Six Memos for the Next Millennium
This has long been one of my favourite go-to books when it comes to inspiration. Whether the project is creative, academic, or simply the project of life, Italo Calvino never fails to shed simple, perfect light on the matter. Before my uncle John pointed me towards this text I knew Calvino for his masterful short stories and his innovative and whimsical Invisible Cities. Based on writings composed for the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, Calvino died before he had a chance to deliver the lectures. Of the memos, only five were completed at the time of his death.
The memos, broken as they are into chapters, are as follows:
1) Lightness
2) Quickness
3) Exactitude
4) Visibility
5) Multiplicity.
The sixth memo was to be Consistency. The lectures perform a selective and intertextual delving into literary history in order to predict the future of literature. He warns that these meditations will not be speculations on the potential death of the book "in the so-called postindustrial age of technology." Instead, he writes, his "confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us."
For me each lecture is a revelation. As part of the project of tying up dissertation ends and poetic presents, I will write a response to one memo a day next week, starting with Lightness on Monday and ending with Multiplicity on Friday. My hope is that these responses will act as a focusing and meditative tool. I haven't re-read the entire series through in quite a few years and am excited to see what this will yield. Stay tuned...
The memos, broken as they are into chapters, are as follows:
1) Lightness
2) Quickness
3) Exactitude
4) Visibility
5) Multiplicity.
The sixth memo was to be Consistency. The lectures perform a selective and intertextual delving into literary history in order to predict the future of literature. He warns that these meditations will not be speculations on the potential death of the book "in the so-called postindustrial age of technology." Instead, he writes, his "confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us."
For me each lecture is a revelation. As part of the project of tying up dissertation ends and poetic presents, I will write a response to one memo a day next week, starting with Lightness on Monday and ending with Multiplicity on Friday. My hope is that these responses will act as a focusing and meditative tool. I haven't re-read the entire series through in quite a few years and am excited to see what this will yield. Stay tuned...