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the American spirit in New York: the Russian component (in this case Stanislavsky), brought here by the Jews, mixed with the Freudian notion of internal sincerity, which is rooted in the old Protestant component of public confession, and all this held together by the fundamental Anglo-Saxon pedagogical idea that holds that everything can be taught. At the Actors’ Studio two American actors, husband and wife, who saw my little play at Spoleto, the only one I have ever written in my life, asked me to put it on there, so we translated it together and they will perform it in a few weeks, but I will by then be in California. There is also a section of the Actors’ Studio for playwrights, but I have never been. There are no books about the Actors’ Studio.
    Electronic Brains
    I have contacted the head office of the biggest producer of calculating machines, IBM. Their public relations are very classy, they received me as though I were the Italian President and put the entire firm at my disposal. When they learned that I was going to Washington, they set up a visit for me to the Space Computing Center, in other words the tracking station which receives all the data and does all the calculations for the Vanguard and various other rockets. I was all pleased with myself, thinking I was going to see things that were almost top secret, whereas this Space Computing Center sits in a shop-window in a street in central Washington and is for show more than anything else; however, it is a functioning centre, though the danger that all the astronauts’ data would be lost if a lorry smashed the window in a crash is nullified by the fact that there is another identical centre at Cape Canaveral. However, it was really fascinating: I saw models of rockets and satellites, which in theory should even take off if you turn on certain lights, but the models are always broken. Young mathematicians type on space computer keyboards with hesitant and absent-minded gestures. On the 23 rd IBM in New York put at my disposal a Cadillac with a chauffeur and a technical expert from Turin to be my guide at Poughkeepsie, up in Westchester where IBM’s huge factory is. This is a factory with 10, 000 employees, like a medieval city, and in front of it is a huge carpark for 4, 000 cars (these immense carparks full of grey and blue cars, that you see as soon as you leave New York, are one of the things that give you the most authentic feeling of America). I am received by a group of managers who explain to me first the way the whole organization is structured, and one of the first things they tell me is that there is no trade union. Naturally I ask why; ‘They don’t need them’ is their answer. In fact they are all paid better here than elsewhere, the paternalism is quite open, and the colour portrait of Mr Watson 41 hangs everywhere; I will later learn that on Mr Watson’s birthday the employees were invited to the party with a cyclostyled letter explaining that if they did not have a car to go to the party with their wives, a car supplied by the management would come to fetch them at such and such a time; if the wife did not have an evening-dress the management would provide her with one, and a baby-sitter service was also assured for that evening, and at table number such and such places numbered such and such were booked for them, and when Mr Watson came in they all had to stand and sing the following song to the famous tune, etc., and there on the letter were the words of a song in honour of Mr Watson. However, all this is beside the point. I visited the factory, they explained everything about the cores which make up the machines’ memory and I also learnt how just through the positive and negative charges in the cores you can represent any number or letter, and all the processes they use to produce those tiny transistors, and then I saw the Ramac, which is the part that carries out the operations even on data input at random, not in any established