"Quickness"

Odly enough, Calvino chose to further his lecture on Quickness by surprisingly praising it's counterpart, lingering. He also writes that Quickness is a linkage between the consciousness of thought and also the simultaneousness of ideas being presented. He feels that speed is not just simply the actual movement or progression of time but the relationship between speed and the mind. He notes that Quickness can even be broken down into two sides and he uses the examples of Salviati and Sagrado. Salviati is the reasoning side of quickness or the consciousness of thought as mentioned before. Sagrado represents the imaginative, new conclusions that have not yet been reached as a result of the simultanteous ideas.

I chose to use this famous painting by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. The jumpled images representing the war at Guernica cause the mind to interpret with what Calvino names as Quickness. This literary image was painted with Quickness. There is the obvious reasoning of how the images represent the war. The panged faces and random body parts are expected consequences of bloody and violent encounters. This is the consciousness of thought, the reasoning in the work. However, how Picasso chose to assemble this literary work as well as his other famous works causes the mind to process the "reasonable" information in an imaginative way. The way the images are jumpled together allows for the Sagrado part of Quickness to be played out. Although one aspect of Quickness for Calvino is time within literature, it is also how the creator influences that time. Picasso's painting was not done "Quickly", it took time, effort, thought, planning, precision, vision, etc. Yet, the piece still resembles Quickness in the literary sense.

Electronic Literature must also encompass the components of Quickness. It is just the hard-fast truth that these works cannot be so far out there that they are completely unrecognizable or "un-readable". However, at the same time, they must be simultaneously presenting new ideas, new information, new input so that the option of arriving upon new and creative and imaginative conclusions is a true possibility. In my own words, I would say that Quickness could almost be viewed as an organized chaos within the literary work, whatever it may be.

Literary example: For this, I have chosen to go out on a limb and choose a film rather than a print based text. The film is called "Eight Seconds". The story of a rodeo bull rider whose life is consumed by the world of bull riding. He lives each day for the eight second ride, and it ultimately destroys his life. I think this is a good example of Calvino's concept of quickness, because in the long run of life, 8 seconds is a very short amount of time. However, in the main characters opinion, he is only really living during those 8 seconds. The manipulation of the value of time within this movie is similar to quickness and lingering within works of literature.