Information and Play in the Postindustrial City: A Mixtape
by John Talbird

1. Calvino

In Italo Calvino’s story, “The Garden of Stubborn Cats,” his protagonist Marcovaldo follows one of these titular cats to the upper-class Biarritz Restaurant where, through ankle-height transoms, he discovers a strange and wonderful world, the five-star restaurant. He watches an elderly waiter in tails following a wealthy patron to a glass tank full of trout. The waiter carries a little net “as if he were going to catch butterflies” calling to mind the comic trope of loony bin workers arriving with nets to take away the crazies. A world where a man points out a particular fish to be captured, cooked, and brought to his table must seem, to a post-war Italian like Marcovaldo—a man who works arduous hours in a warehouse and makes so little that he, his wife, and six children must sometimes skip meals—the height of insanity. And so, just as Chaplin’s Little Tramp might, he behaves logically in a crazy world: With fishing pole, he catches his own trout from the restaurant’s fish tank.