Italo Calvino (Italian: ˈiːtalo kalˈviːno; 15 October 1923 – 19 September 1985) was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952–1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979). Lionised in Britain and the United States, he was the most-translated contemporary Italian writer at the time of his death, and a noted contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Six Memos for the Millennium is a collection of five lectures Italo Calvino was about to deliver at the time of his death. Here is his legacy to us: the universal values he pinpoints become the watchwords for our appreciation of Calvino himself. What should be cherished in literature? Calvino devotes one lecture, or memo to the reader, to each of five indispensable qualitie Six Memos for the Millennium is a collection of five lectures Italo Calvino was about to deliver at the time of his death. Here is his legacy to us: the universal values he pinpoints become the watchwords for our appreciation of Calvino himself.
Aug 22, 2017 Italo Calvino (Italian: ˈiːtalo kalˈviːno; 15 October 1923 – 19 September 1985) was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952–1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible. Scopri la trama e le recensioni presenti su Anobii di Lezioni americane scritto da Italo Calvino, pubblicato da Mondadori in formato eBook.
What should be cherished in literature? Calvino devotes one lecture, or memo to the reader, to each of five indispensable qualities: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity. A sixth lecture, on consistency, was never committed to paper, and we are left only to ponder the possibilities. With this book, he gives us the most eloquent defense of literature written in the twentieth century as a fitting gift for the next millennium. This is a series of lectures and in each of them Calvino takes it upon himself to recommend to the next millennium a particular literary value which he holds dear, and has tried to embody in his work. That way this book becomes not only a manifesto on how to write but also a guide to interpreting Calvino’s writings.
1) Lightness: not frivolity but a lightness of touch that allows the writer and reader to soar above the paralyzing heaviness of the world. 2) Quickness: the mental speed of the narra This is a series of lectures and in each of them Calvino takes it upon himself to recommend to the next millennium a particular literary value which he holds dear, and has tried to embody in his work. That way this book becomes not only a manifesto on how to write but also a guide to interpreting Calvino’s writings. 1) Lightness: not frivolity but a lightness of touch that allows the writer and reader to soar above the paralyzing heaviness of the world. 2) Quickness: the mental speed of the narrative — he takes the rapid trot of a folktale as his model here. The narrative should pull the reader along and not get mired up in questioning the non-essential parts.
3) Exactitude: the novel should be perfectly proportioned. Calvino says his guiding image when composing a literary work is the crystal — the magnificent complexity of it and the fact that it can be held in one hand and admired despite all that complexity. The only way to capture life might be to crystalize it with rigid rules? 4) Visibility: or the visual nature of the literary work is all important. For Calvino, every story begins as a visual cue, to which more and more images are added until he has to summon words to describe this profusion of images. He worries about what will happen to the originality of the visual imagination in a world supersaturated by external images. 5) Multiplicity: a literary work should try to encompass the whole known world.
It should be ambitious beyond measure. Without unachievable ambition among its practitioners, literature cannot survive long. So Calvino exhorts us to soar beyond the most distant horizons we can conceive of and then to look down and see everything and then write everything. This section is a paean to the encyclopedic novel. And lastly, 6) Incompleteness: a good novel would be incomplete, just like this list. No one could locate the last memo. Let's start with the fact that Italo Calvino is one of my favorite writers of all time.
His crystalline surrealism, easy tone (at least in translation), and whimsical subjects (by which I mean situations and characters, inclusive) are, to me, compelling. To say that I went into this book with a favorable view of the author would be a gross understatement. I absolutely adore Calvino's work. Now, I am also discovering that I don't really like many books about writing.
Moorcock's Let's start with the fact that Italo Calvino is one of my favorite writers of all time. His crystalline surrealism, easy tone (at least in translation), and whimsical subjects (by which I mean situations and characters, inclusive) are, to me, compelling.
To say that I went into this book with a favorable view of the author would be a gross understatement. I absolutely adore Calvino's work. Now, I am also discovering that I don't really like many books about writing. Moorcock's is, so far as I've read, the best book on writing out there. Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium is a close second. A.very. close second.
What you won't find in this book are lessons on grammar, editorial tips, or the best way to market your book to the masses using obnoxious tactics like going on Goodreads and spamming members when you have not bothered to review more than a half dozen books or looked to see if said members share any kind of interest in books of your type whatsoever. Sorry, was I using my outside voice when I said that?
Italo Calvino Wikipedia
What you will find here is a peek behind Calvino's magic curtain. You will see that even his explanations about how he does his work are magical. You won't see the nuts and bolts of how Calvino mechanically goes about constructing his stories (though he is very methodical), but you will see a high-level treatise on Calvino's state of mind as he writes. This is a philosophical text cleverly disguised as a book about writing. The book is divided into five sections. 'What happened to the sixth?'
The sixth memo is 'Consistency,' lightly penciled into the handwritten table of contents provided by Calvino at the beginning of the book. In fact, it looks as if it had been written in, then erased, an irony that is as Calvino-esque as anything else I can think of. The first memo, 'Lightness,' is the one thing that I struggle with the most as a writer. Here, Calvino is not talking about lightness as it relates to hue, but as it relates to mass. He gives the example from Boccaccio's Decameron, a story in which the Florentine poet Guido Cavalcanti is beset by some men who want to pick a (philosophical) fight with him in a graveyard. Guido, seeing himself surrounded by them, answered quickly: 'Gentlemen, you may say anything you wish to me in your own home.'
Then, resting his hand on one of the great tombs and being very nimble, he leaped over it and, landing on the other side, made off and rid himself of them. Now, call me strange (it's true), but this is something I can sink my writerly teeth into.
I can apply this principle of lightness, not because Calvino has given me specific instructions on how to do it, but because he has opened a window for me to stick my head out, look around, take stock of the landscape, and enjoy it. He's put me in the headspace I need to be in to integrate this principle of lightness into my writing. And so it is with the remaining principles. Of 'Quickness,' Calvino states: I am a Saturn who dreams of being a Mercury, and everything I write reflects these two impulses. And, reading the context of this memo, I know exactly what he means and see that struggle in myself. In fact, this is my favorite quote about writing ever written. But can I take this down to the grammatical level and explain it to someone else?
I know in my bones what Calvino is saying, but explain it in figures and diagrams, I cannot. In the section on 'Exactitude,' Calvino goes to some extent to explain how vagueness can only be properly described, with exactitude. In speaking of the evocative power of words and the importance of using them in the most exact way, he states: The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss. Again, a bit of intuition and reflection is required to really grasp what he is saying. Not because his statement is poorly written, but because this notion is an abstract concept.
This 'writing book,' if one can assign such a banal descriptor to it, requires the reader to think! Memo four, 'Visibility,' dwells on the imagination as the impetus for all creativity, particularly the visual imagination. While he acknowledges that literary work might arise from the hearing of a good turn of phrase or from an academic exercise, the majority of such creations arise from a visual cue in the writer's mind. Thus, the need to use exactitude to describe the visual seed of a story or book, which allows the reader to see into the mind of the writer, if but for a moment, and anchors the story in the reader's mind.
'Multiplicity' is the fifth and most inappropriately titled memo. I might have used the word 'Nestedness' or even 'Complexity' to give the reader a head start, but, hey, it wasn't my book to write. I do feel that this is the weakest section of the book (and Calvino acknowledges as much), as the decision to try to form an all-inclusive novel (meaning: including ALL), is really a question of writerly preference, rather than a universal principle which one ought to apply to writing a novel. Still, Calvino calls on the example of Borges and the Oulipo to demonstrate what is possible in a novel, eve if the pursuit of such a work might not always be advisable.
As a part of this fifth memo, Calvino states his vision of the aim of literature:. The grand challenge for literature is to be capable of weaving together the various branches of knowledge, the various 'codes,' into a manifold and multifaceted vision of the world. Unfortunately, Calvino did not live to see the new millennium. He would have been fascinated by the possibilities of hypertext, no doubt, and his memo on multiplicity dwells, in fact, on the need for more open-ended work with several possible endings, a multi-dimensional plot that reaches through various realities (a'la Borges' 'The Garden of Forking Paths'), and gathers them into one text. He even goes so far as to call his experimental If on a winter's night a traveler a 'hypernovel'. Perhaps, in another reality, Calvino is exploring the infinite possibilities of literature and will one day find his way back to teach us more, like some kind of literary Messiah. In the meantime, he has left Six Memos for the Next Millennium as a travel journal showing the direction he might have gone; inviting us to follow.
I would not be so drastic. I think we are always searching for something hidden or merely potential or hypothetical, following its traces whenever they appear on the surface. I think our basic mental processes have come down to us through every period of history, ever since our Paleolithic forefathers, who were hunters and gatherers. The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an aby I would not be so drastic. I think we are always searching for something hidden or merely potential or hypothetical, following its traces whenever they appear on the surface.
I think our basic mental processes have come down to us through every period of history, ever since our Paleolithic forefathers, who were hunters and gatherers. The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss. Calvino's posthumous lectures are a grand gallop across a cherished earth of letters. The Six Memos For The Next Millennium are a celebration of Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility and Multiplicity (the sixth was never written at the time of Calvino's passing). The ruminations and citations extend from Ovid and Lucretius onward through Dante, Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Cyrano, Valery, Flaubert, Musil and, especially, Borges. This is a wonderful construction, one without grandiosity, but teeming with an organic eloquence.
Were I to choose an auspicious image for the new millennium, I would choose that one: the sudden agile leap of the poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world, showing that with all his gravity he ahs the secret of lightness, and that what many consider to be the vitality of the times-noisy, aggressive, revving and roaring-belongs to the realm of death, like a cemetery for rusty old cars. INTERVIEWER: What place, if any at all, does delirium have in your working life? ITALO CALVINO: Delirium?.
Let’s assume I answer, I am always rational. Whatever I say or write, everything is subject to reason, clarity, and logic. What would you think of me? You’d think I’m completely blind when it comes to myself, a sort of paranoiac. If on the other hand I were to answer, Oh, yes, I am really delirious; I always write as if I were in a trance, I don’t know how I write such crazy things, INTERVIEWER: What place, if any at all, does delirium have in your working life? ITALO CALVINO: Delirium?. Let’s assume I answer, I am always rational.
Whatever I say or write, everything is subject to reason, clarity, and logic. What would you think of me? You’d think I’m completely blind when it comes to myself, a sort of paranoiac. If on the other hand I were to answer, Oh, yes, I am really delirious; I always write as if I were in a trance, I don’t know how I write such crazy things, you’d think me a fake, playing a not-too-credible character. Maybe the question we should start from is what of myself do I put into what I write.
My answer—I put my reason, my will, my taste, the culture I belong to, but at the same time I cannot control, shall we say, my neurosis or what we could call delirium. Italo Calvino is a literary philosopher. He has always strived to provide an alternative view to see through this world and to decipher its beauty and secrets through the mode of imagination and fantasy. His mind is few of those which fascinates and asks me to question the very possibilities of human intelligence. When I finished reading, 'If on a winter's night a traveller' and 'Invisible Cities', I was intrigued and thrilled, and had a nagging curiosity to understand the working; the underlying formula; the quest which must have lead the author to write them.
'Six Memos for the next millennium' provides me a window to understand the methodology and motivation of Calvino's art and magic. Reading Calvino is an experience in itself. He has the marvelous gift to create at the juxtaposition of science and art, the man who wants to combine both. This particular book under discussion is a loose speech prepared to be delivered in Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, in 1984. 'They became an obsession, and one day he announced to me that he had ideas and material for eight lectures', writes his wife Esther. And further continues to say that the eighth lecture, had it been presented, would have been, 'On the beginning and the endingof novels'. But this collection has five lectures, sixth one unwritten, and provides the dissection of Calvino's own works and also an idea of the enormous range of his inspirations.
Heads up, Calvino places 'Lightness' as the first value to be discussed. As someone whose writings makes the reader to fly, it is no surprise that Calvino places this value on top.
He is quick to make it clear that he is proposing to talk of the lightness which one derives from intelligence/ thoughtfulness, and not the lightness of frivolity. 'Lightness for me goes with precision and determination, not with vagueness and the haphazard', and aptly quotes Paul Valery, 'One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather'. Of all the passages which he writes to espouse his first value, the one that stood close to my heart is his tribute to Milan Khundera's novel 'The unbearable Lightness of Being'. When I finished Kundera's novel, I had the feeling of jubilant joy and freshness as if I stood beside a waterfall with patchy greenery surrounding it.
I never fully understood the reason behind the 'light' feeling I had then, for the novel is an excruciatingly painful one to read. But, Calvino explains beautifully: 'His novel shows how everything we choose and value in life for its lightness soon reveals its true, unbearable weight. Perhaps only the liveliness and mobility of the intelligence escape this sentence - the very qualities with which this novel is written, and which belong to a world quite different from the one we live in' With 'Quickness' as his second lecture, he brings open the secret of a story which is its economy, the form and structure, rhythm and underlying logic. His love for fairytales and folklore, and his varied reading of classics have peppered the whole book, and he quotes them laboriously to show the agility of thought and expression. Like a tangent that strikes an arc and flow on its own, he touches Galileo, Leopardi and mythology, and he turns himself into a thread that connects the parallels. He also predicts the sure raise of mass media (and social media), and had the foresight to suggest that Conciseness will be the virtue of the new millennia. 'I will confine myself to telling you that I dream of immense cosmologies, sagas, and epics all reduced to the dimensions of an epigram' In 'Exactitude' and 'Visibility', Calvino explores the calculated and well-defined symmetry of a work, and the beauty and nature of visual imagination, respectively.
Julian Barnes has said, “Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.” It is the same kind of obsession which Calvino exudes. His search is to create an art as perfect as a mathematical equation or a geometry. To create an orderliness using literature as his medium. Literature - and I mean the literature that matches up these requirements - is the Promised Land in which language becomes what it really ought to be. A work of literature is one of these minimal portions in which the existent crystallizes into a form, acquires a meaning - not fixed, not definitive, not hardened into a mineral immobility, but alive as an organism.
For some reason women often see truckers as totally safe to be flashing and it leads to some very hot porn that ends up on VoyeurWeb. Flashing truck drivers pics. A lot of the time the flashing truckers action is captured by the husband as he drives.
Poetry is the great enemy of chance, in spite of also being a daughter of chance and knowing that in the last resort, chance will win the battle Both 'Exactitude' and 'Visibility' are also the values which could easily be expected in other arts and most importantly in painting, drawing etc., Perhaps, is it because of the fact that Calvino himself was trained in the art of drawing when he was an adolescent and his extraordinary love for movies as a youngster that must have led him to the love of forms and colors? Next to 'Lightness' and 'Quickness', my favorite lecture is on 'Multiplicity'.
No wonder Calvino is inspired by technical-engineer background writers like Gadda and Musil, and he is also enamored by their capacity of excruciating detail. He quotes Gadda, Musil and Proust, all of those authors who never had an ending for their works as a denouement or struggled to have a one, something a game which Calvino would like to play in his literary works. Isn't it ironic and looks like a divine comedy that this book which stands as his final legacy must itself remain unfinished, although each of the chapters is surrealistically complete and conclusive on its own? But perhaps the answer that stands closest to my heart is something else: Think what it would be to have a work conceived from outside the self,a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, To the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to stone, to cement, to place. Somewhere else, Calvino wrote almost emphatically, 'the less one understands the more posterity will appreciate my profundity of thought.
Lezioni Americane Di Italo Calvino Ebook Library Online
In fact, let me say: POSTERITY IS STUPID Think how annoyed they’ll be when they read that!' Perhaps, Calvino might have treated Posterity with less glory and empathy.
But, time, the sure hands of which determines the best, will always treasure Calvino as an original writer, with a voice which movingly spoke for all that is wonderful in human beings, for all the ages to come and even beyond eternity. References: 1. Calvino is just so effortlessly wonderful.
He and literature have a very intimate relationship and she tells him secrets about herself that no one else gets to hear. Calvino spills the beans on what are the qualities he feels are most important to the literature of the future: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity. I think my favorites were lightness and multiplicity considering that quickness, exactitude, and visibility seem to be very self-evidently positive Calvino is just so effortlessly wonderful. He and literature have a very intimate relationship and she tells him secrets about herself that no one else gets to hear. Calvino spills the beans on what are the qualities he feels are most important to the literature of the future: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity. I think my favorites were lightness and multiplicity considering that quickness, exactitude, and visibility seem to be very self-evidently positive qualities of literature (who wants to read a slow, vague, abstract novel?) But the idea of lightness as a positive quality was fresh for me: not lightness as insubstantial but rather, 'be light like the bird, not the feather.' And the goal of literature as a connector of the wildly disparate knowledges of the modern world, the multiplicity of knowledge in every book, I think is a courageous, especially if coupled with quickness and lightness.
Calvino occasionally meanders a wee bit too far from his topics in the essays but his digressions are terrifically thought-provoking. His vast knowledge of world literature is also inspiring-he basically provides a list of great authors you should read (if they're good enough for Calvino.).
Although this has the potential to be a little bit too academic for some, I heartily recommend this as caviar for a hungry mind. Italo Calvino, given the meticulousness and conceptual cohesion of his storytelling, is an unsurprisingly lucid theorist as well. Among his final works, these five essays were drawn from lectures he he was prevented from delivering by his death in 1985, each covering a different literary trait he most valued. (A 6th was never written down.) Equally ordered and discursive, each offers insight into Calvino's writing (though much of it this is self-evident in the writing, as well), commentary on li Italo Calvino, given the meticulousness and conceptual cohesion of his storytelling, is an unsurprisingly lucid theorist as well.
Among his final works, these five essays were drawn from lectures he he was prevented from delivering by his death in 1985, each covering a different literary trait he most valued. (A 6th was never written down.) Equally ordered and discursive, each offers insight into Calvino's writing (though much of it this is self-evident in the writing, as well), commentary on literary history, and useful notes on areas of consideration that should really be on any writer's mind when beginning a new work. Actually, following that prior comment, I should say these traits are SO self-evident in Calvino's writing that the direct explication of them is almost unneccessary. Not that there isn't much to value here, but only after you've already considered works like Invisible Cities and If on a Winter's Night a Traveler for yourself. The examples outshine their analysis, or any specific analysis for that matter. Italo Calvino was born in Cuba and grew up in Italy. He was a journalist and writer of short stories and novels.
His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If On a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979). His style is not easily classified; much of his writing has an air of the fantastic Italo Calvino was born in Cuba and grew up in Italy.
He was a journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If On a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979). His style is not easily classified; much of his writing has an air of the fantastic reminiscent of fairy tales ( Our Ancestors, Cosmicomics), although sometimes his writing is more 'realistic' and in the scenic mode of observation ( Difficult Loves, for example). Some of his writing has been called postmodern, reflecting on literature and the act of reading, while some has been labeled magical realist, others fables, others simply 'modern'. He wrote: ' My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight.
I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.'