Italo Calvino
>Precision in imagination and in language
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| John Martino @ Cerise Press |
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )“In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogenous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language.”
Italo Calvino
Six Memos for the Next Millennium
The impulse for this essay struck hazily, one of those ideas that snuck in between pillow and sleep, or after too many coffees. I’d just read Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium for the first time and thought, ‘fuck me, this is important stuff’ and then, ‘I want to tell other writers and readers about this’.The following revised memos, which are bits of Calvino that I’ve sliced and diced, bits that I’ve twisted and mushed together with my own words.
>Calvino’s faded sixth idea
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In the mid 1980’s, Italo Calvino began to think about the approaching millennium. It was still a decade and a half away, but the Italian writer had been invited to give a series of lectures at Harvard University and believing he needed a bigger theme to guide his lectures he chose “Six Memos for the Next Millennium,” which would be collected in a book by the same name. On the eve of his departure for the United States and with five memos written, he died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage. In the front of the collection his wife later published is a list of the six memos in Calvino’s handwriting, though the sixth and final is faint, as if someone had attempted to erase it. I have read the book a handful of times since it was assigned to me in an MFA course a couple years ago and this opening page remains my favorite, the faded letters like an invitation to finish the list for him, as if the sixth memo could (and should) be almost anything.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Each memo is intended to illuminate a value that Calvino saw in literature and address how it will function within literature in the new millennium. The five memos Calvino wrote cover lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility and multiplicity. The final lecture would have been on consistency. I was fifteen the night the Y2K world meltdown didn’t happen, so I’m not quite a child of the new millennium, but a child of the moment just before, the same moment in which Calvino began his memos. I can remember a time before the proliferation of computers, when I had to do the majority of my teenage gossiping tied to the kitchen wall by a long curling phone cord. So, if I were to complete Calvino’s memos (not that he asked) I don’t think I’d choose consistency. From my vantage point, a decade into the shiny fresh millennium, I’d make the case for sustainability.
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