Some beauty of the Adelphi Project

It’s strange to have written so little about The Adelphi Project in the past year. Having read 341 books or so (a few more now), and having spent so much time thinking about everything even slightly related, I still seem to forget to bring you along.

  • I regret that we don’t write the short novels of early 20th century Austria. These astonishing books that are really never about their author. I am going to try to talk you into doing this, soon. We need these, our world needs these, our cultures need these.
  • I am astonished by how much history my brain can absorb and re-weave together into new fabrics to fold beneath the story I am trying to tell.
  • I’ve discovered that what I see wants to be made into short movies, with archival footage, because the images of the past are beautiful. As are the sounds. More sound archives please!
  • I find I can tell stories of history the way I tell stories at Mythology Club, that there is a magic in knowing something so well that I can tell it in any direction and a thousand different ways, and they will all be as true as the next. My own personal creation of a European Mah?bh?rata.
  • I think I underestimated the importance of Adelphi Edizioni in the history of Italy. Yep, I am just going to leave this here for now. This is big and I need to get it right.
  • There is no good software to track the tangential thoughts and pathways that are part of the magic of this project. Network theory and history and a million other things are complex enough, but this model is stored in my head in five languages, and that’s just hard for the machines. And I can rotate it, like a chemical model, to see the view through a different lens, or language, or time period. If I could figure out how to do this with software it would be gorgeous. If you know, please get in touch.
  • I want to translate the untranslated books, or the old translations that aren’t able to resonante now. I want to become a translator of both the books and the magic of the history that interweaves them. I want to tell you the stories that make me laugh or weep or wonder or love. The stories big and small. There are so many. Stop by for tea, and I will tell you a story.
  • Hand drawn maps and the chalk walls are an amazing tool for seeing simplicity in complexity. Especially as I sit in the morning with coffee and stare at the wall, in that slightly unfocused way, where I can see things that aren’t there, or weren’t until I only half looked.
  • Most of the really cool bits of this work to date are in notebooks and on pieces of paper and I really need to figure out how better to share them with you. I want you to fall in love, along with me. I want to make you movies and stories and books and pictures.
  • As I read, the project continues to shift, and it becomes more beautiful and more meaningful. Back to the point before this one, this is really important. How do I bring you with me? I am working on it. Funding is ever a problem. Great sorrow that this is. I need a de Medici.
  • My friends still love me, it seems, even though I talk about history and literature and mythology and languages and all that, and not a whole lot of other things. Thank you for that.