Six Memos For The Next Millennium [Paperback]

Calvino offers us a bag of jewels with these five essays on the principle qualities that will carry great writing into the next century. The lessons learned from "Lightness," "Quickness," "Exactitude," "Visibility," and "Multiplicity" can be applied in any creative situation. They add strength to my own compositional efforts, but even more, the multi-faceted richness of Calvino's prose and Creagh's translation is something to savor and rejoice in. Even in his essays, Calvino is a storyteller, and as always his characters are the moods and motives of the people at large, as well as simply people themselves. Whether this is your first or fiftieth time reading this little book, the rush of inspiration that will sweep over you is not to be stemmed. Buy it, read it, write in it, draw lines and circle your favorite words and sentences. This is a book to imprint into your mind.

A new italian Futurist Manifesto, but this time a good one.

It was a an Italian virtuoso contrabassist who told me to read these Lectures. Stefano plays all the arduously difficult new music literature for the contrabass. He travels with a violoncello,so he can play all that repertoire as well. When he plays this music he often ponders Calvino, five primary conceptual corridors toward what he thought of as literature,but music as well can be contemplated with these ideas. "Lightness", well music has a density, Mozart played games with it, and interpreting Mozart can be a treatise in the dialectic,the transformations and timbral modulations of lightness to heaviness.,ask any violinist.Calvino of course expounds on Kundera's popular book, on the weight of the lifeworld of living in the East,the coal-dusted passageways,or of a fallen love,begun transgressivly there as well. Dante is a frequent pilgrim(example) here the lightness of snow falling imperceptibly on the mountainside. "Quickness", but not how fast things move,(our Silicon Valley) odious airjets that may puncture the ozone layer,or violins, but the quickness of an image to transform our consciousness,to lighten it up from the cruel oppression of citylife.That's poetry. I think.Robert Musil is here as well, the complexity,the numbering imagination of his transitory work to modernity the opening two decades of this century,his "Man Without Qualities" a seemingly endless work.And Gedda's "Awfull Mess. . . " on the street a probing detective novel of complexity of a murder in Rome,on the way to the Labor Bureau of the Roman Government. In music I frequently think of Visibility when I have nothing to transport me into the bowels of a Bruckner or an Antheil Symphony,what do I see in the music,like the weight of this century in the "Largo" from the "Fifth Symphony" of Shostakovich.Multiplicity as well another Calvino chapter is here,sprouting its wings like a peacock, all around us if we only have the patience for it. To phanthom and explore all images of a work as looked at through a plexiglass. We seldom do that. How exact is art, "Exactitude" is what Leonardo di Vinci lived his life with, rewrote almost everything,Calvino tells us, as Leopardi,the Essays.