I wrote about the bookstores and libraries I knew before the Digital Revolution, but I forgot to mention several works of fiction based on that cultural scene, because I was just warming up with a few brushstrokes.

Just as struggling actors fight for their dreams waiting tables or working as baristas, struggling writers end up as clerks in bookshops—as did George Orwell and Penelope Fitzgerald, two British authors who used their experience to craft superior, heartbreaking fiction.

Orwell, in the mid-1930s, worked for almost two years as a part-time assistant—just afternoons—at Booklovers’ Corner, a secondhand bookshop in the London borough of Hampstead. He was a real nut job, and probably was dealing with a ton of guilt after his experience in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. Indeed, he was a thirty-year-old, but fast and expeditious in translating his adventures into fiction, always peppered with the current leftist ideas of that decade, when Stalinist commie propaganda still wasn’t exposed as a total fraud.

Fitzgerald, in the late ‘50s, worked part-time for four years as a clerk at The Sole Bay Bookshop in Southwold, Suffolk. She was already a forty-year-old mother of three children and the wife of an alcoholic trial lawyer, who was already on his way to disbarment for theft and public disgrace. But Penelope never dared to abandon him, because he had post-traumatic stress disorder from the war, and legend says she began writing fiction just to entertain her husband on his deathbed in the late ‘70s.

I say “legend says” because anything you may read about Penelope Fitzgerald is just heartbreaking. Or maybe it’s me, because of the deep connection I feel while reading The Bookshop. That idea about reading for pleasure or entertainment is total BS for retarded, fat, and bored panda bears. I mean it. Reading is dangerous, and good novels are always written on the razor’s edge. That’s the deal.

While mourning her alcoholic partner, Fitzgerald sat at her desk and channeled her whole love story with authorial control, writing about a childless young widow, Florence Green, who decides to open a bookshop with a small inheritance in the back of beyond.

Call me crazy, but what I feel reading the first page is a dark genius gutting me with a butcher’s knife. Remember the narrative skill required to immerse you immediately in the story and activate your suspension of disbelief? This is it. I’ve read it out loud like a hundred times, and each time my voice breaks. It’s not about empathy; it’s about the narrator’s skill to project Florence Green’s worries onto a heron flying across an estuary while trying to swallow a long eel.

That being said, you are right for thinking: what a drag those writers are! Is this one of those books about books? Well, let me cut it into slices for you. Real writers are too busy writing to care about anything other than books, the money they need to remain tightly focused on their next installment, and the amount of love and dedication they can get from their partners or non-committed relationships to survive the constant ordeal that writing entails. Pulling up all-nighters is not for the faint of heart.

I wrote a novel about The Chocolate Party, the Barcelonian bookstore of my younger years, because I was immensely fortunate with the bookseller, who took my literary ambitions as his own. And we couldn’t have been more different, as I came to realize.

It took me two long decades to find an interesting angle to write about The Chocolate Party, centered entirely on characters, way beyond the usual clichés about the parochial clientele, book clubs, coffee stains, and cigarettes—and I still think it cries out for a third act. Because of the gripping march into the Digital Revolution, and its nefarious consequences both for readership and creativity.

While working the afternoon hours at Booklovers’ Corner, Orwell couldn’t turn on the heat because the owner thought it would steam up the window display and drive potential customers away. Nothing serious, but the frail and moth-eaten Orwell had caught pneumonia during his vagrant years that almost killed him. And all his works shared the same noble obsession with poverty and class warfare—which was, on the other hand, entirely reasonable in the era of the Great Depression.

In his novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Orwell goes further because he was in love and, suddenly and for the first time, loved back. So the main character, Gordon Comstock, became a caricature of himself, his war against money, and his search for love. But we should read between the lines, as with all of Orwell’s stories. Eileen O’Shaughnessy was a poet and psychologist, a balm for the socially awkward Orwell, and she married a struggling writer and political activist whom his own family described as impossible to live with.

Sadly, it was too good to last. But they still lived together through ten productive years before she died at age 39 on the operating table. I know it sounds corny, but without Eileen, it’s hard to explain how Orwell chose to be a fiction writer instead of a fierce political activist after becoming deeply disappointed by Stalin’s purges. That, and the trickle of news about the Holodomor that escaped Soviet censorship—the terror-famine that the Soviets inflicted across Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and the North Caucasus. I can imagine Orwell’s disappointment through reading Homage to Catalonia, which he wrote after witnessing how the commies turned on each other in Barcelona in May of ‘37, where he went from fighting fascists to running with Eileen for the French border, convinced he would be killed by those fools.

I remember when and how bookstore cafes arrived because it is part of my reading experience. They arrived in the ‘80s when the number of readers dropped drastically, acting as an invitation so that people who had never opened a book in their lives could find the perfect excuse to enter a bookstore. Sometimes, they would have a quick coffee, feeling completely out of their element, without a television or background music to entertain them. Other times, and not as often, they thought about buying a book as a gift for a loved one with whatever was trendy back then. Like someone buying clothes or checking out whatever is playing at the movies, without showing the slightest preference. For all of this, they relied on the bookseller.

Every male bookseller’s dream was to set up a book club with the air of the old casinos. Every female bookseller’s dream was to set up a book club where no man could enter, unless he was trans and promised to remain mute. I was lucky enough to meet a straight couple—everything has to be labeled now—both inveterate readers, who set up a bookstore in the late ‘80s in the Eixample of Barcelona, almost reaching the upper part of Diagonal Avenue.

And it was by chance. Because in reality, I was trying to buy a telescope at the department store on the other side of the corner. I lived devouring books in a solitary bungalow in the coastal hills, far from the city lights and traffic. Reading at night was thrilling, and sometimes I rested my eyes by stargazing. Hence, I wanted to acquire a telescope that wasn’t a toy.

The small bookstore was close to the chamfered corner, wedged between cafes, parking exits, and other businesses. And the storefront was a windowpane framed by green wooden slats, where pastries had likely once been abundant and the bowls of hot chocolate served, since it kept the same name as the defunct business, The Chocolate Party. I mention this because the mix-up caught my attention at the time and made me browse the lovely window display. In the back, consumed by his reading and without noticing me, sat the bookseller.

If there was one thing I detested, it was booksellers who sold books they didn’t read. It was like going to a record store where the clerk had no ear for music. When I walked in, the old shop bell rang. Since I couldn’t find what I wanted, I struck up an animated conversation with the bookseller, who, as he listened to me, jotted down the order I was placing. I was the only customer he had, and he gave me his full attention. And I promised to drop by soon, before locking myself in the nearby cinematheque.

Some years later, I also ended up frequenting the university library, totally circular and glass-enclosed in the shape of a flying saucer. I would wait for the girl I lived with to finish her shift, a shy librarian with blond curls who, when she spoke, did so in whispers, while shooting you dead with enormous blue eyes that she couldn’t close even when sleeping by my side.

Sometimes, I would make the entire round of the library, as the panoramic view of the city was impressive. The place seemed as silent to me as the library where the angels Damiel and Cassiel wander in Wings of Desire, alongside other angels, which served them as a sounding board to hear the inner monologues, sometimes overlapping, in other languages, the unspoken thought.

I wasn’t an angel like the one Bruno Ganz played. But I craved the never-ending flow of unspoken thought. Because there was nothing sexier than a woman who loved to read. It was the first time I was with someone who shared that passion as intensely as I did. I guess I became a hopeless sapiosexual.

The pastoral evenings we shared were far more creative than the usual emotional melodramas. Thanks to her, I read a divine madman like Friedrich Hölderlin. And I also learned the fate of the books that nobody reads, which until then I was completely ignorant of: the sordid graveyards of forgotten books.

Between the small bookstore and the flying saucer-shaped library, I was giving free rein to the lust for books that I felt, until I wound up in a hospital with an ulcer, alongside that silent sphinx with eyes like hard-boiled eggs, in the X-ray waiting room, while I recited very close to her “The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow,” a short story by Gabriel García Márquez.

The bookseller soon knew that I didn’t read to entertain myself or to marvel, but to learn narrative, as much of it as I could understand, convinced of how useless it was to try to write something original while lacking a baseline. It is the sin of Adamism that floods the world of Vanity Press.

But this is the world of yesterday, before the Digital Revolution began turning record stores, afternoons at the cinematheque, and the small bookstore into a fading memory; the latter was revived as a bookstore cafe and gave the couple a good fifteen years, until Amazon entered the market and The Chocolate Party closed shortly before the 2008 financial crisis. And the flying saucer was demolished twenty years ago when the university changed neighborhoods. I imagine the same fate for the graveyards of forgotten books.

In today’s world, less than one percent of printed editions manage to surpass three thousand copies sold in Spain, and 49% sell nothing at all. By the way, the Vanity Presses are working better than ever. And the bookstores that can afford the rent have no qualms whatsoever about selling you even bread.

In a town of German Bavaria, Pegnitz, when the bookseller retired, the baker was an inveterate reader and, understanding that man does not live by bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God, the baker refounded the bookstore with the fitting name: Bread and Book. It was certainly a collective effort that also involved citizen participation. And it demonstrates, in turn, that book clubs are the last bastion against the tsunami of idiocy.

I thought that this summer audiences would rush to the bookstores to read Homer’s work, instead of splitting hairs between IMAX and regular movie theaters, both populated by popcorn munchers and soft drink slurpers, which I avoid by default.

I confess I have lost count of the years I’ve avoided a totally outdated economic exploitation model, which entails sitting in the dark with hundreds of strangers who do not keep the required silence, despite the imposing sound. And of course, they plan to stuff themselves with the same decorum as a capon.

That being said, I was once a good moviegoer, back when computer technology was in its infancy and monitors had fluorescent colors. But as soon as I could clearly see the skin pores on a monitor and the sound went beyond stereo to multichannel, the lack of civility from the audience in movie theaters finally convinced me not to go back.

From the point of view of the British film director Christopher Nolan, I am wrong. And yes, I probably should have watched his impressive Oppenheimer in an IMAX theater. Because on a 27-inch 4K monitor, the atomic bomb didn’t look big enough. But on a laptop with earbuds it is way worse. And on an iPhone, simply ridiculous.

Nolan has taken his camera to the Mediterranean locations where the Homeric epic is based, a visual luxury for those who do not know them. Or if they have been to these shores, it was to ignore history and focus exclusively on their selfies with Italian gelato and cool tans, eating pasta and asking the waiter, completely out of place, for gravy.

Odysseus’ nautical tale, getting lost in treacherous seas, has happened to many people throughout the centuries. In fact, nowadays, the mafias smuggling African immigrants in makeshift boats to Europe subject them to a real odyssey that they sometimes pay for with their lives.

Indeed, there is historical data showing that the Mycenaean Greeks, once their civilization collapsed in 1200 BC, became a scourge of the Mediterranean, known as the Sea Peoples, because other groups displaced by famines joined them, looting the Mediterranean coast, raiding unfortified cities, and especially the fabulous Egypt. Pharaoh Ramesses III made a strategic retreat and lost all his possessions in Asia Minor, which reached Byblos, in what we know today as Lebanon, to focus on driving them out of the Nile Delta, mobilizing every man who could wield a weapon.

Homer comes after this turbulent time known as the Greek Dark Ages, or simply the Late Bronze Age collapse. It is known as the Dark Ages because no written documents were left behind, and the little we know comes from the funerary monuments of the pharaohs and Assyrians.

This is the simple reason for Homer’s oral tradition, situated in 800 BC, a figure surely composed of several people, lacking documentation or historical evidence as solid and monumental as Ramesses III, mummy included. Nothing exceptional, on the other hand, because ordinary lives passed without glory or trace.

However, upon the myth of that blind man capable of reciting the warriors’ heroic deeds by heart rests the rebirth of Greek literature. First with the poetry represented by the rhapsodes, and then with the birth of tragedy as a performative art.

Thanks to the written word, mythological superstitions and organized religion began to gain strength in the Mediterranean. The Pentateuch, the oldest scroll of the Jewish Torah, which out of bold, sheer ignorance we rename as the Bible, was also written in Jerusalem in 800 BC.

But at the same time, in almost all the excavated Jewish houses of the time, small terracotta statuettes with a column-shaped base have been found, representing a female figure holding her breasts. They are associated with the cult of Asherah—the mother goddess and deity of fertility in the Levant. Common people in 800-700 BC practiced a marked syncretism: they worshiped Yahweh in the Temple, and in turn, kept these statuettes at home as amulets to pray for fertility, breast milk, and a safe childbirth.

It is clear that Christopher Nolan has a devotion to the lavish imagination and ingenuity of the Homeric tale, which we still use today in words like Trojan Horse. It is the first literary figure—a catachresis that has traveled down to our days to describe a malicious code executing stealthily, while disguised as a legitimate application—long before scapegoat, another catachresis, was written in the scrolls of Leviticus.

And that is why he has depicted the famous horse with better fortune, even allowing himself an anachronism, because it is armed like a Viking longship, with overlapping wooden slats, known as clinker construction.

It is easy to sneak absurd things like these into a Hollywood blockbuster. I still crack up laughing when Ridley Scott showed Napoleon shelling the Pyramids of Egypt, just to scare the living daylights out of the Mamluks of that time. Therefore, I expect that in The Odyssey the actresses will in turn show off porcelain smiles, because it seems the Greek mortals had abundant toothpaste at hand, and the American actors will even make a ridiculous effort to achieve an Oxford English accent—as if the Mycenaean Greeks in 1200 BC were loyal subjects of the British Empire.

In Book 3 of the Iliad, Helen of Troy is described as leukōlenos, which means “white-armed.” In the Odyssey, she is xanthê, “golden-haired” or “fair-skinned.” Homer portrays her as the daughter of Zeus, the ultimate archetype of Achaean beauty. She was white, exactly because the world that gave birth to her was the cradle of the European identity. But in our Hollywood frame of reference, the Woke narrative is way more important than the truth, so Nolan chose a Kenyan actress for Helen of Troy. What can you do?

The bottom line is, in short, that the public is discovering the Greek hero upon whom the art of storytelling rests. And since this is a podcast about books and fiction, I recommend the celebrated translation by Emily Wilson, published by Norton. We should celebrate the return of the original tale and its reading, because the ability to read is no longer required but remains a personal option of the National Education Association of teachers. The classics were all lost from the education system when the left trashed classical education.

You have never before heard such a nervous clattering in the discreet, carpeted corridors of the world’s great publishing houses. There is a palpable, unprecedented fear vibrating behind those closed doors. A growing sense of alarm is sweeping through the industry worldwide. Computer inboxes are no longer just full; they are heavily clogged with an impenetrable, thick traffic jam of manuscripts, and literary competitions are receiving more original submissions than ever before.

Once upon a time, the repository of unsolicited manuscripts was simply known as “the slush pile.” It was a physical mountain of paper, a testament to the fact that few were actually brave enough, or persistent enough, to finish a book. Back then, a literary prize was occasionally left unawarded—deserted, simply because the usual suspects did not click with the jury’s sensibilities and the slush pile yielded no hidden gems. The gates were heavily guarded, and the gatekeepers slept soundly.

Those were the days of the old-school writers. They started with a pencil and let the words flow like bourbon-driven fools, bleeding their raw, unpolished souls onto the page. They left the hard work to the typewriters first, and then to the editor—that unsung hero who would ruthlessly cut through the tangled manuscript. The goal was always singular: to distill the prose until the common reader could do what he does best, which is painting the author’s world with his own vivid colors.

Then came the generation of writers who used the typewriter not just to transcribe, but to actively edit. They loved to waste paper, yanking half-finished thoughts from the carriage and tossing them into the overflowing bin under the desk. I sincerely miss those machines. In the beginning, they were massive and incredibly loud. Every keystroke was a physical commitment. Because of this machinery, society became convinced that typing fast—without looking down at the keys—was a vital life skill. I think my parents tried to instill this in me back in 1980, without any success. I simply did not like writing without thinking. What’s the point of moving your fingers faster than your brain can conjure meaning?

So, I maintained a delicate balance between deliberate handwriting and measured typewriting, until the word processor arrived and changed the rhythm of thought entirely. It wasn’t aggressively loud like the typewriter, and in its infancy, the dot-matrix printer still spat out text with faint, shitty points. But progress was relentless. Soon came the internet, the crisp perfection of laser printers, and bigger monitors that glowed late into the night.

This digital revolution began tearing down the old walls, flooding the carefully cultivated gardens of the gatekeepers. Magazines and newspapers had to adapt, and eventually, books had to adapt too. It is true that the proportion of writers had already grown in a frankly insulting manner in recent years, expanding at a much faster rate than the population of readers. But that phenomenon must be seen as part of a broader explanation. Thanks to technological conveniences, people discovered a long time ago that it is much more fun to be an author than a reader, or a tweeter than a newspaper buyer. It is a novelty, I insist, that is purely technical: it has been known since Eve that talking is much more fun than listening.

Added to this structural surge is the recent, explosive development of artificial intelligence. It was not until the covid pandemic, when the world ground to a halt, that tech moguls went a step further. What could they sell now? Their answer was AI in all its forms.

Now, editors are utterly convinced that this algorithm-driven output is the sole reason for the massive spike in manuscripts. When it comes to literary prizes, the alarm has reached hysterical levels. The prospect of accidentally awarding a prestigious prize to a text written by an AI won’t let them sleep or live in peace.

But regarding the books that an artificial intelligence might write, the only thing I hold as an absolute certainty is that they will be fundamentally better than their “organic” counterparts. Make no mistake: if an idiot sets out to write a book using an AI, the final product will undoubtedly still be an idiotic book—but it will be vastly improved compared to the sheer volume of idiotic books written up to this point in history.

You only have to look at the daily newspapers for proof. Ever since the advent of automatic spellcheckers and digital layout assembly, we have never seen such impeccably clean nonsense. The grammar is flawless, even when the substance is entirely vacant. And the future—which is already here!—heralds an era of magnificent splendor as the machine gradually assumes total command of the newsrooms and keyboards.

Where the great naturalist Buffon famously declared that “the style is the man himself,” we must now amend the record to add that the machine is the man. This exact sentiment was already expressed when tractors revolutionized the fields; now, it must be ruthlessly applied to the subject and the predicate. The mechanics of human labor have simply shifted from the soil to the syntax.

Although, if we are being completely honest, the underlying concern of these editors is quite different. The real terror is that they are actually starting to have to thoroughly read the manuscripts they publish and award.

If an editor publishes a book he has genuinely read, is completely convinced of its value, and can passionately defend it, the possibility that an AI wrote it should be entirely irrelevant. It will still be a good book, and its true author will simply be the person who set the machine in motion. The modern author is the one who crafted the initial prompts, who meticulously guided the flow of the writing, and who chooses how to improve the successive drafts.

In the past, editors were perfectly satisfied with a somewhat superficial skimming and a reader’s report done by someone else—and heaven knows under what conditions that was done. Let us drop the illusion of pristine human perfection. Of course books—even by great authors—have been published without the editor so much as raising an eyebrow at numerous pages of dull writing, endless verbiage, stylistic immaturity, embarrassing syntax, and even flagrant plot inconsistencies.

I truly do understand the grave problem facing today’s gatekeepers. And I know, of course, that they could easily lighten their crushing workload by giving these towering stacks of manuscripts to the machine to evaluate. After all, at this point, the machine reads much better than it writes.

But let me think there is a light at the end of this tunnel. Even with AI handling the initial slush pile, and sifting through everything that absolutely must be cribbed and sifted, there will inevitably come that final, quiet night right before the big literary prize is awarded. On that night, there are no shortcuts. The editor will have no choice but to sit hunched under the warm glow of a desk lamp and read, and read, and read. It is a wonderful, solitary exercise, yielding a profound intellectual pleasure that no known machine can inject.

Although, we shall see.

The arc of a bow and its arrow are our primitive reference for fully understanding the entropy that life entails. An entropy that overwhelms—or bores, depending on so many things—even the brightest minds. I imagine this is the origin of the narrative arc of a story: cutting through space like an arrow of time.

Zeno of Elea believed that time was merely a sum of static, frozen moments, failing to realize that time and motion are continuous and cannot be suspended or divided into parts. Although the mind can divide space into fixed points, according to Bergson, movement itself is pure duration.

Hence the stories we tell ourselves in the present—that mixture of vanity and an obsession to spin. The falser they are, the simpler their narrative arc, and the more self-serving are their omissions—but truth floats on water like oil does. Cave paintings in France and Indonesia show that hunting images served the first storytellers long before religion centered on gods—those invisible friends with a thousand faces who eventually spread across five continents with varied rites and sacrifices designed to keep them on our side.

Because even with these contrivances to ward off the fear of the dark, life was devastatingly tragic, often ending before it had truly begun. Before the advent of hygiene and antibiotics, the elderly were revered simply for surviving the chaos and uncertainty that so many others paid with their lives.

The rite of passage belongs to the common monomyth of the hero. To stay alive and awake, he sheds fear like old skin to make room for indispensable courage, successfully confronting whatever harsh trials cross his path. We endow these figures with extraordinary powers, eventually worshiping them as icons and statues.

The oldest texts are sacred—holy, canonical books. We see it in the Book of the Dead written on papyrus scrolls, or the spells chiseled into the stone of Egyptian sarcophagi three thousand five hundred years ago to guide a pharaoh’s great journey to the beyond. Yet the Sumerian tablets, carrying the gripping tale of the last king before the Great Flood instructing his heir on piety, ethics, and social order, sink another thousand years deeper into the night of time.

From this incessant work of mapping our anxieties for the afterlife, we gradually birthed arts of magnificent depth and beauty, moving further and further away from religious issues and limitations. We now have music on demand, paintings to decipher, theater and cinema to watch. And books, when read without distractions, light up like fireflies.

I confess a deep fondness for modernist novels, where storytelling doesn’t devolve into an inventory of infinite trivialities, but functions as a spell for crossing that river of time. I think of Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Sound and the Fury. But above all, I think of Proust, fragmenting the Self and prioritizing involuntary memory over the ticking of a clock. It is no coincidence that in 1928, just as literature was fracturing chronology, Arthur Eddington coined the term “the arrow of time” to illustrate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. He noted that because entropy is always increasing, the universe has a distinct, irreversible direction.

These reflections invariably lead me to my own second rite of passage: the fertile prospect of crossing the very same threshold I stood before thirty years ago. What I mean to say is that I still believe writing fiction is the passion that anchors my life. But for the first time, I have a clear, realistic idea of how to escape the bleak landscape of a missing readership, due to the collapse of sustained reading. More importantly, I finally possess the tools to do so with true craftsmanship.

Oral storytelling is more effective than the written word. Your hearing is more laser-focused and detailed while your eyes have to deal with visual fatigue and that weak focus of the multitasking era. It isn’t bound to a paper format, and therefore the narrative isn’t condemned for commercial purposes to becoming a fat, brick-sized copy. And audio technology today is so diametrically opposed to ancient formats that I am truly remembering a future once dreamed of.

I haven’t been very active on Substack lately, because having ideas and tools isn’t enough if the craftsmanship is lacking. I believe it was about six months ago that I was left awestruck listening to the immense talent of actor Will Patton, well known to audiences for narrating nearly fifty audiobooks. His whisper from six inches away feels exactly like a tired man driving down a dark, desolate road in the wilderness, attempting to carry a whole story in his arms for the young girl in the passenger seat. He spins the story in the faint light of the speedometer just to keep himself awake, wrapping her in that light sleep—a modern Gilgamesh, where holding her attention and trust is the last trial to hold onto immortality. The movie Train Dreams, based on the novel by Denis Johnson, opens with that exact voice.

That foolish assertion that reading aloud should be as neutral as possible is now a skin I have shed. That is why I no longer include any background music.

To say goodbye, I leave you with the narrated lines that struck me with such awe, just to make my point clear. I didn’t want to strip away the soundtrack because it is cinema. And yet, when you listen to what follows and your jaw drops to the floor, know that you are not alone in your wonder. I have been recording whispers for six months now, and I still have a long way to go.

“There were once passageways to the old world, strange trails, hidden paths. You’d turn a corner and suddenly find yourself face-to-face with great mystery, the foundation of all things. And even though that old world is gone now, even though it’s been rolled up like a scroll and put somewhere, you can still feel the echo of it.”

Sometimes, I wonder why the mere reading of some books stirs in me the irrepressible appetite for writing. Like just yesterday with Erasure by Percival Everett–the experimental novel that the latest film American Fiction is loosely based on. At the crack of dawn, while the first drops of spring rain were cleaning my dusty window, I was pounding away at my keyboard, keeping in mind the challenging question of Whit Burnett, the editor of the literary magazine Story and mentor of the young and ambitious JD Salinger, who grew resentful after Burnett rejected many of his first short stories.

“Are you willing to devote your life to telling stories knowing that you may get nothing in return?”

Let’s assume you have watched the film featuring Jeffrey Wright. If not, stop now and quit listening; I am going to detail the plot and hit a nerve, no holds barred. Because if I were pandering—by the strict code of artistic values I’ve carved for myself—I would not be a writer of fiction.

Believe it or not, there was a time when publishers were the custodians of beauty, quality and good taste. At least, I believed the spirit of Max Perkins from Scribner’s was hovering among them. But since the invasion of smartphones that ironically made people ridiculously stupid, because of the subsequent collapse of sustained reading, actually, it’s the algorithm that knows you better than you do, feeding you like a butler.

AI-generated writing is here to stay. And the same goes for every art. Without a baseline knowledge, you’ll believe anything, even that a human being of flesh and blood toiled over the page. That being said, if you really think a soulless AI narrator will eat my lunch, you are as deaf as a post. Q-tips come in handy to remove earwax!

In American Fiction, a Black author with a jazzy name –Thelonious Monk Ellison– is trying to teach the southern author Flannery O’Connor in a Californian college ridden by the Woke fever. The short story written in 1955 as a brilliant satire against the Jim Crow era is titled “The Artificial Nigger”. But a white and privileged female student–according to the analytical framework of intersectionality–who did not do her homework, which is naturally reading the story, is uncomfortable with the N-word written on the board. And she denounces Monk to the dean, resulting in a disciplinary sanction.

That sanction forces Monk to visit his family in Boston, where he is dealing with the problems of a middle-aged man; the slow descent of a mother into Alzheimer’s, disturbing revelations about the double life of his late suicidal father, and the sudden death from a heart attack of his sister, who has been the caregiver for years.

The combination of these situations, coupled with the rejection of his last erudite book for not being Black enough, pushes him to write the Hood lit that white and privileged publishers deem genuinely Black, under the false identity of an ex-convict, with the swearword F**K as a title, recreating all the trite clichés. Drugs, ghetto life, deadbeat dads, and rappers, written in Afro-American vernacular English.

So, he tackles all his problems at once with this Faustian bargain, raking in all the money he needs, with the help of his savvy agent to pay for his ailing mother’s expensive nursing home. And a Hollywood deal to free him once and for all from the drudgery of academia he has endured.

The plot twists. He is invited as an “ethnic diversity” pick to join the jury for a literary prize where the prank he churned out is the runaway winner. During a break in the deliberations, he has the chance to confront his nemesis–Sintara Golden–a Black female author, who possesses an intellect and education similar to his own, but with no moral qualms about catering to the audience if that’s what the market demands. “That’s how drug dealers excuse themselves,” says Monk.

That plot reminds me of my editor’s fate–pressured to publish young women’s romantic fiction not by choice, but because it was the new niche. And authors must be women, too, so the female readers can relate to them through social media. It reinforces the stale idea that if you aren’t a woman, you cannot write about women–an insult to the imagination that fuels all fiction. Gustave Flaubert must be turning in his grave. Do you remember his joyful proclamation? “Madame Bovary, c’est moi!”

I think we are living in the best of worlds. We have the internet and access to a variety of cultures that our ancestors didn’t have. Yet, the audience has grown dull. Is there a correlation? I’ve written about my teenage struggle to read mighty books and the delight that went far beyond mere entertainment. It was a cultural pursuit. I wanted novels full of universal, riveting characters–not some validation of the crushing burden of growing up.

Now we have labels for every alleged literary work: Hood lit, MeToo lit, Sick lit, Victimhood lit. Bookstores feel like a visit to Dr. Feelgood. It’s blatant pandering for commercial gain. The only label I accept for fiction is the original language it was written in–provided it’s one of the languages I can read without needing a translation. But I couldn’t care less about the author’s race, gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation; their religion, social status, or disability; their age, class, or citizenship. Because intersectionality is the relentless resurrection of the author—and the death of the text.

I was a boy wonder, and I loved to hate the guts of whoever was a killjoy. And mostly, any authority figures who were poorly paid teachers, so I was bound to be self-taught. However, I had a professor who taught me to channel all that hate by reading aloud about any historical character of my choosing.

Soon, I also became a performer aboard the school bus, which had loudspeakers and a microphone; I learned to read a comma and a semicolon and pause after a period without missing a beat. The bus driver cut a deal with me. I could read if I indulged him in reading his favorite book. The Bermuda Triangle by Charles Berlitz.

Time after, when I began to write, all those bloody caesuras made a lot of sense. Slow reading made me pore over sentences unfolding every aspect of language; all those sensuous qualities–how many syllables a word had and how long the accent over a vowel–are likely to carry weight, give pleasure, and hold meaning. These poetic qualities are tied up as the purely cognitive. And if I think about them as a mode of communication only, those qualities would not be alive and kicking.

That must explain why I feel myself accessing skills I have learned through decades-long narrator performances. I’ll read aloud and look up for the through line.

At this stage, all the worms will come out of the can: tiny dialogues, unconvincing characters, sludgy descriptions, totally random, unrelated bits of crap, and b******t that have made it through what I hoped would be an astonishing copy.

I have done enough awful rehearsals–I know this for real. But the pain in writing, as you know, it’s a discarding process as well. And I don’t have any partner to reassure me I will make it. Outside the box, I find myself ‘watching’ the story like an audience. Am I bored? Restless? Irritated? Would I tattoo the first line over my forearms?

Don’t you dare to think like a wordsmith if you don’t bring along a hammer! Eventually, you will kill your darlings. It will be a drama otherwise. You have to let it go and move on.

And I keep asking myself while gripping that hammer over the head, am I really nuts to step out of the comfort zone? Why am I doing this? Because I have no choice!

I don’t stop blowing with all my strength until I hear the anvil forging from nothing, a new beat I had never heard of, that sparks of wonder, insight, and hubris that come along with it.

I suppose it’s because I had a good night’s sleep that I feel better than yesterday. I thought I couldn’t write a single word because of the alarming lack of relevance. Writing fiction requires a massive focus on a story that sometimes makes no sense, and sometimes it truly does. Navigating between these two extremes is quite intense and certainly not for the faint of heart.

I had the bad luck of growing up in a time when the plot seemed useless. In fact, I could say the novels I loved were a kind of chaotic mess.

When did I begin to appreciate a plot? That’s easy! Writing my first manuscript, I ran a free-fall plot, which brought about a large number of characters. So, at the time of ending such an orgy of creativity, the protagonist looked like a bit player.

Of course, that little crack went unnoticed until I began to receive the feedback of my first agent, who in a moment of candor, said:

“You could have written seven novels if you had had a plot.”

Needless to say, Mrs. Kerrigan was right. She had a business to run, books to pitch for big publishers, not a lab of crazy ideas, but a literary agency.

A friend of mine was way more graphic:

“Next time, cut the bologna in thin slices.”

That was bound to happen. So, with the first lesson learned, my second novel was a tour de force. But I missed out on Cervantes’ trick of giving voice to 600 characters. On the contrary, I ran a mix of triangle affair and coming-of-age novel.

And yet, I did not run the distance, the 120,000 words that make a good brick of waste paper a beautiful printed ephemera to fill the windows of a bookstore. On the contrary, I fell short because I had no idea what a canonical novel was. A behemoth of five hundred pages. Otherwise, your literary dreams will go to the pile.

A younger version of me thought a page turner a thing of the past. Like when Tolstoy wrote novels like War and Peace –or Cervantes ran a carousel of freaks he certainly would have met once in the funny pages of Don Quixote.

Lesson learned, the result was the corkboard, the card notes, the three acts, the rolling scenes, and the facts that give speed, flow, and beat to the characters. At the back of my desk, I want now order, not menacing chaos, which might destroy or diminish my creative efforts. No board, no compass to get through the day.

And the actual version of me is making peace with the idiot I am self-portraying in this mirror of ink – or whatever are these winged words because you are hearing me.

All I want is to run the distance, flow like a f*****g river if I have to, and manufacture something to remember, beyond all sorts of ephemera.

Yesterday, Alan Ball was in town, the screenwriter of the film American Beauty and TV series Six Feet Under. And hearing his masterclass was certainly a shock for me. That a multi-awarded screenwriter could blame the poor creative zeitgeist in such terms was mind-blowing.

And I’m quote:

“It’s depressing. All they want now is something that looks like something that has been successful. The competition is fierce. Everything is tremendously oppressive. It seems that the fear that floods everything is also in the writers’ rooms and especially in the directors’ rooms. Creativity is dead. That’s why I’ve left it. I’m writing a novel. And I’m enjoying it a lot. You know why? I don’t have an opinion on what I do. No one is intervening in my creative process. For once, I am alone. For once, no one is going to control me. Anything is possible. And it’s perfect.”

End of quote.

I’m already handwriting word by word Allan Ball’s utterance in one of my cards, and punching it quickly on the corkboard, to avoid that such wisdom thins itself out as the foam of days.

And all because of you, my silent friend. Nothing I do on a daily basis is because of me. If I had my way, I would settle for being something between a clown and a conman.

And certainly I have those personal traits, given the Jungian shadow I cannot see. In moments of extreme clarity, I feel like walking home in a daze and broke after betting all my riches on the horses. Yeah, a struggling writer is closer to a professional gambler than you might think.

It helps if you have plenty of courage to fail big and don’t dwell on it, or if you sell your poor soul to the very Devil. Or both. It’s always about faith. I’m not a man of the cloth, but certainly I am a man on a mission.

During the pandemic while taking care of my old man, a karmic chance like no other I could imagine, what really changed me was confronting the fact of what shoes I had to fill after he passed away. After mourning him for two years, it’s time to let it go.

And it’s time to reach the goal of this podcast. It wasn’t my intention to write essays or a journalist column but fiction, because that was the Substack shelf I chose. Books and Fiction. The goal was narrating my own work, and someday have it all done to upload it to the audiobooks platforms like ACX and whatnot.

If Alan Ball, the guy who wrote about a plastic bag dancing in the wind as the most beautiful clip the character named Ricky Fitts could show to Jane, the ultimate and freak teen girlfriend, has switched to the art of sewing words, it’s because he trusts in the might of abstraction without limits of any given written language.

The freedom you have in a blank page, the quiet epiphanies you try to tame with just words, and how much craft you put into a simple dash to elaborate a concept.

I won’t miss out on those days of heaven ahead of me.

What can I write about Lorca? He was not just a poet; he was also a dedicated pianist. Manuel de Falla was his mentor, and he learned from him about the profound songs known as Cante Jondo. Therefore, reading Lorca is an experience that evokes a deep sense of Duende, an ethereal quality that transcends mere poetry. Many scholars believe that translating Lorca into American English is an impossible task.

However, if you dare to attempt it, I highly recommend reading this translation by Sarah Arvio while having a glass of red wine and some delicious Serrano ham. And perhaps, for a moment, you can channel the spirit of that young boy who found inspiration in music and transformed it into poetry.

This voice crafter you are hearing will provide you with a full-blown rendition, taking advantage of my privileged condition as a transnational author. See, the translator thought Lorca never used commas or periods or full stops, but he certainly did. Like Emily Dickinson used dashes, including long ones, to create pauses, separate ideas, and add ambiguity to her poetry, a feature often lost in standardized printed versions but present in her manuscripts.

I hope you find a suitable time to listen, not because you need to open the doors of perception with red wine and Serrano ham – and prosciutto does not count, because it is sweeter and more tender with a buttery texture, while Serrano ham is from Spain, is saltier and more intensely flavored, and has a firmer texture.

The reason for such preliminaries is because of the magnitude of Lorca as a poet. And the tragic fate he found in the first days of the Spanish Civil War, assassinated in cold blood at the wee hours by a bunch of fascists in an unmarked place between the infinite olive trees of Granada, where since then nobody could find his lovely bones.

Like the bones of 140,000 Spaniards still lost in ditches, fifty years later to this day of the passing of General Franco, who died peacefully in his bed after ruling for 39 years, while the cowards did nothing else than lie through their teeth about a resistance that only existed in their wildest dreams.

Not for nothing, it is rightly said that real heroes cannot tell war stories because they die pretty soon for their exceptional acts of valor. And stolen valor is the sign of any coward that hopes you are too lazy to connect the dots and ask them why they kept their heads in the sand.

Get ready and comfy to meet the beautiful mind of Federico García Lorca, a man of the short-lived Spanish Republic, and how he pictured his own demise.

Dreamwalking Ballad

Green I want you green.

Green wind. Green branches.

Boat on the sea and

horse on the mountain.

Shadow on her waist,

she dreams at her railing,

green flesh, green hair,

eyes of cold silver.

Green I want you green.

Under the gypsy moon,

things are seeing her

but she can’t see them.

*

Green I want you green.

The great stars of frost,

come with fish of shadow

paving the path to dawn.

The fig tree rasps the wind

with its rough branches,

and the wildcat mountain

bares its sour agaves.

Who will come—from where—?

At her railing she gazes

green flesh, green hair,

dream of the bitter sea.

*

Compadre! Can I swap

my horse for your house?

My saddle for your mirror

-my knife for your blanket–?

Compadre! I come bleeding

from the Cabra passes.

If I could, young friend,

the deal would be done.

But I’m no longer me

nor is my house my own.

Compadre! Let me die

decent in my bed.

A steel bed, if you please,

laid with Dutch linen.

Don’t you see the slash

from my breast to my throat?

Three hundred dark roses

on your white shirtfront.

Blood oozes and stinks

in the sash at your waist.

But I’m no longer me

nor is my house my own.

Let me climb way up

to the high terrace.

Let me climb! Let me

to the green terrace.

Railing of moonlight

and the rushing water.

*

Two compadres climb

to the high terrace,

leaving a trail of blood,

and a trail of tears.

Tin lanterns trembled

on the tops of roofs.

A thousand glass tambourines,

tore up the dawn.

*

Green I want you green,

green wind, green branches.

The two compadres climbed.

The slow wind in their mouths

left a strange flavor

of bile, basil, and mint.

Compadre! Where is she?

Where’s your bitter girl?

How often has she waited!

How often will she wait

fresh face, and black hair,

on the green terrace!

*

Over the face of the cistern

the gypsy girl swayed.

Green flesh, green hair,

eyes of cold silver.

A moon icicle holds her,

high over the water.

The night was as cozy

as a small plaza.

Drunken civil guards

pounded on the door.

Green I want you green.

Green wind, green branches.

Boat on the sea and

horse on the mountain.

Physical beauty must be the most bitter of gifts because it carries the seed of its own destruction, and its absence mortifies more than any. We all more or less know how the young and handsome Dorian Gray had problems to deal with this, and whoever does not should stop listening this literary podcast right now, shake off the mental sloth, and dust off the master of paradoxes, the great Oscar Wilde, who remains still undefeated a century later, so unparalleled and unique was his genius.

Some French film director has lifted a big fuss with a movie that shamelessly pinched that character from Wilde–they call plagiarism now to be inspired by–changed the gender in order to cater to a feminine audience and moved Dorian Gray from Victorian London to the show business in LA.

Coralie Fargeat, the director and writer of this satirical film, had the audacity to convince one of the most iconic movie stars of the 90s, Demi Moore, to take on the lead role. This meant portraying her as an old, broken toy of cable TV, but not in a way we’ve ever seen before. No, this was a fresh take on Demi Moore, one that showed her naked, humiliated, and degraded in front of the last of the nepotistic babies, Margaret Qualley, the daughter of curly Andie MacDowell—remember Sex, Lies, and Videotape?

I forced myself to watch twice this true horrorshow, this cinematic nightmare, and the only thing I missed were those eyelid clamps that a young Malcom McDowell was forced to wear in A Clockwork Orange. Because the first act is just brilliant and highly recommended.

Instead the lavish beginning of Dorian Gray, we see a conceptual episode: a raw egg and a hand with a syringe with a magical substance in fluorescent yellow that it infuses in the egg yolk. Then, after a second, the yolk duplicates with a blob sound.

Demi Moore plays a TV aerobics instructor who’s fired when she turns 50. Desperate to stay in the spotlight, she avails herself in the black market drug, a substance–uh-huh–that births from her body a younger, entirely separate version of herself very squelchily. But there’s a catch. She has to switch back and forth between her two bodies every seven days or things are going to get weirder and somehow even squelchier.

I’m not a fan of spoilers. While Oscar Wilde presented in The Picture of Dorian Gray one paradox after another to make us ponder, this completely bonzo, bloody, campy, and unapologetically feminist body horror film loses all its originality of the first scene to follow the rules of this old genre with a fresh coat of paint, where men are depicted under a prism that is almost ludicrous. I wonder how many women must have seen me as well just like that. As my wife, with an American Mid-Western accent, would say: “He’s a dog!”

Instead of the utterly sugarcoated Hallmark romance movies, I think The Substance would be a perfect tool for couple therapy and also for understanding each other’s needs, anxieties, and moods. I mean it. Sometimes, a wake-up call is necessary and highly valued. Perhaps eyelids clamps will be handy in the case where an individual rejects to acknowledge that youth and beauty are the only things worth having, so vain we are. And how much self-loathing we have. Demi Moore’s character in the film has a moment that is quieter and truly effective. She is asked out on a date and spends a considerable amount of time getting ready for it. There’s a lot of standing in front of the mirror, examining her skin and noticing how it no longer looks supple, observing the wrinkles, and then looking at her entire body. I admire how that very quiet and somewhat introspective moment in the film effectively conveys that point.

Humans have always been drawn to beauty. Of course, beauty standards change all the time. What one culture considers beautiful, another might consider ugly. What our own culture considered beautiful 200 years ago, or even 50, isn’t beautiful to us anymore. But that hasn’t changed the fact that we love to look at beautiful things, and even more than that, we wish to be beautiful ourselves. In our society today, people will go to incredible lengths—makeup, plastic surgery, even harmful things like eating disorders—in order to fit themselves into our culture’s idea of beauty. And once we believe we’ve reached that goal, we’ll do anything to keep it that way, and with our current technology, that is possible. But is this the best thing for us?

Oscar Wilde firmly believed in the importance of beauty; he belonged to the Aesthetic Movement, a movement emphasizing aesthetic values over social or political themes. They believed that it was more important for art to be beautiful than to have a deeper meaning—it was “art for art’s sake” alone. The very first line of the Preface of The Picture of Dorian Grey is “the artist is the creator of beautiful things.” That is his true purpose. Beauty is not only the end goal of Dorian’s life, but of all art.

For Dorian Gray, beauty is the end goal of his life, a goal that he claims he would give anything, even his soul, for. This is a high price, a price that Dorian eventually pays. Throughout the novel, we watch Dorian become more and more morally corrupt. It begins when he heartlessly rejects his fiancée, leading to her suicide, and he continues to experiment with every vice, eventually even murdering someone, while his portrait slowly becomes more and more hideous. However, Dorian is able to escape all blame, because even though he is accused of many things, society dismisses it all, saying, “Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face. It cannot be concealed.” His beauty has saved him, at least in this life, although ultimately, he will still face a great demise.