"Umberto Eco (b. 1932) is a novelist, semiotician, philosopher, and literary critic most famous for his novel The Name of the Rose (1980). Along with artist Eugenio Carmi, Eco has published three picture books, the first of which is The Bomb and the General, published in Italy in 1966, and then revised and reissued in 1988, at which time it was translated into English by William Weaver.

For more information on Umberto Eco's children's books, visit my blog:

http://wetoowerechildren.blogspot.com/2012/02/umberto-eco-bomb-and-general.html "

"Novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco once said that the list is the origin of culture. But his fascination with lists and organization grew out of his longtime love affair with semiotics, the study of signs and symbols as an anthropological sensemaking mechanism for the world. In bridging semiotics with literature, Eco proposed a dichotomy of “open texts,” which allow multiple interpretations, and “closed texts,” defined by a single possible interpretation. Since semiotics is so closely related to language, one of its central inquiries deals with language acquisition — when, why, and how children begin to associate objects with the words that designate those objects. Most children’s picture books, with their simple messages and unequivocal moral lessons, fall within the category of “closed texts.”

In 1966, Eco published The Bomb and the General — a children’s book that, unlike the “open texts” of his adult novels with their infinite interpretations, followed the “closed text” format…

"The truth is otherwise. Remove the author and all you do is to remove every restraint upon Narcissistic Reading Disorder. To read an author is to read someone different from ourselves. Reading is not a means of self-affirmation, but of self-denial. Any book that is any good challenges its readers…

Hence reading is self-mastery, because the self (and its affirmations) are held in check while the author (and his structures of thought) are fully attended to. True diversity in literature would be to read authors in circumstances as different from our own as possible, because we might then imagine ourselves as different than we are — not the creature of circumstances, but their master. Reading is fundamental, all right: to a person’s ethical development."

[via: http://ayjay.tumblr.com/post/16901462693/hence-reading-is-self-mastery-because-the-self ]

"I once had occasion to observe that technology now advances crabwise, i.e. backwards. A century after the wireless telegraph revolutionised communications, the Internet has re-established a telegraph that runs on (telephone) wires. (Analog) video cassettes enabled film buffs to peruse a movie frame by frame, by fast-forwarding and rewinding to lay bare all the secrets of the editing process, but (digital) CDs now only allow us quantum leaps from one chapter to another. High-speed trains take us from Rome to Milan in three hours, but flying there, if you include transfers to and from the airports, takes three and a half hours. So it wouldn't be extraordinary if politics and communications technologies were to revert to the horse-drawn carriage."

"A fictional book is a non-existent book created specifically for (i.e. within) a work of fiction. This is not a list of works of fiction (i.e., actual novels, mysteries, etc), but rather imaginary books that do not actually exist.<br />
<br />
Uses: Such a book may (1) provide the basis of the novel's plot, (2) add verisimilitude by supplying plausible background, or (3) act as a common thread in a series of books or the works of a particular writer or canon of work. A fictional book may also (4) be used as a conceit to illustrate a story within a story, or (5) be essentially a joke title, thus helping to establish the humorous or satirical tone of the work. (Fictional books used as hoaxes or as purported support for actual research are usually referred to as false documents.)"

Q: "[I]f you were to use a computer to generate your next novel, how would you go about it?"

“He teaches 3 days a week, “for pleasure not money”...enjoys company of young people...he’s an old adolescent...

"The list is the origin of culture. It's part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order -- not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart's librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists -- the shopping list, the will, the menu -- that are also cultural achievements in their own right."

"What created culture is not conservation but filtering. There’s randomness in how the works have reached us. We will never know if, among the 4000 scrolls burned in the library of Alexandria in ancient times was not a masterpiece of humanity greater than Homer…Our culture is thus the product of what has survived filters more or less hazardous, censorship, failures, losses…And the Internet is the scandal of a memory without filtering, where we can no longer distinguish the truth from error. Finally, it also produces an erasure of memory. There is a kind of encyclopedia accepted by everyone, even if a man of 70 years knows more than a 25 year old. Internet could mean the eventual demise of the common encyclopedia, replaced by six billion encyclopedias, each individual constructing his own, each of which may prefer leisure to Ptolemy to Copernicus, the story of Genesis to the evolution of species. We run the risk of an inability to communicate, the impossibility of a universal knowledge"

"You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary."

"Slow blogging is mindful wandering is meditative reflection is an attempt to face the fear, to take a stab at the heart, take responsibility and risk, and in the process create a gift of immense value to others, a manifestation of our particular truth."

Michael Chabon on Solitude and the Fortresses of Youth: "It is in the nature of a teenager to want to destroy. The destructive impulse is universal among children of all ages, rises to a peak of vividness, ingenuity and fascination in adolescence, and the

"The Department for Children, Schools and Families has advised staffers at preschools and play groups to “resist their ‘natural instinct’ to stop boys using pretend weapons such as guns or light sabres in games with other toddlers,” reports the Da

"Boys should be encouraged to play with toy guns at nursery school because it can help improve their academic performance, according to government advice issued yesterday."

"I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh...tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach - if not the Kingdom of Heaven"