Free Hermit in Paris by Italo Calvino

order. Very beautiful machines with these cascades of threads in beautiful, different colours, producing an effect like a wonderful abstract painting. I had lunch with some managers and researchers, but no alcohol since Mr Watson forbids alcohol in the factory. I visited the labs, wonderful architecture, better than Olivetti, all with moveable walls so they can have rooms of any size they want, and the organization of research is excellent, totally separate from production; all in all, the organization of the firm is extremely efficient, although when they do a drawing on the blackboard for you to give an outline of the company’s structure, they draw lines that continue above Mr Watson and they say: God. Even though I was falling asleep, they explained all this problem about the insulators, you know. I also saw the school they have: wonderful. The staff: two categories, the managerial type who really are quite intimidating, and what we would call the Olivetti type; but of course I was not able to understand the relationship or the dialectic between the two types. It was an amazing sight, all those mathematicians and physicists in their little cells with their green blackboards. The workers were certainly highly qualified, and there was a very smooth rhythm of work; many women, all of them fat and ugly (beautiful women here, too, as in Italian cities, are now only to be found in certain social strata). Many boxes of sweets on every worktop: it’s Christmas. Among all these computers were Christmas decorations and banners; many departments organize Christmas parties; loudspeakers broadcast for the workforce of the most advanced technology in the world Christmas carols, a gift from the management of IBM.
    Homesick for New York
    I am not going to tell you about Washington because it is exactly as one has always imagined Washington from what one has read: artificial, boring, and very elegant, and basically I can even say I liked it, I would not want it to be any other way, but the fact is that I was not even three days in the place and I could not stand it any longer, so homesick was I for New York, and so I raced back here again.
    The Cinema
    Naturally I never go to the cinema because in the evening I like to see people, but what strikes me is how nobody goes to the cinema, I never find anyone who has been to the cinema or who talks about films. This is of course a feature of Manhattan, and I expect that as I go around America I will see the other side, but certainly this island is a unique case in the world of a society in our time for which cinema does not count at all, very odd for someone who comes from Italy. At most, in our circles, which in New York is not a special category but is
the
city (publishing, journalism, theatre, agents, writers, and all the enormous world of advertising and public relations, plus the world of education and research and the lawyers who are also always concerned with questions over authors’ rights, etc.), at most they discuss old silent movies which you can see every day at the Museum of Modern Art, or Ingmar Bergman’s films; but for example I have never found anyone who has seen
On the Beach
(which is the only film I went to see, because it interested me as a political symptom even though it is not very good).
    Midwest Diary
    Chicago, 21 January
    I have spent ten days between Cleveland, Detroit and Chicago and in these few days I have had more of a sense of America than in the two months I spent in New York. More sense of America in that I continually found myself saying: yes, this is the real America.
    The most typical image of an American town is that of streets flanked by places selling used cars, enormous lots full of white, sky-blue or pale-green cars lined up beneath festoons of little coloured flags, billboards showing not the price but the savings (you can easily get a car for a hundred and even for fifty dollars), and these car-dealers go on sometimes for miles, a bit like a