Well, not really, no more so than Samuel Pepys, I suppose. But I finally got to leafing through a collection of the great Italian fabulist‘s collection of autobiographical writing, Hermit in Paris. The first major section is a series of letters from the states, mostly New York, arranged under rather blog-like subject headings. Calvino sent these to a woman at the publishing hose where he worked, with instructions that they be kept around in a folio so that friends and colleagues could see his musings on the American publishing world, the literary party scene (featuring Allan Ginsburg and the beatniks, who Calvino found excessively dirty), and the “electronic brains” produced by IBM. Is there any doubt that, had he done it today, he’d be carting around a laptop with a WiFi card to log in to Blogger or Moveable Type?