Hermit in Paris by Italo Calvino

lectures on politics: it is government propaganda. I express my opinion on the play to the director’s wife as I accompany her home (she seemed to me to be a very intelligent, liberated and happy woman) but she really believed in good faith that the play was good: she is a prisoner, like many provincial intellectuals, of a solely relative scale of values, engulfed by mediocrity.
    My thoughts naturally run to Olivetti, 42 and here there is the opportunity to check the origin and function of his ideas in a country where they are not a strange growth, but experiences which have emerged empirically in certain areas of ‘enlightened capitalism’. You could say in general that Olivetti has more style than his masters, and that on the whole he can make use of the best collaborators that Italy has to offer, whereas here paternalistic cultural initiatives operate on a much more provincial level, since the centralized cultural industry absorbs the ablest into New York and corrupts them in a different way; and here these things reveal their mechanisms more. (Here often with Americans – at least with some of them – I find myself speaking well of Olivetti and presenting him in a totally favourable light; this is one of the few Italian phenomena that Americans can understand and appreciate and it can give them an idea of ‘the other Italy’ of which they are completely ignorant. I also mention Togliatti, 43 of course, and speak well of him – you cannot really have a discussion with an American in which you outline first the seriousness and historical legitimacy of certain phenomena, and then their negative aspects – but they don’t understand a thing, it’s like talking to a brick wall.)
    The Museums
    In all these industrial towns of the Midwest there are wonderful museums, with Italian primitives and French impressionists, first-class collections scattered here and there, also a lot of average stuff but never poor quality and every now and again there is a really famous masterpiece (Corallo cover stuff ) 44 which you never expected to find here. I am sorry that I was not able to stop at Toledo, a small steelworks town which is said to have the best museum. Then there are always technical innovations in the way they are set up: in the Cleveland museum there are no custodians in the rooms but in every room there is a camera hanging from the ceiling which swivels round photographing the visitors: by this means a single custodian in his booth can keep an eye on the whole museum. In Detroit’s museum you can hire for 25 cents a little cardboard box with a transistor to put against your ear: in each room there is a transmitter with a disc which explains about all the paintings in the room.
    Death of a Radical
    In Cleveland liberals and Jews are grieving for the death of Spencer Irwin, an old liberal journalist, a newsman on a local paper which although owned by isolationist conservatives allowed him to write what he wanted. I read his last article, on the swastikas in Germany: it is old, fiery democratic rhetoric, provincial-style. Herb went to the funeral: Irwin was a Quaker but the pastors of all the Protestant churches were there along with the rabbi, and each of them said something, and there were also black intellectuals as well as purple-faced alcoholics. Irwin was an ex-alcoholic who had recovered and was one of the heads of Alcoholics Anonymous, a self-help group for alcoholics of all classes.
    The Bar
    While waiting for Herb who has gone to the funeral I sit in a very tough-looking bar, a different side of America which I waited in vain to see in New York, with rough guys who look like something out of a film but who are in fact workers from the car factories in Cleveland, women who look like prostitutes but who are probably poor workers as well, jukeboxes (a guy in a beret dances with an old woman, then they leave), bingo machines which are really what we would call pinball (and which exist in New York only in a bar in