To whom it my concern,
Please consider this an official letter of invitation to listen to a
broadcast of 'Saturday Afternoon, 1st of December, Leeds', a reading
by Zygmunt Bauman from Italo Calvino's novel 'Invisible Cities'. It
will be played on Resonance FM (www.resonancefm.com and 104.4FM in
the London area), on Monday, 14th of April 2008, at 16:30 (London
time). If possible, use headphones.
Sincerely,
Anna Ostoya
P.S.
Zygmunt Bauman is Emiritius Professor of Sociology at the University
of Leeds and the University of Warsaw. He is author of books about
'heavy' and 'solid', hardware-focused modernity and a 'light' and
'liquid', software-based modernity. 'Liquid times' is a term he
introduced to describe post-modern life, which main characteristic is
ambivalence and increasing feelings of uncertainty. According to
Bauman the product of modernisation deriving from economic progress
and order building is human waste: a superfluous, unusable being, a
redundant human, such us an unemployed person or a refugee. His
favourite authors are Robert Musil, George Perec, Jorge Luis Borges
and Italo Calvino. In 'Wested Life' and 'Liquid Love' he uses
fragments of Italo Calvino's book Invisible Cities as a references
and a metaphor for his theories.
Italo Calvino was an Italian writer and a journalist. 'Invisible
Cities', published in Italy in 1972 is a novel containing
descriptions of 55 cities, which are told by the main character Marco
Polo, the young Venetian traveller to Kublai Khan, the old Tartars'
emperor. Khan is curious to hear about the places he owns, but has
never visited and to engage himself in philosophical conversations
with his visitor. The cities in Marco's narration are not real
places, but they contain features of urban life and organization,
which though taking different forms in different places and epochs,
seem universal.
