Rather than speak to you of what I have written, perhaps it would be more interesting to tell you about the problems that I have not yet resolved, that I don’t know how to resolve, and what these will cause me to write…

Italo Calvino’s book Six Memos for the Next Millenium is my current obsession. My dad got it for me a couple of years ago, back before I was ready to read a major work of literary criticism (I was knee-deep in figuring out how to teach, where to live, etc). Leave it to a nor’easter, though, to make me want to do nothing more than to sit in my room, listen to quiet music, and hunker down with a book like this one.

Six Memos consists of five lectures–Calvino died before he could complete the sixth one–on what makes good literature and why we still need it. Although the lectures date from the mid-1980s, they’re still highly relevant today. The first pieces, “Lightness” and “Quickness,” describe exactly the kind of writing I hope to achieve on this blog. Lightness, Calvino writes, can mean more than one thing: the lightness achieved through using words carefully, imparting an airy, floaty type feeling; and the lightness that we need to find in our lives to avoid our world’s “slow petrification, more or less advanced depending on people and places but one that spare[s] no aspect of life.” This heaviness is something I feel in the constant bombardment of media signals and consumer pressures: YOU MUST CARE about Anna Nicole Smith’s baby! STOP QUESTIONING WHAT I SAY and pay attention to my intent! BUY a new iPod! YOU NEED an SUV! It is only through literature, argues Calvino, that we can order the heaviness of the world, remixing it into something lighter, more ethereal, and more beautiful.

Anyway, back to Calvino. The quote in the beginning of this entry neatly fits into the ideas about writing I’ve been working with.  Having spent all of last week reading, pro bono, my sophomores’ history research papers, I think I am qualified to say that the great majority of student writng–even honors-level student writing–is boring.  There is a tendency to build pyramids of hard facts and minutiae until, it is hoped, the entire essay is unassailable and the teacher gives an A.  “Whee!” we teachers yell, high-fiving each other.  “Scout found out everything about the Battle of Gallipolli!  And look!  Young Jem knows, through the acquisition of irrefutable evidence, that the case of the Lindbergh Baby’s kidnapping was an unfair media circus!  What great work!”

Sadly, no.   Students, writers, intellectuals, all–there is nothing more boring, more soul-crushing, than to read pages upon pages with no questions, no uncertainties, only heaviness and slowness.  When you fail to make a reader think, you have failed to engage that reader.  And making him or her think doesn’t mean doing the thinking FOR the reader.  This should be obvious by now.

More on this later, I am sure.  Right now, though, I’ve got more reading to do.  Quickness and light, people.  Quickness and light.