Oct 15, 2011

Italo Calvino's 88th Birthday

I was overjoyed to be able to celebrate one of my favorite authors, Italo Calvino. Ostensibly a science fiction writer, Calvino is more of a fabulist, using scientific notions as a jumping-off point for whimsical, delightfully far-fetched, extremely warm and compassionate little tales. The first work of Calvino's that I read was Invisible Cities, an imagined dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan that meditates on the different ways of conceptualizing cities.


For this doodle, however, I decided to illustrate the first story from my favorite Calvino collection, Cosmicomics. Cosmicomics is an audacious series of myths and legends that covers everything from the creation of the universe, to the evolution of land vertebrates, to the social lives of dinosaurs.

In this story, The Distance of the Moon, the protagonist tells of time when the moon orbited so close to the Earth that it was possible to row out into the middle of the ocean and climb onto the surface of the Moon with a ladder. Once on the moon, the protagonists and his friends would frolic and cartwheel while the Moon's gravity gently pulled jellyfish and crabs up out of the sea. It's a fantastic image, and hopefully one that's very evocative to readers of Calvino.

If you haven't yet, please consider investigating his work!

Where this Doodle appeared

The Doodle Italo Calvino's 88th Birthday launched Oct 15, 2011

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