I’ve realized that two interview-collaging TV shows of recent years have had Cosmic Library guests. How To with John Wilson includes a conversation with Philip Kitcher, the philosopher in our Finnegans Wake season; in Cunk on Earth, you’ll see Jim Al-Khalili, who’s also in our 1,001 Nights season. Those two shows are comedies, and on The Cosmic Library we’re very much serious about our interviews, but I think there’s something related in The Cosmic Library, something similarly cosmic/comic. In all three shows, tangents radiate conversationally, revealing interconnections and their opposite. I think that explains the cosmic/comic mood in all these shows.
This is not my announcement that our next season will focus on Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics. But it is my announcement that another season is on the way, and it will be true to the delirious profusion of tangents that John Wilson finds in New York City, Philomena Cunk finds in world history, and this show has encountered in Finnegans Wake and 1,001 Nights.
I won’t say here what the subject will be for season five, but I will say that you have almost certainly encountered it in some way. It is not Cosmicomics.
