Collisions

May 7, 2009 2:21 pm

Last Sunday I went to the town of Novello to see a small literature festival conceived and organised by the writer Filippo Taricco.

The title of the historic launch of the festival was Collisions – the collision to two very different worlds: literature and the Langhe district.

It took some courage to come up with an event like this from scratch in these difficult economic times, and go ahead with it in the midst of a local scandal surrounding the Grinzane-Cavour Prize.

But, as Filippo said, even in times like these:

“Culture needs to reach out and talk to people, especially the young. We chose the town of Novello because climbing a hill is a way of broadening your horizons and looking forward to the future, and not just back to the past.”

And a way of addressing important topical issues such as education and integration. The festival has also been designed to involve local artists and bands, to create Collisions not only between geographically different contexts, but also between the worlds of words and musical notes, painting, sculpture and even drama. It is a way of mixing up different languages.

The initiative takes a high-quality, low-cost approach, with guests and organisers taking part free of charge. Writers will come along because “they want to meet readers and explain their approach to writing.”

The local population of this little hill-top town was wonderfully friendly and courteous in welcoming visitors, sharing with us the beauty and bounty of their land, as though we were a part of their little community.

For two days, Novello was the fulcrum of a world of books. Not a library or bookshop, nor a readers’ club or trade fair, but an entire town in which to meet in flesh and blood your favourite author, listen to a concert, drink a fine drop of Barolo Chinato, and relax in the castles’ gardens, admiring the view of the hills.

Lots of guests were there, including actors, singers, journalists and DJs, though they were almost all Italian. The one big flaw was that there were too few women – just two to be exact, the writer Francesca Mazzuccato and the journalist Federica De Maria.

Three artists were also there, roaming the streets of Novello to capture Collisions. My favourite was Alberto Ponticelli, one of the founders of Shock Studio, who in the 1990s was one of the first Italian artists to make his name on the American comic strip scene, working for publishing houses such as Image, Dark Horse and Marvel. Sam and Twitch, The Punisher and Devil are just some of the characters he has brought to life.

Next to the authors’ stage, he drew like a whirlwind to keep up the pace with the topics addressed by the conference, which is what I found most interesting.

I am talking about the conference moderated by Sergio Dogliani, inventor of the Ideastore library, in which Bruce Sterling talked about the future (both he and his wife Jasmina Tešanovi? are good friends and contributors to Share Festival). Next to him was the writer Tommaso Pincio and the essayist Fabio Cleto, author of Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject.

Sergio launched the debate with the provocative question of whether collisions we should fear await us in the future.

Bruce Sterling got the ball rolling, talking about the collision between the world of print and the digital world. The outcomes of this violent clash are still unpredictable. Twenty years ago it was thought that the print press would disappear entirely and that books and newspapers would all become digital.

This prediction has not come true completely, though print newspapers today are beginning to disappear and writers are increasingly keeping an eye on the online distribution of news and content. It is a transition towards a No Man’s Land – neither totally print nor totally digital.

The role of authors is shifting towards representations which today do not have a clear outline, because there is no single audience, and there is no online business model that can fully replace the printed word. Even though this change is having less of an impact in Italy, even here journalists are losing their shine, with the result that writers no longer have a test bench and fertile ground for their fame. Furthermore, according to Sterling, even production and distribution means are changing.

Bookshops, for instance, are no longer the sole channel for distribution, which means that certain literary circles, as we once know them, will disappear. What will be left is the Net, which is already where writers and journalists shape their reputations. This has been a revolution, though many more will come, because the digital world is fragile – it tends to bud, grow rapidly and then drastically disappear. Websites for instance are vanishing because everyone is migrating towards social networks and forums; mailing lists don’t work anymore, Facebook is set to close down, and YouTube has been left without a business model.

Tommaso Pincio agreed with this analysis. Right now we are creating new forms of literature, and new models, as we change our approach to the written word. Pincio noted how writers have a tendency these days not to use subordinate clauses anymore, using a language shaped by how we see reality through the filters of the media. Our relationship with the real is changing, our vocabulary has become hybrid, and hence the way we tell stories has changed.

We know nothing about our neighbours, for instance, but we know all there is to know about people who have nothing to do with us, but which take up lots of media space. The word ciarpame owes its new-found popularity in Italy to its use in the news, entering the minds and vocabulary of ordinary folk.

Even spelling is changing, keeping up the pace of our evolving language, driven especially by computers and mobile phones; people write the Italian word for is with an apostrophe (e’) instead of an accent (è), because there is no accented letter on the keyboard. And this seems to be becoming the standard even in our newspapers.

Fabio Cleto adds to the discussion by placing our attempts at cognitively shaping the future within our cultural past. Cleto traces them on the one side back in the 1950s, when the apocalyptic threats of the Cold War transferred future scenario-making from the literary realm of science fiction to the scientific disciplinary field of futurology. On the other side, he places their very ancient origins in Mesopotamia’s divination practices.

Tracing the very historicity of our look at the future enables us to assess its worth, Cleto claims. Such predictive practices find their interest not so much in their capacity to actually forecast the future, which is rather weak even in sophisticated futurology systems, but rather in their shaping the ghosts, hopes and fears of the present and the past. In their telling a story of the present, in their interpreting its signs.

Here one can really find it worth to try and guess what the future holds for us, even when we face forecasts that have not been confirmed by facts. The forecasts that books would be soon dead, quite obsessive in the early Nineties as they were, did not stand the test of reality. In the last 15 years paper & ink, printed novels have known increasing publication numbers and selling rates.

As to literary sociality, it seems to be quite active, as we can see right there in Novello, for in recent years there have been more and more book presentations, readings, and literary festivals. It is a world made of paper and of bodies, the world of writers and readers, that in its physical materiality won’t easily give in to the digital revolution.

Our world is not entirely determined by technology, and as we can see in the current comeback of the vinyl long playing on the music market, a new technology does not necessarily efface the technology it claims to supersede.
Figures which become incarnate and material – hopefully only in contexts and initiatives, such as here in Novello, where culture and not private interests take centre stage.

Simona Lodi