You, Bleeding Childhood E-Book

Michele Mari

• Herausgeber: And Other Stories
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 270

Beschreibung

Long before the latest vogue for autofiction, Michele Mari, one of Italy's most beloved authors, cast his mind back to the days of his own childhood, and found it crawling with monsters. Raised on comic books and science fiction, the young Mari constructed an alternate universe for himself untouched by uncomprehending grownups or sadistic peers. Compared to the horrors of real life, Long John Silver and Cthulhu made for positively cuddly company; but little boys raised by beasts may well grow up beastly – or never grow up at all. Waking or sleeping, the obsessions of Mari's youth seem to colour his every adult thought. You, Bleeding Childhood stands as his first attempt to catalogue this cabinet of wonders. Cult classics since their first publication, these loosely connected stories stand as the ideal introduction to an encyclopedic fantasist on a par with Kafka, Poe, and Borges.

Leseprobe

Originally published as Tu, sanguinosa infanzia

First edition in English published in 2023 by And Other StoriesSheffield – London – New Yorkwww.andotherstories.org

Copyright © 2009 and 2018 Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a., Torino

“The Soccer Balls of Mr. Kurz” and “Eurydice Had a Dog” originally published in Euridice aveva un cane © 2004 and 2015 Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a., Torino

Translation copyright © 2023 Brian Robert MooreTranslator’s afterword copyright (c) 2023 Brian Robert Moore

All rights reserved. The rights of Michele Mari to be identified as author of this work and of Brian Robert Moore to be identified as translator of this work have been asserted.

ISBN: 9781913505684eBook ISBN: 9781913505691

Editor: Jeremy M. Davies; Copy-editor: Gesche Ipsen; Proofreader: Sarah Terry; Cover design: Holly Ovenden; Typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London.

And Other Stories gratefully acknowledge that our work is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

This book is a co-production with the Italian Cultural Institute in London and was made possible by a special funding of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation

Contents

Comic Strips The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance The Covers of Urania They Shot Me and I’m Dead The Horror of Playgrounds Eight Writers The Black Arrow Jigsawed Greens War Songs And I Am Thy Daemon Down There

from Eurydice Had a Dog

The Soccer Balls of Mr. Kurz Eurydice Had a Dog Letting It Bleed: A Translator’s Afterword

‌Comic Strips

When he learned that he was going to become a father, Professor —— shut himself for a long while in his study to get his thoughts in order. In the midst of so many looming uncertainties, he came out of that room with one thing certain: the comics, the dear comic strips from his childhood had to be stored away for safekeeping.

For thirty years that beloved bundle of treasures had occupied one of the highest shelves of his vast library, a position that, while banishing those pages to the unreachable heights of the science fiction series Urania and the tales of monsters, nevertheless exalted them to an eminence before which all the other books—the “real” books, the “serious” books—had to bow down. The professor knew, of course, that the nobility of his library resided in the products of sixteenth-century printing presses and in his baroque folios, in the volumes of Antonio Zatta’s Parnaso and in the beauty of his Bodonis, that its academic pinnacles found name and substance in critical and national editions; he had known for some time that this immense family had grown with the Silvestri and Sonzogno imprints, the Medusa and Struzzi series, and that it had been refined by the Oxford blues and the brick-yellow of his Belles Lettres, by the human abundance of the Pléiade and Ricciardi collections, and by the defunct rigor of the Lerici catalogue. But he knew, too, that without that initial foundation his library—and therefore his life—would have been like a great fruit with no stalk; as if, plucked from that original life-giving tree, all those learned writings would have been destined to shrivel up and wither away. Pascoli and his poetics of the inner child had nothing to do with it, the professor irritably declared to himself, it was rather a question of proper sequence, of material justification: you won’t be the owner of a bed if you have never slept in a crib, if you haven’t been rocked in a cradle. Similarly, you won’t absorb Columella or Malebranche if you haven’t absorbed Collodi’s Pinocchio or Salgari’s pirates. In his house in the country, he still had all of his old childhood beds, lined up in the same room like an allegory of the ages of man—and should he not have conserved as sacred the first works he’d read? Were they not perhaps a document—proof!—of his childhood and, at the same time, of his anguished struggle to never leave that childhood behind, while the world, seemingly out for blood, had been plotting all along to tear it away from him, bludgeoning him with fears, with horrendous itches, with ambiguous intellectual conquests (The Epic Reawakening! The Way of Man!), blindly doling out blows? Deeply, he felt that if life is corruption and abjuration, then it must be highly moral to counter its general ruin with the opposing process of redemption, of affectionate disinterment.

And so it had been with those comic books of his, jealously safeguarded as his most valuable possessions. How many times, upon hearing someone his age express perplexed ignorance over the fate of their old comics, had he felt an invaluable sense of triumph and reward for not having squandered, for not having caved—like the others—to the humiliating blackmail of growing up at the cost of betrayal!

Now, though, a baby was on the way. High up there, his comics would be out of reach and even out of sight for the future critter; but, even so, a few feminine words had been enough to alarm him: “Just think, someday your old comics will be good for Filippuccio.” Will be good? They had been, they were good—he would have liked to protest—retaining their goodness like an everlasting luminescence. But he did not speak, for right away he had to obey an even stronger impulse to climb up there and retrieve them, those blessed things so unexpectedly ensnared. After redescending with the entire stack, he blew on them to remove the majority of the dust; then he undid the twine that bound them together, and once again the relics spread out before his emotional eyes.

He considered them closely. Every Tintin; each of the original editions of Cocco Bill; countless issues of The Phantom, just a couple of issues of Mandrake the Magician; a few issues of Nembo Kid, a few of Jeff Hawke, the first three years of Linus, that first Mickeyneid, that first Donaldduckyssey, two issues of Creepy, and still more, still a few more loosed relics. As always happened on such occasions, an imperceptible pause spent lingering on a given cover was all it took for him to succumb to the urge to pick the book up; and having picked it up, to start to reread; and having started to reread, to devour it from cover to cover. In this manner he reread Cigars of the Pharaoh, then The Cossack Cocco Bill, then The Seven Crystal Balls; after which—more than two hours had passed—he shook himself back to life with a doleful shudder, heaved a deep sigh, and spoke to himself as follows: “These are a crystallization of my dreams, the only not-sad glimmer in my life; they are documents, fossils of an age that entreats me to pay it homage; they are little cadavers that refuse to die; they are such that I alone know what they are. And all this should be ‘used’? It should go back to being something ‘current,’ tomorrow? Current! These monstrous coagulations, these superhuman concentrations of my melancholy, these monuments of my solitude, these sacred things are to end up in the hands of a little critter (loved, no doubt—my own flesh and blood, even), a slobbering critter who will scribble on them with obscene crayons, with even more obscene pens? They are imbued with my own sequels and re-elaborations, entities such as these, they compartmentalize unrepeatable days, such vignettes (beloved squares, adored rectangles, emblems of my room, insignias of my bed), yes, yes, they are history, musealized and annotated laudatissima historia, they are a docta collectio (codified, catalogued) meriting scientific discipline, distance, the love owed to the classics (Tacitus, Proust, Guicciardini—Soldino, Geppo, Eega Beeva), and they are, and they are tradition, and they are religion. And they are emotion. Enough. I handle them with care, I who possessed them, touching them with imaginary gloves, turning their pages with mental tweezers as if they were invaluable papyruses—I who was their master—and now others are to establish with them a practical relationship of immediate gratification, reify them in such a way? No, it’s too late for that. One can no longer have fun with what is cloaked in an aura, one cannot carnally commingle with our object of worship, nor put it under examination when there is only room left for contemplation. Forgive me, future Filippuccio, but if, among your future comics (you, homologous to them, and they, organic to you), I were to slip in these ancient ones of mine, you would not recognize the categorial difference, the inherent transcendency, the axiological superiority; approaching one of them—this wondrous Cocco Bill in Canada,for example—you wouldn’t whisper to yourself, ‘Behold, that comic has at last come back to us!’ (and has returned thus, unchanged and perfect), you wouldn’t predispose your whole being to taking a gluttonous and at the same time painful gulp, no: you would say, brutally, ‘Huh, a comic, let’s see what it’s about, let’s see if it tickles our fancy.’ But the holy scriptures, Filippo, do not tolerate the criticism of modern men, nor indeed will it be tolerated by me, their priest. Not only doodles and tears, Filippo, are blasphemous affronts, so, too, is indifference, the glance that clumps together and knows no hierarchy, the adiaphorous passivity of the profaner. I close my eyes and I see you, quick little ghost, looking, rummaging, finding, flipping through the pages, I see you toss this worn Phantom into a corner after just a couple of pages—you, fruit of my loins, not falling madly in love with the Phantom! I saw you: you gave a huff, you weren’t impressed! You seek comfort—and find it—in other books that mean nothing to me, stuff that is yours and yours alone, and so I hereby officially allot them to you, let those be your dreams, and if from that jumble you’re one day able to extract the gold that I’ve extracted from my comics, then my compliments to you: life always starts from scratch, it’s not as though you’d want to inherit Daddy’s emotions, Daddy’s memories, Daddy’s consciousness, and just insert it all into your little brain like a transplant, would you? So go ahead and get started, for I’m wrapping up, I’ll now take what’s necessary and pack it away, burying it in the basement, shielding it from the contamination of your impish spirit (to not love the black grilles of Tintin’s cars! to be hard-hearted before the power of kryptonite! forever blind to the dialectic that sparkles between Dick Tracy and Fearless Fosdick!), you won’t even know that my comics all lie in this trunk, you won’t even be able to look for them, never shall I hear you ask me to show them to you for just a second… ‘a second’! Like liquidating an entire civilization with a single glance! I am the cowboy Cocco Bill, understand? So if you don’t dedicate your childhood to Cocco Bill—and you certainly won’t—then it will be as though you renounced your father, as though at the dinner table one evening you were to turn to your mother and, pointing with your pudding-smeared spoon, ask her, ‘Mommy, who’s this man eating with us?’ Cocco Bill is who I am! Captain Haddock is who I am! Wellington Wimpy! Ellsworth! Brainiac! Is that enough for you? That halfwit Jimmy Olsen, yes, him too! This is your father! Answer me one question: Chamomile tea—who consumed it? What about mountains of hamburgers? Or—need I even ask—kumquats? But you don’t know anything, not a thing. What do you know about issue no. 7 of the comic supplement of Il Giorno, that little booklet published in the first few days of July 1962? It was titled Kamumilla Kokobì, and now I’ve said everything that needs to be said. Kamumilla Kokobì… Something more or less like the Iliad… Ah, enough, enough, it hurts too much to talk about these things—comic strips, what comic strips? You’re not even born yet and your father is bringing all this to a close, finis, the topic’s exhausted, to be all aflutter in such a manner is simply not okay, end of discussion; one grows up alone, lives alone, dies alone, we’ll try to meet each other on other planes, we’ll play chess, go to the movies together, I’ll teach you to use Vinavil glue, someday I’ll give you a book by Stevenson as a present. But these comics, Filippo, cannot be shared, they are the flower of my childhood, you see, and they are, therefore, my essence: if you take them away from me, you kill me; take away the Divine Comedy, take away Moby-Dick, even take away Aulus Gellius, all of the Loeb Library—you want the Battaglia too? You want Rerum Italicarum scriptores, the Ramusio? But don’t ask for Kamumilla Kokobì, don’t ever ask for it, don’t ever so much as smile at the holy names, I’ll snuff out that smile here and now by hiding my treasure, for you’ll admit that if I didn’t, I’d be forced to live out the humiliation of subterfuge, think long and hard about that humiliation, a university professor who locks himself in the bathroom to reread a Tintin without his son knowing! And in my study, too, I would hide—‘Daddy, what are you doing?’ ‘I’m working on the critical edition of Castiglione’s Latin eclogues, off you go, I need to concentrate.’ But no, Daddy’s brain is jerking off to Jeff Hawke’s metallic beetles, if you stretch your neck you’ll see the pages of Jeff Hawke poking out of the eclogues, no, please don’t condemn me to all that, one day if you like I’ll give you a seven-hour lesson on jerking off but that’s enough for now, let me close the book on all this, if you can see me from the antemundia where you currently dwell, then look, look, I’m closing the book, you see? Book closed.”

‌The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

He wore an embarrassed smile, my father, while looking me in the eyes in my dream last night. There was a door next to us, and when he asked me if I knew what was on the other side of it, I simply replied that I did not want to go in.

“I didn’t ask you if you want to go through the door, but if you know what’s on the other side.”

“It’s for the best if I never find out, Dad. If it’s something unknown, it will be horrific; if it’s something familiar, it will be sad.”

But you kept on insisting, and when your look softened, began to gleam with that special light that recognizes me as the same as you, all of my defenses left me.

Now that the dream is over, I wonder why you didn’t actually do it—this thing, which, if I was able to dream it up last night, you surely must have imagined for yourself—why you didn’t dare do it while there was still time. This void that echoes inside me, this grief that day after day has saddened the days of my life, now I know where it all comes from; now I know where the most secret part of my soul has fled whenever the vile world has tried to tear me to bits.

“Do you recognize it?” My father was showing me a fifty-centimeter Winchester rifle. “Purchased on December 20, 1963, in a store in Corso Vercelli; given on December 25, 1963, with the following card: ‘To Mike, for saving my life—Johnny Guitar’; used without interruption from December 25, 1963 until May 9, 1964.”

“What… what happened on May 9?”

“You lost it. It slipped through the slats of a bench in Piazza Napoli, and when your grandfather stood up to go back home, you followed him without a moment’s hesitation.”

“Really? Just like that? That’s how it happened?”

“Just like that. And these, do you recognize these?” In the palm of his right hand were three Mercury toy cars, four and a half centimeters long, made of bulky enameled iron: a yellow one, a red one, a green one. I reached out to take them, but my father closed his fist. “Purchased on December 18, 1964, in a store in Via Foppa by your father on behalf of your grandparents; given on December 25, 1964, with no accompanying written material; used without interruption from December 26, 1964 until February 19, 1968, the day of a deplorable trade with a classmate, which you certainly ought to remember.”

Did I ever! His name was Federico Colla, he was a year older than me, and one cursed day he offered me a plastic box containing tiddlywinks and pick-up sticks. He offered them to me in exchange—yes, he committed this act of violence against me—and I was depraved enough to accept. His plastic in exchange for my iron! But…

“But I only gave him two cars, because I’d already lost the yellow one down a storm drain not long before…”

“Oh, and you think that changes things, do you?”

“No, Dad, it doesn’t change a thing.”

“Correct. It doesn’t. In any case, you would have regretted the trade immediately even if you’d only let him have a single wheel—because it was a Mercury wheel, and it was your wheel.”

“Mine, yes—it was mine.”

“Don’t get too emotional, son, because we’ve only just begun. Otherwise, how will you be able to handle seeing things like this—” (in his arms there had appeared a little fortress made of bamboo) “—or this—” (the No. 5 Meccano set) “—or this—” (The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul, half its pages detached from the spine) “or this, or this, or this—”

“Stop, I’m begging you, have mercy!”

“Saturnin Farandoul, how you loved that book! But that didn’t stop you, one day, from letting someone get between Saturnin and you. An overeager grandfather who politely asked you—because he did ask you—if the book could be passed down to a younger cousin, seeing as you—”

“Don’t say iiit!”

“Seeing as you were now a ‘big boy’… Do you want the date, the exact date of your betrayal?”

“That cousin, how I hated him for it!”

“Of course you did. And who can say whether, after him, there wasn’t an even younger recipient, or whether he held on to Saturnin forever, or if one day he threw that old book into the trash—who knows?”

“But it’s here, you just showed it to me.”

“And these marbles, what do you have to say about them? They didn’t require too much space at the end of the day, just a little sack in the corner of your drawer. And yet, at a certain point, game over: they wound up being expelled from your life.”

“That’s a lie! It’s the things themselves that disappear. I would have given my own life for those marbles, how could I have abandoned them? My marbles…”

“There you have it, they disappear. The trick is never to become distracted, never let your guard down… to know at all times what one has and where one has it… and, after you’ve loved something for even a single morning, to keep it close until the day you die. To keep, to keep, to keep…”

“Never regretting the loss of a single thing…”

“This model fortress, for example. One day you forgot you had it, and you never gave it another thought. But on the inside, from that day on, you missed it—missed it when you looked at that special girl in your high school class, or when you studied Thomas Hobbes, or when you polished your bicycle. You missed it the day you got married, when Berlinguer died, every time you took the number twenty-nine tram—always and everywhere, you still missed it. Even yesterday morning, from the beginning to the end of your faculty meeting, you went on missing it.”

“It’s true, Dad, because we made it together with Vinavil glue, and it’s so imbued with our essence that it seems almost obscene to me now, this fortress, I can barely even look at it. You were wearing a white shirt with ink-stained cuffs, and I was wearing a burgundy sweater, and you were singing to yourself, ‘Besciamboeu, the cow and the bull.’ Oh Dad, how is it possible that one day I simply stopped thinking about it? I, who for my entire life have been a morbid, fetishistic keeper of everything that was mine, archiving it all with obsessive affection, how could I have possibly committed so many acts of betrayal?”

“You see, Michele, one can never be too morbidly attached, because as much as one might live off the past, there’s always going to be something in the present, unavoidably, to coerce and humiliate us. Distractions, compulsions, good excuses to throw off a few blankets and let some fresh air into the stuffiness of which your life has consisted—so long, consistency! New schools, new houses, new lights, and in the meantime we’ve prostituted ourselves to just about anybody and anything, to the point that we’ve actually lost ourselves… But all it takes is for a picture from back when we were seven or ten years old to fall into our hands, and we melt with emotion like wandering adventurers laying their eyes once again on their homeland: ‘There,’ we shout, ‘that’s what I am, no doubt about it, I’m still the same!’ But, in the meantime, you have squandered. If you have twenty toys and you hold on to eighteen, you’re already toast. A certain pocketknife with a mother-of-pearl handle, a single red enamel magnet, as soon as you push them aside, however lightheartedly (‘Stay here for a bit,’ you say affectionately, as you tuck them away in a drawer), that’s it, you’re toast. You’ve become a squanderer.”

“You don’t have to tell me these things, Dad. I know them better than you do.”

“In fact, it wasn't my intention. I only wanted to give you a present.”

My father looked tired now, perhaps because of the look of uncertainty roving in his eyes. I was trying not to stare at the heaps of objects surrounding us.

“I’d watch you,” he said, “after you lost or traded something, and I’d feel so bad for you—such a restless little creature, pacing up and down the hallway with a face like someone who’d had his soul ripped out, someone who just couldn’t understand. So one day I made up my mind, and became your custodian angel. I went to the little park in Piazza Napoli, and the Johnny Guitar rifle was still there, hidden in the grass; I snuck into Mr. and Mrs. Colla’s apartment while they were watching TV, slipped into their sleeping son’s bedroom, and retrieved the Mercury cars; I went to your cousin’s cousin’s house, and I confiscated Saturnin Farandoul. Wherever the diaspora had reached, I went: amid so many unfamiliar items, your things shone with the love that had been in your eyes—I couldn’t miss them. ‘This is Michelino’s, don’t mind me!’—and from the heap I’d pick out the single marble that had been yours, unstick from an album of trading cards the one soccer player who had been squeezed between your fingertips. Then, inevitably, I even developed the habit of recovering your belongings that were still in our home but had been left to gather dust. After a whole year of disuse, that mother-of-pearl knife and that scarlet magnet could have been considered, to all intents and purposes, lost—and that’s when I’d step in.”

“And you think I didn’t realize that after a little while certain things of mine could no longer be found where they were supposed to be? All my useless searching, and the thief was you! But I’ve never loved you as much as I do now that you’ve told me.”

“Don’t get too misty-eyed, because you’re about to see something that will blow right through your heart.”

And then I saw once again the love of all loves: my teddy bear, the agonizing entity that corresponded to the flatus vocis of “teddy,” my bear of ripped and faded gray cloth, tarnished, blinded, piss-stained, flattened.

“Purchased—”

“Give it to me!”

“You’re almost forty years old, you can’t act like a little kid anymore. As I was saying: purchased on September 29, 1958, at the department store La Rinascente, given the same day and used without interruption from then until December 26, 1968. And without interruption, this time, truly means without interruption.”

“The interruption… was you?”

“You turned thirteen years old that day. If I hadn’t taken it away from you, you would be sleeping with it even now. It was the only instance in which I allowed myself to lay hands on something you still kept by your side. At dawn, I tiptoed into the room where you were sleeping, and I slipped it out from under your arms.”

“You decided to play the pedagogue! You were impatient to see me grow up! What a wonderful, caring angel! Stealing things from me as if I were just another Federico Colla!”

“Think about it: you were literally eating away at this bear, it was becoming embedded between your ribs, seeping slowly but surely into your bloodstream. But now, instead, you have it here, whole, like your other toys.”

“Sure, let’s put it that way—but really it’s mortifying to put it that way. And, in fact, I’m not going to put it any way at all! And don’t call it a toy! Look at me, look at this wretched son of yours, look at how he had to live from that day on, as though he were already at death’s door. At thirteen I became a dead man walking. And you want to give it back to me now? For twenty-seven years you kept it in your studio, twenty-seven years of my life! The greasy marble that was handsome little Michelino’s! The rifle that goes ping. ‘Oh my heart, oh let us embrace, Father!’ That’s the kind of touching finale you were expecting, eh? A syrupy melting of our chromosomes? Absolutely not! This finale is poison, life is horrific, if God is in bears then why are we men so interested in pussy? You realize that at the age of fifteen I read all of Plutarch just to fill the void that was left? That my whole life long I’ve dreamed of slaughtering a dozen people a day, that today my diet consists principally of benzodiazepine? That there isn’t enough water in the world to quench the burning thirst inside me?”

“Would you prefer to talk about Lemmy Caution? About Liberty Valance?”

“Yes, let’s talk about Liberty Valance—about the man who shot Liberty Valance.”

‌The Covers of Urania

Maybe the sweetest dream I ever had was when Robert Louis Stevenson came to ask me if I would lend him a few of my Urania paperbacks. “I should ask my grandpa first. They were his,” I replied, but already his long fingers were caressing no. 17; already, I knew that book would end up in Polynesia. And he said, “Your grandpa is fine with it, I already checked with him myself.” And never in my life have I felt so touched by grace.

Fact sheet. Urania is launched on October 10, 1952 with The Sands of Mars by Arthur C. Clarke (trans. Maria Gallone); the cover—on which the title of the series, the novels of urania, is printed enclosed in a little box—is by Ć. Ćaesar, who is replaced by Carlo Jacono in 1957. In 1958, the branding also changes (urania: the most famous science-fiction series), as does the color of the spine (from white to red). In 1960, the first cover by Karel Thole appears; he will go on to provide cover art for over thirty years (with rare incursions by Ferenc Pinter). In 1962 (January), the trim size is reduced from 20 x 13.7 cm to 18.9 x 12.9 cm and (in May) the spine reverts to white (with the exception of a variously colored rectangle at the bottom): concurrently, the series branding begins to be printed inside a diamond, which shares the color of the spinal rectangle. In 1964, the cover art, previously quadrangular, becomes round (with a red border); the rectangle disappears from the spine. 1967 sees the end of the diamond; freed from any geometric shape, the branding is condensed to read, simply, urania; a red line separates the series name from the cover art: Urania persists in this incarnation to this day (1995).

Therefore, in order of increasing value and aura: “the rounds,” “the rounds with the diamond,” “the diamonds,” “the little reds,” “the big reds,” “the old whites,” “issue no. 1” [continued].

The little boy who still doesn’t know how to read sees those thin books in his grandfather’s hands (that uninterrupted series of books) and infers his own notion of peril: sensing in his elder a shaman, and in the books an initiatory clavis to horrific yet solemn Mysteries. If he can handle all of those illustrated monsters and live to tell the tale—this is the boy’s little brain’s awestruck discovery—then he must have entered into an agreement with them (making agreements with Monsters!), poor Grandpa, tremendous Grandpa, condemned to never slip up, the slightest error and the Monsters will be merciless with him, with Grandma, with the grandson who spends every Sunday at their house, all of them gobbled up in one go, an immediate mangling. And so the little boy examines him from afar, watches while his grandfather reads one of those books, pretending to play one of his games but in fact fulfilling the role of witness that has fallen to him: poor Grandpa, what torments is he suffering for our sake—is everything okay there, Grandpa? Is your reading working out? And, creeping undetected until he’s just a few steps away, the boy cranes his neck to peek once again at those nightmare forms, thinking that Grandpa is in their presence, he seems to be sitting here but he’s actually with them, in who knows what obscure point of the infinite universe.

Editors: 1952 G. Monicelli, 1962 C. Fruttero, 1964 C. Fruttero and F. Lucentini, 1981 G. Montanari, 1990 G. Lippi.

Publishing directors: 1952 G. Marchiori, 1961 E. Pagliara, 1966 A. Tedeschi, 1979 A. Polillo, 1984 L. Grimaldi, 1990 G. Orsi.

Price: 150 lire in 1952, 200 in 1963, 250 in 1967, 300 in 1970, 350 in 1972, 400 in 1974, 500 in 1975, 600 in 1976, 700 in 1977 (text omitted) [continued].

Those Urania covers… first and foremost: monsters upon monsters, of every type and form: loricate and scaly, cataphracted, furry, slobbery, slimy, flaming, ungulate, bituminous, lobated, crested, gaseous, glutinous, shapeless and misshapen, heraldic, enormous, abominable, solitary, flocked, frenzied, infiltrating, prognathous, chthonic, zoomorphic, cachinnatious, metaphysical, mucoidal, ulcerated, petrosal, gnarly, fibrous, exploded, amoebic, crepuscular, darting, ancient, putrid, rutilant, majestic, filamentous, vermiform, sentient, horrifying, always horrifying, yes, figures of plastic horror throbbing to come out of those covers, how not to feel it, how not to sense that those ghastly mouths were hankering for you, that those mutilated eyeballs were staring at you, and that if you weren’t quick in putting the book back on the shelf, that dripping runoff would absorb you forever.

When there weren’t monsters, there were vestiges or theaters of unspeakable horrors: scattered boneyards, deserted realms under copper skies, blood-red planets, wreckage and rubble, tuffaceous karsts, the semblances of condensed screams, lacrimae rerum of the cosmos. Then, sublimating and veering toward abstraction: strange prisms, spheres, cubes, spirals, vortexes, perspective distortions, labyrinths, oxymorons, anachronisms, hybridisms, metamorphisms, dadaisms, surrealisms, oneirisms.

Always and everywhere, the iconography of anguish.

The “Variety” section: From its outset, the series offers an ample appendix of short stories, scientific curiosities, and vignettes at the end of each volume. The comic strip B.C. (by J. Hart) appears regularly from 1962 onward, along with, from 1966, The Wizard of Id (by J. Hart and B. Parker).

Interior illustrations: Anonymous, in black and white (often mere section-break decorations: a tiny comet or rocket); they don’t last beyond 1962 [continued].