Just finished Italo Calvino’s “Six Memos for the next Millennium”, newly re-released as  a lovely looking Penguin Modern Classic. Calvino was due to give the Charles Eliot Norton lectures in 1985/6, but died before he finished writing them. This book is the collected draft versions of what would have been those lectures.

Each lecture addressed a concept that Calvino suggested would define, or be worth saving by, the millennial writer, namely: Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility and Multiplicity  (Constancy, the sixth, wasn’t written).

Despite being written in 1985 and aimed squarely at literature, it’s amazing how prescient they are re all things online. In 6 words he’s pretty much nailed the internet.

But then is that really so surprising? Most people operating online are telling a story of some description, aren’t they? And, ok, what Calvino means by some of those terms might not immediately spring to mind now – In Visibility he fears the loss of the abilty to imagine up picures from the written word, of our over-reliance on visual stimuli. And we do like a bit of visual stimulus online, don’t we? That aside, it’s still interesting how these tenets of a proposed new fiction have been migrated to the web in telling those stories.

Is the web a better medium for story-telling than the novel these days? I don’t know. I can’t remember the last time I read anything new in the shape of a novel that came close to representing any of the above, but that might have more to do with my reading habits over the last few years, and especially since the loss of David Foster Wallace. And while there have been some pretty lovely uses of new media to create outright fictions (I’m thinking of Carl Steadman’s 99 Secrets, as randomised on twitter by Matt Webb), I’m not sure these are any more successful than the occasional poetry of a single 140 character missive.

Anyway. It’s a lovely little book. You should read it.

Tags   Calvino · internet · Literature · stories · twitter1 Comment