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Published posthumously in 1988, "Six Memos for the Next Millennium" is a collection of five essays on literature and writing transcribed from lectures that Cuban-born writer Italo Calvino (1923 - 1985) would have given at Harvard during the Fall of 1985 for the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. Calvino grew ill and died before the lectures could be given.

The five essays collected here are titled: 1. Lightness; 2. Quickness; 3. Exactitude; 4. Visibility; 5. Multiplicity. The sixth lecture was to be titled "Consistency," but was never written.

Each essay is dedicated to one aspect or value in literature, and Calvino draws on a vast resource of folkloric, mythic and canonical material to express the importance or relevance of each value. The tone of the essays is reminiscent of George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language;" both focus intensely on the way language is used as a medium for thought, and caution against mis- or disuse of straightforward thinking, writing and speaking.

Below is transcribed the introduction to the Vintage (1993) edition, a textual note by Calvino's wife, Esther Calvino.

"About the title: Although I carefully considered the fact that the title chosen by Italo Calvino, "Six Memos for the Next Millenium," does not correspond to the manuscript as I found it, I have felt it necessary to keep it. Calvino was delighted by the word "memos," after having thought of and dismissed titles such as "Some Literary Values," "A Choice of Literary Values," "Six Literary Legacies"--all of them ending with "for the Next Millenium."

Calvino started thinking about the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures as soon as they were proposed in 1984. He stood before a vast range of possibilities open to him and he worried, believing as he did in the importance of constraints, until the day he settled on a scheme to organize the lectures; after that he devoted most of his time to their preparation. From the first of January 1985 he did practically nothing else. They became an obsession, and one day he announced to me that he had ideas and material for eight lectures. I know the title for what might have been an eighth lecture: "Sul cominciare e sul finire" (On the beginning and the ending [of novels]). But I have not yet been able to find the text.

My husband had finished writing these five lectures by September 1985, at the moment of departure for the United States and Harvard University. Of course, these are the lectures Calvino would have read--Patrick Creagh was in the process of translating them--and he would certainly have revised them before their publication as a book by Harvard University Press. But I do not think there would have been major changes: the difference between the first versions I read and the final ones lies in structure, not content. Calvino wanted to call the sixth lecture "Consistency," and he planned to write it in Cambridge. I found the others, all in perfect order, in the Italian original, on his writing desk ready to be put into his suitcase.

I should like to express my gratitude to Patrick Creagh for his hard work on the translation; to Kathryn Hume, from Pennsylvania State University, for the help she has given me--in more ways than one--in preparing the manuscript for publication; and to Luca Marighetti, from Konstanz University, for his deep knowledge of Calvino's work and thought."

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review by stevedolph

sucker for the absurd, the ironic

http://calquezine.bl...

The definitions of “charlatan” are varied, but all humorous. Some: “a mountebank or Cheap Jack who descants volubly to a crowd in the street;” “one who puffs his wares; a puffer;” “an empiric who pretends to posess wonderful secrets;” “a quack.” The most universal: “an assuming empty pretender to knowledge or skill; a pretentious impostor.” Whenever a skilled craft like, say, writing fiction, for example, is sold to the unwitting in a package marked “magic” or “secret,” the seller, without fail, is a charlatan.

So it goes with the contemporary world of the so-called “writing industry,” in which thousands of copies of hundreds of books are sold yearly which contain the secrets of the craft of writing. Add to that the white tower version, where hundreds of Creative Writing programs across these great United States give willing (and more importantly, paying) students an education from published writers in the program’s permanent or visiting faculty who may or may not be at all interested in teaching.

But let’s stick to the books. What I need is Magic, O wizard alchemist of the writing life! And I’ve got rupees to burn so give it up. A quick incant through the interweb’s list manifests these promising titles: Writing Magic: Creating Stories that Fly; The Magic of Writing: How to Write and Publish the Book That Is Inside You; and of course, Capturing the Magic of Fiction Writing. But damnit my double skinny latté is cooling off and I’ve got to get this Art made like now! If you’re like so many hurried American professional Artists you don’t have time for some weirdo Hippy potions, you need results. Try: Schaum’s Quick Guide to Writing Great Stories; Writing Under Pressure: The Quick Writing Process; or the all-in-one style A Quick Guide to Writing a Book: From Ideas to Publication. But you’re not some Yuppy mainstream schmuck, are you? You are a true rebel, an individualist Emerson would envy. What you need are the secrets that those other typewriter monkies don’t know; that’ll get the Art out. If so, drop some change on: Show; Don’t Tell!: Secrets of Writing; Writing for Story: Craft Secrets of Dramatic Nonfiction; and for the Dan Brown in us all, Trial and Error: A Key to the Secret of Writing and Selling. I could go on and on like this, but you get the gist: no matter what kind of Artist you are, there’s a book out there that’s been specially, secretly and magically designed to turn YOU into a true writing craftsman.

The overwhelming popularity of this discourse on writing is enough to turn anyone off to any book that deals with the subject. But Six Memos for the Next Millenium is a different sort of book. In fact it’s exactly the opposite. Six Memos is a book about reading, about the value of reading in a go-go iWorld where the information and insight we get most often, from the internet most likely, is for all intents and purposes, magical. The essays contained in this book are prophetic; they were written in a year before the internet, or home computers for that matter, were as ubiquitous as they are today. Calvino understood that in the late 1980’s our global society (before there was one to speak of) was at the brink of a new era, one in which knowledge acquired through books, literary books specifically, would soon take a back seat to a different kind of knowledge, one that was instant and effortless, invisible and intangible. He doesn’t say this outright but the thought is implied by the titles of the essays: Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, Multiplicity; apply these gerunds to the things we value about the world around us today and you’ll see to what extent Calvino understood the direction in which we were moving.

The titles of the essays refer to literary aspects he takes as values. Simply put, they are guides to reading and writing. Each essay focuses on writing or writers, from the Classical to the Modern era, that embody these aspects. What we find out is that on a deeper and more simple level, these are ways to think and be. So really Six Memos is a philosophy book written like a book on literature written like a book on writing. But in this case it’s written from the perspective of someone who knew that the only way to be a writer is to read deeply and widely, and to write.

Ratings (100 pt scale)

Overall Rating - abstained

Dolcezza Quotient - 90

review rating:

-- compelling --

This review has (2) responses

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response from cheyne
I've read this book *maybe* 10 times -- not straight through -- I tend to skip around and read only certain sections. Maybe Calvino would appreciate that?

response from sbarranca
sorry, couldn't resist. Loved the review. I don't read those writing books because I am first and foremost a reader, so I am not disenchanted with the promise of writing a best seller after reading a "how to" book. I am interested in what our society is becoming in this too fast paced world, and these essays sound interesting and maybe they will validate me when I push all my work to the side because I am reading a great book! Thanks for the review.

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