{"id":276,"date":"2008-09-12T17:52:43","date_gmt":"2008-09-13T00:52:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/?p=276"},"modified":"2008-09-13T22:31:14","modified_gmt":"2008-09-14T05:31:14","slug":"walks-in-the-woods-fictionally","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/2008\/09\/12\/walks-in-the-woods-fictionally\/","title":{"rendered":"Walks in the woods, fictionally"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I was in grad school, I went to a series of lectures by Umberto Eco; they were wide-ranging talks on literary theory but very entertaining despite what you might imagine, covering everything from the freemasons to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, to fables (Little Red Riding Hood) and the meaning of truth.\u00a0 The lectures were eventually published as Six Walks in the Fictional Woods<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Eco also talked a bit about his own experiences as an author.\u00a0 He described how paranoid readers of his fictional books would write to him and complain that so-and-so couldn’t have moved through the moonlit night in Paris because on the date in question there was only a sliver moon.\u00a0 Notwithstanding the ‘fact’ that the ‘fact’ was ‘fiction.’<\/p>\n

He also told a beautiful story — one I still remember, although I have trouble remembering my own mobile phone number — about visiting the planetarium at Santiago de Compostela (maybe it was in Coruna, but this is my memory).\u00a0 The director as a gift to him had set the night sky to the way the stars appeared at his home on the night of his birth.<\/p>\n

At one point in the lectures, he said that we could all accept that it was true that there were no armadillos in the lecture hall — the jewel box of Sanders Theater — but that that didn’t mean they couldn’t exist in a fictional lecture hall.\u00a0 At that point he held up a fake armadillo, which doesn’t appear in the book.\u00a0 So beware!<\/p>\n

Something about my day today made me remember this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was in grad school, I went to a series of lectures by Umberto Eco; they were wide-ranging talks on literary theory but very entertaining despite what you might imagine, covering everything from the freemasons to the Protocols of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[646],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8jQA6-4s","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1116"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}