that the head of a pin”
b. retaining the same qualities that the original had and learning something new upon every examination

46. Laudomia:
a. “every city has as its side another city whose inhabitants are called by the same names”
b. every stage of life has to make room for the other

47. Perinthia:
a. “cripples, dwarfs, hunchbacks, obese men, bearded women”
b. seclusion from others and lack of diversity has consequences and produces the most negative of results

48. Procopia:
a. “Each year, as soon as I entered the room, I raised the curtain and counted more faces”
b. things are not always as they first appear

49. Raissa:
a. “life is not happy” “In the morning you wake from one bad dream and another begins” “the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence”
b. where there is good there is always bad

50. Andria:
a. “painstakingly regimented” “Each change implies a sequence of other changes”
b. planned change and uncontrollable change are both necessary

51. Cecilia:
a. “Cities have no name for me”
b. everything has some distinguishing quality

52. Mazoria:
a. “It is time for the century of the rat to end and the century of the swallow to begin”
b. there is harmony in relationship to one another, even throughout change

53. Penthesilea:
a. “city’s midst of still outside it” “vague spaces” “does an outside exist?”
b. are some things truly inescapable?

54. Theodora:
a. “gave birth to a tougher progeny”
b. changing who controls the power

55. Berenice:
a. “the unjust city” “the hidden Berenice, the city of the just”
b. good vs. evil

The narrator/s: Marco Polo (first person) and the author (third person)
Historical significance: Marco Polo was Venetian, who was very well traveled and introduced the Europeans to the Orient; he is someone who is see as a very well-traveled person. Contemporary author, Calvino makes a good choice by using this historical figure to tell these stories because Polo is a believable and credible source considering his background and knowledge of the world.

Person/point of view author uses to tell tales and why: Calvino creates a very dynamic and layered story by switching the book’s narrator from the omniscient author to Marco Polo. The reader gets a look into the Marco Polo’s and Kublai Khan’s take on the stories and their discussion in a much more engaged style.