“The city is redundant: it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind”

--- Italo Calvino

1

Prompted to divine “interesting elements” of late Italian writer Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972), my immediate response would involve the images (a city rigged in catwalks between two mountains, a city taking the shape of an underground lake directly below it),

2

or the provocative yet entirely applicable ideas on urban environment and what they suggest for our preconceptions of living space around us and daily perception of surroundings (a city of strangers who fantasize about contact but constantly avert their eyes from each other, a city that consumes, disposes and refashions itself daily);

3

but supporting all this – perhaps our truly “interesting element” - is its structure: categorical, slender yet encyclopedic in its series of repetitive, numbered cities and the intervallic (italicized) interaction between explorer Polo and emperor Khan - unfailingly imaginative despite rigidity – is this novel, stories or long poem…

4

that’s just it: probably something else.

--Jack Boettcher