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[proximoception]

44. The Name of the World
45. Six Memos for the Next Millennium

Someone I otherwise don't respect gave me the good advice to spend some time writing about everything I read, given my intended profession. I've tried to practice that this last year or so, but it's gotten rusty along with the reading lately. Six Memos is five lectures Calvino was about to go give at Harvard when he died, each about a value he wanted future writers to keep alive in their work: quickness, multiplicity, lightness, exactitude, some other one. Consistency didn't even get written - insert joke about death here. The book is largely a stitch job from literary essays found in English in the overlapping collections The Uses of Literature and Why Read the Classics, which makes it a good sampler of Calvino-as-critic. It's probably a wonderful book about literature, but Calvino's narrative voice has analysis blended into it so perfectly in his stories and memoirs that you miss that fullness here, where the artist knob's turned down and the critic one up. He can talk about anything inside stories and you love it, but talking about stories from without diminishes him to a curious degree. I wonder what it is that Borges has on him, here - self-dramatization as a critic? Whatever it is it's thoroughgoing, presumably innate. From day one Borges had the just right tone, while Calvino can be perfectly reasonable, original, exact and right on matters of great importance and still not excite as much as some snobbish, zany, misguided attack on fin du siecle suburban Buenos Aires bordello music Borges dashed off at age 25 for some drunk friend's ten-copy journal. You see the difference in the few pages of personal reminiscence Calvino allows in, on how American cartoons were republished in Italy without word balloons during his early childhood, forcing him to imagine the connections, encouraging him to inhabit them, mix them up with one another, think in and between images. You have to hear him tell it.

I'm overcritical but always in a good cause: something better is near and we must run to it at once. In this case, the other Calvino.

Comments

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

It's a tough comparison for Calvino. Borges has a once-in-a-century ability to find things/topics/themes that are incredibly interesting. Almost nobody else like him until after him when his example was there.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I think Calvino proves the example's not enough. Great critics seem much rarer than great fiction writers.