In 1985, italian writer Italo Calvino

was invited to give the annual [chagachaga speech] at Harvard the next year. He began working on a series of 6 lectures, which he called memos (in italian "proposte"), that together would outline what writing needed to do in order to stay relevant in the next millennium.

Each memo was dedicated to a different theme - and as one might expect from the author of Invisible Cities, each one was a map that contained both itself and its inverse, as well as a hint of the other memos. They are somewhat like what one might see if magnetic fields had shadows: tense, illusive, expansive. Reading the lectures, one begins to "discern [...] t he tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites' gnawing."

The first memo was dedicated to Lightness. "My working method," he writes, "has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight [...] 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."

The second: Quickness -- praise for swift storytelling.

The third: Exactitude, without which lightness and quickness dissolve into mist. "For the ancient Egyptians," he begins, "exactitude was symbolized by a feather that served as a weight on scales used for the weighing of souls."

The fourth, Visibility, is about being faithful to the images that rain into our imagination - and it is about the source of this rain. The author often sets off not with words but with a picture.

The fifth, Multiplicity, is a call for literature as all-encompassing encyclopedia, a shaded relief of the web that holds every object and every event to each other throughout time. Within the particular opens a window onto the infinite.

Calvino died before writing a sixth memo.



The five existing lectures, never read aloud, were published posthumously. It is with sincere respect to the author, and with a touch of cheekiness, that we've named our digital production company Sixth Memo Media. The last memo does not exist, and the last thing writing needs to do in order to stay relevant today is to become an image.

The Sixth Memo, said to have been titled Consistency, is also an homage to our friendship: Calvino's collection of lectures was a present Danny gave Oscar, a node in a long string of shared books that weaves through our work. We founded Sixth Memo Media to make whatever we want with whomever we please. We aspire to produce works that share Calvino's whimsy, his lightness, and his depth of imagination -- "imagination as a repertory of what is potential, what is hypothetical, of what does not exist and has never existed, and perhaps will never exist but might have existed."

Click the goods on the shelves to find some of our past pieces, collaborations, and (anti)inspirations.

If you'd like to collaborate, reach out to either of us, or both: [dchimes94@gmail.com // oscardangeac@gmail.com]

Sixth Memo Media