motherland fathertongue

There is a photo of this. Eco writes on the board: w/c.

It is a code. He is talking about how talk of the book’s death fails to heed how many books are still born.

still born use less (he didn’t say this)

He used as an example the introductions of scholarly monographs. They all write the same things, he said (though not exactly, this is paraphrase, of course, and so signals the analytic not narrative). It could just as well be code. I want to thank my dear wife and children for their sacrifices: w/c.

He had it exactly backwards. It is the monograph which should be coded and the stories of the wives and children which should be told. My own as well as any other.

Would you please stop telling all these stories and get on with the story?