On a lighter note:
Years ago, my brother Brendan heard a radio interview with Umberto Eco. It is hard to explain, in writing, the humor Brendan found in this interview. Basically, it had to do with Eco’s long-winded post-structuralist post-modern convoluted sentence structure. Brendan does an absolutely hilarious (to me) imitation of Umberto Eco. No sentence can be too long. If Brendan ever feels that his Eco is getting too clear, he veers the sentence off into another direction. Brendan calls his version of Umberto Eco “Umero Nuno”. He laments the fact that this is not the sort of humor destined to go over well at your local stand-up comedy open mike. Brendan said, “Unless Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul happen to show up at Caroline’s one night…I don’t think anyone would get it.” Which is a hilarious comment, in and of itself.
However, for those of you out there who have any knowledge of exactly how Umberto Eco expresses himself, I present to you an email I just received from his counterpart: Umero Nuno:
“Ahem. When the ramifications unfold at a leisurely pace, the juxtaposition of the dialectic and the infrastructure of storytelling itself can assert energy simultaneously with equal exactitude and prodigiosity. However, this causes a conflict between the outcome of the overarching dramaturgical leanings that can manifest themselves in myriad ways:
A: a tendency towards regimenting the inner lives of the superego’s alter ego to such a degree that a discrepancy can occur between the dream and vocalized aesthetic
2: superfluous virtuosity bordering on schizophrenia,
9: the gleaming vanity of tumblers filled with the red wine of Bolibia, the country of the imagination of my youth,
and firstly, the battle amongst medieval robber barons who will relinquish only one word at a time to me, no matter what that word may be or what relevance to my storyline, characters, or even native language it has.”
