“[…] all ‘realities’ and ‘fantasies’ can take on form only by means of writing, in which outwardness and innerness, the world and I, experience and fantasy, appear composed of the same verbal material. The polymorphic visions of the eyes and the spirit are contained in uniform lines of small or capital letters, periods, commas, parentheses—pages of signs, packed as closely together as grains of sand, representing the many-colored spectacle of the world on a surface that is always the same and always different, like dunes shifted by the desert wind.” These sentences form one my favorite passages of one of my favorite books, Italo Calvino’s Lezioni americane (Six Memos for the Next Millennium, in Patrick Creagh’s English translation for Harvard University Press). Whilst I cannot get excited by those other “grains of sand” of which musical notation is made, the written word fascinates me in itself, especially when it is printed in ink and on paper. Scores only interest me according to what we humans make of them while turning ink into sound. With books I like to interact, hold them in my hands, look at them, smell them, and hear what sound comes out of them when opening, when closing, when turning their pages. And, with the same pleasure, I like to write them. I started doing it in the 90s and I hope to die with a pen in my hand—metaphorically or not.