David Naimon
speaker
4,074 appearances
10 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 24 Aug
David Naimon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Hearing your family in the audiobook, inviting your daughter into the composition of the book, your partner into the sound design, your mother character sending her own writing to her mother in the hopes of keeping her mind sharp and alive.
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All of these feel like homemaking activities or mosaic making activities.
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Same with the way your books are so full of other books and of your love of other writers, that your books swim sort of within an ocean of books that you want to be among.
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And I also love how you mentioned to Carlos Puig that at many Sicilian archaeological sites, the mosaics counterintuitively were preserved by the volcanoes rather than destroyed by them.
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And it reminds me how the tablets where we discovered Gilgamesh, our oldest epic, were preserved by the heat of the fire from the burning of the library of Nineveh.
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because it does feel like the world is burning in many ways.
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And in these instances that you put forth,
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the volcano preserving the v mosaics, the burning actually produces a certain continuity somehow.
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I also think of how, as you also mentioned today, Empedocles, who originated the theory of the four elements, believed that the forces of love and the forces of strife would either mix or separate the elements, respectively.
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Because it feels like these books of yours are about bringing the elements together, the mosaic fragments together, knitting us together against the odds somehow.
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In this book, you talk about how Virgil thought of Sicily as the hinge between Africa and Europe, or the hinge where Africa and Europe were once linked, and how the southernmost part of Sicily is farther south than the northernmost part of Tunisia.
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And how the gesture of this book feels in a way like a future oriented gesture that is knitting something back together in the face of what appears to be
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be a further and further rupture apart.
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Because I think of things like similar things like Matya Sanar's work, who
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not only uncovers the deep ways Islam has influenced Europe in history, but how many of Europe's cities in his mind he would call great Muslim cities too, which makes me think about this secret Arabic history of volcanoes, or Tedju Cole's great essay where he follows the flight of Caravaggio from the law in Italy and Sicily and Malta and elsewhere.
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And he's painting some of his most iconic paintings while he's on the run.
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But he's not only stopping to visit the paintings that Caravaggio made along the way, but he's visiting the refugee camps too.
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sometimes creating intersections between the two, bringing people from the camps into churches where they didn't necessarily on their own feel welcome to be before these paintings and to discuss them together.
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In a way I I bring this up simply to say thank you for your work, Valeria, but I guess also to invite any final thoughts you have about throwing in your lot with
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Reinvention, I think, perhaps too.
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Showing 1601–1620 of 4,074 · page 81 of 204
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