The German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt told a friend, a Parisian doctor, that he wanted to meet a certifiable lunatic. He was invited to the doctor’s home for supper. A few days later, Humboldt found himself placed at the dinner table between two men. One was polite, somewhat reserved, and didn’t go in for small talk. The other, dressed in ill-matched clothes, chattered away on every subject under the sun, gesticulating wildly while making horrible faces. When the meal was over, Humboldt turned to his host.

“I like your lunatic,” he whispered, indicating the talkative man. The host frowned.

“But it’s the other one who’s the lunatic. The man you’re pointing out is Monsieur Honoré de Balzac.”

I'm sharing this story with you to shed light on the hazards of the craft. You cannot see me now, but if you could—and you never will—I am making horrible faces too, showing teeth to hit higher notes, and I do hand gestures like the Italians because it projects my voice and avoids droning. In some recording sessions, my vocal folds have colors unknown to me. I recall the short story Letter for a Young Lady by Julio Cortázar. As the guy of the surreal story, I'm going to vomit up a little rabbit that will nibble the cable of the microphone to create something new. The creative process is a perpetual orgy. The more, the merrier. I understand that you may not always enjoy the soundtrack, but sometimes it works wonders—whether by chance or by design. Cortázar would enjoy this format, considering that his funny Hopscotch has constant musical references. I have listened to all his tapes with the frill of his exotic mix of Argentinian and French accents.

In a canon novel—Honoré de Balzac wrote ninety—there are numerous characters. Imagine an author possessed by the characters he just made up. I call it dreaming awake, with good spirits, considering the absurdities I have to rule out to find the one that fits the composition. Some masters scribbled at a stand-up desk, like Thomas Wolfe on top of one of the first refrigerators, and helped keep his mind flowing freely. Or Ernest Hemingway, writing on his feet and thinking on his toes at the first light, as sober as a judge, staying alert, avoiding sluggishness, and enabling him to produce his crisp, fast-paced narratives, felt he was boxing in a ring against the old Russian masters.

And to comprehend this competitive attitude, one should consider well the audacity that writing fiction entails from one’s own point of view. What I may think of as an original and somewhat relevant is what a wolf does to feed its puppies—regurgitating what I read somewhere else. I owe what I am to what I've read. And the way to realize an unwilling mimicry is to read more classic literature to reach out to the original sources. An unconventional approach to the craft and a unique narrative voice, that is all I want. Otherwise, I'm not writing a relevant novelty, which is the meaning of the word "novel", but a pastiche.

That being said, if there is a keyword to define a contemporary art form, expressed in continuous sagas and prequels and spinoffs and re-dressed and gender-swapped casting, it's indeed pastiche. We fully embraced a culture of mediocrity and boredom, whereby commercial success is all that counts.

From now on, I shall include in this podcast renditions of my work. Listed under the category of Books and Fiction, I should sing for my supper as a dedicated author whose goal is leaving behind a legacy, before the vocal folds atrophy leave me whispering, given that I skipped the biological way to be immortal, that is, having children. I really think we are already packed, agree? Not counted by millions but 8.2 billion, the human race has to spread out to the stars, seeking new worlds.

The poles and the glaciers are melting because we are unable to control our greed—burning fossil fuel at an industrial scale for nearly two centuries and polluting the oceans with microplastics—even though we have been told about the fatal consequences by the scientific community. Anterior life forms disappeared across the five massive extinctions that mark Earth's history, like the brutal end of the Permian with 96% of species gone, did not stand a chance. But we would if we stopped killing each other and invested in exploration instead of weapons.

About seeking new worlds in the heavenly vault, here is the icing on the cake.

The German film director Wim Wenders and Martin Scorsese, as producer, released The Soul of a Man, a documentary about a message in a bottle into the cosmic ocean. NASA launched the interstellar probe Voyager, with a golden-plated record, to never return. With the hope of finding a superior live form that could manage a suitable player—that was the analogic era of 1977—Carl Sagan compiled images, utterances in many languages, but also Blind Willie Johnson’s 1927 Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground that you are hearing.

Son of a sharecropper, impaired since he was seven years old during an episode of domestic violence, Willie led a peripatetic existence and became a religious busker. Between 1927 and 1930, he recorded an impressive 30 songs for Columbia Records. His celebrity career ended with the Great Depression, after which he continued to perform as a street singer with his last wife, Angeline, playing together the call-and-response format.

After extinguishing a fire that left the poor couple sleeping in the burned ruins of their humble abode on a bed of damp newspapers, living that way until two weeks later, Willie contracted pneumonia but wasn't admitted to the hospital. Because he was blind, black, and couldn't afford a hospital bed. He died at 48 years old and was buried in an unmarked pauper's grave.

I wonder whether Blind Willie Johnson ever cared, thought, or imagined how far his work would travel into the distant future—and distant time. And the extraterrestrial audience he might—or might not get—in the pursuit of accidental beauty and spiritual bliss.

Last Monday, while monitoring and mixing this podcast at midday, a massive blackout plunged this beach town and the entire peninsula into a real-life episode of an apocalyptic future. I was fortunate to be seated at my desk, unlike the poor b******s trapped inside lifters or commuting on trains and subways, standing and packed one against the other like a can of sardines. The only lifeline was the juice of my iPhone, which kept me connected abroad until the network coverage collapsed as well.

As soon as I heard it wasn't a local blackout but by all odds affected Spain and Portugal, I went up to the rooftop terrace to check if the planes’ trails were drawn in the sky, and everything was quite normal for an April day. The tireless sexual revelry of birds mating, the hubbub of swifts flying around me, and the mist of yellow pollen from the mix of pine and oak wood, floating in the valleys of the nearby hills. Why should I be worried?

So, expecting to stay without power for at least 24 hours, given that we are ruled by simpletons crowing about our renewable energy production, I set a leftover of stewed beans and peas to warm up under the glorious sun, well covered to avoid the curious wasps and bees and the looming sea gulls, and returned to my desk to sharpen the pencils, gather paper, and get ready to take casual notes to enjoy a wonderful reading.

From the book stack, I randomly chose a British author I had adored when he was young, and his literary tricks were a novelty for me. I’m talking about Julian Barnes and one of his latest works, The Sense of an Ending. But since the old friend Julian became a solemn widower of Pat Kavanagh, his writing has become simply sad. It evokes the same bottomless loss and grief I found reading Joan Didion’s The Year of the Magical Thinking.

About Julian Barnes, I still recall reading The History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters the first year of the 90s. It was a jaw-dropper, and the unnumbered half-chapter titled Parenthesis was so good to learn the lines by heart. I did many casual renditions; my best one was whispering away in a bookstore to a ballsy sweetheart once I had. So, my actual disappointment is that, after being a loyal reader and reciter of his works for decades, the bond with this author is not there anymore. Surely it's just me, who doesn't find amusing the double sex lives and nor the love triangles as I did in my 20s. I guess everything has its own time.

What really set me in reading mode was a wonderful essay from the Spanish scholar Irene Vallejo, originally titled El Infinito en un junco–the boundless in a reed–but the translator Charlotte Whittle tossed William Blake's Auguries of Innocence obvious analogy to simply leave it as Papyrus.

To see a world in a grain of sand

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And eternity in an hour.

What have you done, Charlotte? You are supposed to translate the concept and not the idea! Which differs in its identity, similarity, opposition, and analogy. The Italian expression 'traduttore, traditore'–translator, traitor–refers to the implicit imprecision of the act of translating.

Anyhow, this is a book about libraries of the past and of the present, and also about the booksellers. As Irene will tell the reader, you can create a parallel world when opening a book and reading every word, and yet at any moment you can move your gaze away and return to the world that is. When you think of the first letters on clay to papyrus and move through the ages to leather-bound books to the modern-day books on both paper and then those words read on electronic devices, think back to where it all began in the ancient world.

My own Irene Vallejo’s blackout party, and the following is not random, began with her description of the lost world of storytelling, in the small palace of a local lord in a time before writing was widespread, when language was fleeting, made up of air and echoes. The Greek Homer called it "winged words" from the point of view of his blindness. Which isn't yet literature, since it isn't set down in letters or writing.

Bards were not only wandering musicians but also skilled memory men, with a repertoire that captivated their masculine audiences for long hours with all kinds of epic. And had no sense of authorship at all, like a jazz musician who takes a popular tune and embarks on a passionate improvisation without a score. Or what we know as variations on the same theme. Individual expression belongs to the time of writing and the prestige of artistic originality had yet to flourish.

The night fell, and the power still wasn't back. And for a stargazer, it was beautiful to look up to the vault of heaven with zero light pollution. It was the night of the times. Then, on the other side of Main Street, power came back, and normality was restored. But the other half of the beach town remained in absolute darkness for one hour more. And I was already missing darkness when I finally turned on the light.

As anyone who has experienced a blackout can attest, when the power returns, even at midnight, it's a boost for morale. And I have a confession to make. I couldn't wait to know if Apple had saved my work! One has these stupid fears, perfectly normal after some bad experiences with disappeared files. So, I put on the open back studio headphones for critical listening, to resume my slow learning as a sound engineer with the digital audio workstation–always feeling a mix of infinite joy and a pang of shame for my lack of knowledge each time I learn something new–cranking up the volume to hear all my blunders and correct them, and also promising to outdo myself with each new release.

I have news for you, my silent friend of many distances. Since I published last February a podcast about Bob Dylan, dealing with his recent biopic A Complete Unknown, where I argued the many reasons why he deserved the Nobel Prize for Literature, it turns out that I have found an audience in Apple Podcast.

All because of a Dylan's fan site called Expecting Rain, which linked my podcast, and suddenly the statistics graph of downloads looked like a rocket on a mighty lift-off in outer space. I, who am as much a theatrical Cyrano de Bergerac as he was, already saw myself back from the States and Empires of the Moon. One never knows when chance of sheer luck might strike, so I keep writing and recording. I had many false auroras before, and my close friends know that.

It turns out that Apple Podcast wrote asking for my business compliance, in order to sell all my work worldwide and get nicely paid. I don't know what to do. I never had a business running or gone to the notary. I've been roaming too much to keep things in order and updated. I hope it won't be too expensive. I'm still waiting for the accountant’s bill. After leaving money on the table with the gig economy, I'm convinced entrepreneurial activities are the way of the future.

And I absolutely do not care about the format in which my work reaches the audience. The normal way would be through printed works because I write fiction, and that's what I've been trying for decades. But the gatekeepers, who are the ones who have the last word, haven't considered it commercial enough to have some skin in the game.

I don't share that point of view. And my natural market is so saturated with TV stars winning literary prizes that the whole business stinks, reason enough to write in English too instead of only in Castilian Spanish–my mother tongue–than to be trapped for the rest of my life in a shithole country, which has changed its old ambition for systemic corruption. And having the immense fortune of living in the multilingual Europe makes it totally organic. I know the monolingual tribe will tear apart their clothes for this statement. What can you do?

I recall when I opened this account on Substack, it was like going back to the times of the old Google blogosphere. But twenty years later, I could broadcast my post in high fidelity mixed with a soundtrack, if I were inclined to create atmospheres. And the capital difference was that I could pass the hat.

The fact that I also could publish in Apple Podcast just like that, it was great. And I thought from the beginning in the solo format, because I'm just reading out loud a column of a thousand words, not engaging in a happening of all sorts, which is what people mistakenly identified as a modern podcast, an old radio talk show with all the plugs to make profit. Moreover, I could write at large, but in times of the economy of attention, I have to go back to the rules of terse language, when the words whispered in the ear were a private affair.

The idea came from my bedside book: the Persian classic titled One Thousand and One Nights, translated by the British adventurer, Richard Burton.

Shahryār, a king who ruled an empire that stretched from Persia to India is shocked to learn that his brother's wife is unfaithful with a slave blackamoor. Discovering that his own wife's infidelity has been even more flagrant, he has her killed. In his bitterness and grief, he decides that all women are the same. Shahryār begins to marry a succession of virgins only to cut the head each one the next morning, before she has any chance to dishonor him.

Scheherazade, the daughter of the sad vizier at the service of the cruel Shahryar, offers herself as the next bride. On the night of the marriage, begins to tell the king a tale, but does not end it. The king, curious about how the story ends, is thus forced to cancel the beheading. Through Scheherazade long narration –1001 is concept of infinite like umpteen– she sought the healing of the jealous ruler, and stop the killing of young women.

Get your bucket list, and duly note this timeless classic is a must-read for those who haven’t had the opportunity. You heard about the missing girls in Mexico in the hands of drug cartels? Pure evil.

Finally, there are those who prefer to read a thousand-word column instead of listening to it. And that's what I would undoubtedly do if I hadn't grown up through the Digital Revolution. I recall the advertising of the German car brand Audi: progress through technology, in German, “vorsprung durch technik.” I never imagined by then that the classic figure of the reciter with musical accompaniment, performing in the floral games that precede the Walpurgis Night, could unfold today into an immersive sound experience, without listening ever again to how badly the reciter spit and breathed and popped and hissed over a cheap microphone. Or that horrible people applauding themselves on the stage like a herd of trained seals with music blaring out from the speakers to round off.

And here I feel the loneliness of the crossroads. Sometimes, I realize that I'm a poor fool who has spent his day dreaming awake, and the folding star arising shows. Other times, I think I'm just passing through. My time will end soon and I am not willing to stop doing what I am passionate about. All I know about the meaning of life and the shifting sands of my future, fits neatly on some books I have read and the poems of my avuncular Rilke.

And if the earthly no longer knows your name,

whisper to the silent earth: I'm flowing.

To the flashing water say: I am.

It's been a while since I have sailed to Palamós, still a small fishing town in 1962, where Truman Capote sought refuge for three semesters—always escorted by his obliging life partner Jack Dunphy and various pets—alternated with his cottage in Verbier, at the top of the Swiss Alps.

In Cala Sènia, a secluded Mediterranean cove, the American author found the necessary peace, far away from New York's social life. The fishermen went out to sea in the wee hours, causing such a ruckus that, according to Capote, not even Rip van Winkle could sleep through it, and that helped to keep a rigorous writer's schedule for his most accomplished manuscript, In Cold Blood.

Local old-timers who met Truman still recalled him doing his errands–two bottles of gin, dry vermouth, and olives for his martinis—the sad day that Marilyn Monroe had tragically overdosed. He was at the newsstand reading the headlines, and with that high-pitched lisping voice I cannot even dare to mimic, because it's way beyond my range, Truman moaned, “My lady friend died!”

He had badly wanted her for the role of Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But Paula Strasberg, her acting coach, deemed it inappropriate for Marilyn's career to play a "lady of the evening" character, especially after being pigeonholed as the sex bomb of the 50s.

Truman was very disappointed and began to spread the rumor that he felt betrayed when Audrey Hepburn was cast instead.

The movie producers thought that a whitewashing of a courtesan was needed. And if I have to judge for the cross-generational audience of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, they rightly did so. Another paradox duly noted, it would be now unthinkable for another Holly Golightly than Audrey Hepburn.

Truman, feeling so at ease in Palamós, invited some of his friends to visit him. The founder of CBS, William Paley, and his wife, embarked on a journey across the Mediterranean Sea during the summer in a mind-blowing sailboat, eventually dropping anchor in the secluded cove.

A terrifying wildfire just outside the villa almost claimed Truman’s life. In that rocky Mediterranean shore, pine groves have always served as both parasols and windshields, regardless of the fire risk involved. Capote only had time to grab his precious manuscript, hoping that a fishing sloop would rescue him from that inferno.

In late September, the furies of the equinox unleashed a deadly flood in Catalonia, further terrorizing him. Consequently, he changed his mind and ended his productive stay on October 1st, leaving for Switzerland.

Despite his efforts, he was unable to finish the manuscript until the Cluttler’s killers were hanged in Kansas, due to his decision to sell the future book as a nonfiction novel. Hickock and Smith were on death row from 1960 to 1965, five long years. “No one will ever know what In Cold Blood took out of me,” Capote said. “It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones.”

The horrifying book was published, and Truman got suddenly rich. But instead of getting back to work with the same stern and unsmiling discipline that had been a constant since the beginning of his career, he dilapidated his earnings and that rare gift, trying to avenge Nina Capote, throwing epic parties for the privileged ones like the Black and White Ball, and showboating in talk show television about his Proustian adventure—a manuscript called Answered Prayers.

Many friends I knew spoke glowingly about the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and sometimes they cannot see beyond the allure of Audrey Hepburn wearing the elegant Givenchy black dress, oversized sunglasses, black gloves, statement pearls, and twisted updo with a sparkling crown beret, eating pastry early in the morning while gazing dreamily into the windows of Tiffany & Co.'s Fifth Avenue store.

But the actual fifty-page novella is something else–exactly eighteen thousand words–and I recommend reading it, even if you really think that watching the movie is enough. That's precisely what this literary podcast is about. An encouragement to read.

Unlike the iconic movie, it's not in the early 60s but in the early 40s, while the Second World War is still ranging. Miss Golightly is much younger, two months away of her nineteenth birthday. While sitting out on the fire escape, she doesn't sing Moon River with her guitar, but simple songs that goes like "Don't wanna sleep, Don't wanna die, Just wanna go a-travelin' through the pastures of the sky" Truman used to say she wasn't a prostitute but an American geisha. Today, we might adhere to woke standards and refer to her as a sexual worker, just like Sean Baker, the director of the Oscar-winning film Anora.

I cannot stop thinking that Truman is portraying his own mother as a “lady of the evening.” And all comes together when you read about that Southern belle, Lillie Mae Faulk, later known as Nina Capote. Married too young to Arch Persons, a well-educated man but a lousy salesman, she left the six-year-old Truman to elderly relatives in Alabama and fled to New York to catch a wealthy husband. She was a black swan that Audrey Hepburn brought to life like a disturbing phantasmagoria.

Four years before Truman penned Breakfast at Tiffany's, Nina took her own life swallowing pills. She was just 48 years old. While in her second marriage to José García Capote—the Cuban businessman that adopted Truman—she had a lavish lifestyle for two decades, beginning her descent into alcoholism, often flying into violent rages, that came to an abrupt end in 1952. When Joe’s fortunes changed and he faced charges of embezzlement. Unable to leave Park Avenue for a modest place and start over, Nina killed herself.

Truman’s never-ending regret for not saving her life fueled his genius and wrote an inverted mirror of Nina in his character Holly Golightly. I bet he did try to find some closure. As the 13th-century mystic poet Rumi wrote, following the Socratic method:

I said: what about my heart?

He said: Tell me what you hold inside it?

I said: Pain and sorrow.

He said: Stay with it.

The plays of William Shakespeare serve as an encyclopedia of human nature, and their characters are complex and rich, portrayed always with contradictions and nuances like real people. Some of these portraits are delightful and full of life, such as the character Puck, who appears in the comedy of Athenian wild fantasy called A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

I believe the first tragedy I read was Antony and Cleopatra. Shakespeare’s ingenious use of blank verses, which are unrhymed iambic pentameter, is more eloquent than any historical account of the actual Cleopatra. But I must acknowledge that popular audiences became somewhat ensnared in the peplum genre, shot in technicolor, which is ideal for napping during the next Easter holidays after indulging in a plate of deep-fried doughnuts, called nun's fart, a sweet treat similar to the beignets of New Orleans. We call them "bunyols" in the Catalan language, closer to the French Quarter than you might think.

Reading Shakespeare is akin to witnessing the breathtaking beauty of the Rings of Saturn through the lens of a telescope. I feel a pang of regret for not attending any of his plays in theaters. However, the experience was challenging when the director insisted that the characters wear elaborate costumes resembling drag. I guess that's the price of fame. Too many people trying to make an original version or to cover genius with mediocrity.

The real deal would be traveling in time to the Globe playhouse and sit in a two-penny room to see Richard III. I would love that. In the meantime, and since time travel is just a fiction genre, as a form of consolation, I have thought up about Laurence Olivier's movie from 1955. It helped me a lot this April's Fool to cope with the unfolding events of the present Tariff War.

On the play, strongly filtered by the new Tudor dynasty propaganda, Shakespeare told us about the historical English king Richard III, the last Plantagenet who ruled for almost four centuries. It was supposed to be historical in somewhat, but the Bard of Avon spun instead a wacky character with a Machiavellian way to reach power.

He's a hunchback, his teeth are crooked, and even more, he has a limp and a withered arm. And this grotesque character is an insufferable blabbermouth that during the play has many asides with the audience, telling them the bad things he is about to do and make them kind of complicit in it. He is flooding us with constant political maneuvering, widening that strong bond with constant updates, which includes the killing of his two brothers, nephews, even his wife, to wear the crown. He's the anti-hero speaking his mind.

Understanding our present moment through a Shakesperean lens, it's my point.

Trump is wacky as Richard III. The freakish hairdo, the shiny orange bronze, the veneers of porcelain, the gigantic red tie. When he was a young socialite, he certainly had the stamina to keep everybody believing that he was a dynamic businessman. But the same guy went from that celebrity niche to old age like everybody does, becoming a wacky Liberace with his gold TV remote, ranting to his fans through social media about how much the entire world has abused of the bountiful America.

I'm convinced we go through our lifespan like the ants on a Möbius strip, crawling along both sides and creating an infinite recursive feeling because of the way it twists on itself. Trump is repeating the same mantra when he was young. America is being ripped off.

While in the first term he was taking a lot of criticism, and the press had a profitable and long run with his scandals, the second term after a four-year hiatus, he's much more authoritarian. Seeing is believing. All the hawkish agenda of George Bush that he used to mock, as the time and treasure spent in nation-building like Bush tried in the distant Iraq, now it's his agenda with his close neighbors Greenland and Canada.

According to Fukuyama, we believed we had reached the end of history. National borders were carved in stone, and economic growth had no limits. However, if our wacky Richard III continues to push the boundaries, while simultaneously updating us with purchases or invasions of sovereign countries, China could seize the opportunity and invade Taiwan, the capital of nanotechnology.

I’m too old for this, and if I stay fit and healthy and productive, and some plague won't leak again from a lab, I’ll be around no more than 2050. But I have already lived enough to assist at the decline of Western civilization, looming large over the horizon. My generation won’t live as well as our parents did. And good luck to the next one!

This Liberace we have for King Richard III, who dances like jerking off two guys at the same time, laughable as he indeed is, under the Shakespearean lens, had a horrible end during the fray of a battle. Remember that line? "A horse, a horse! my kingdom for a horse!". And Trump almost had it last summer when a bullet grazed his ear instead of blowing his brains out. I guess one of the thousands federal workers that Elon Musk and his crew has already fired will not miss the shot.

Trump found himself on the receiving end of Obama’s sharp humor in April 30, 2011. Look in this link the footage of that unraveling moment of being, and forget Obama's charm to focus only in the brief glimpses of Trump while he was taking it. It was Walpurgis Night, and a Faustian pact was made. Trump sold his soul for wanting what Obama had. Power and endless adulation. Richard III would have begun whispering to us the celebrated first aside–now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by this son of York–as if we were seeing Shakespeare's play, revealing his ambition and determination to be king.

Yesterday, I had a lovely spring morning. I had to take care of some paperwork in Barcelona, which left me at the doorstep of my favorite bookstore, La Central del Raval. I hope it will remain open for many more years. I recommend its patio for quiet reading, although I don’t like the self-service and the long queue for those who are undecided about which cake to choose.

When I returned to my studio, the rain blessed me again with its music. But the new cause célèbre in the publishing industry truly irked me. I couldn't resist sharing my thoughts with the people I trust. Go to court and get an order to halt the publication of a book? It certainly was paradoxical for me, a firm defender of freedom of speech and of using all the words in the dictionary while writing without prejudice. That's what this literary podcast is about.

In 2011, José Bretón, a spiteful and deranged father, reacted violently to his wife Ruth Ortiz’s announcement of their divorce. This led him to make a heinous decision to commit double filicide, killing his six-year-old daughter Ruth and his two-year-old son José. He first gave them pills and then put them at the stake using 551 lbs of firewood and 176 lbs of gas oil. Although his criminal goal wasn’t to kill his wife, it was to inflict unbearable emotional trauma on her. This act of vicarious violence is a form of gender-based violence that targets women.

The police finally confirmed, after firing an incompetent forensic, that they had found the charred bones of the children on Breton’s family farm. While he kept denying the proven facts and presenting himself as an exemplary father. A psychiatrist who examined him diagnosed that he did not suffer from any mental disorder. Consequently, the justice sentenced Bretón to 40 years in prison.

That being said, and as a note of clarification for my American audience, Bretón's murder trial was followed by the press and broadcasted daily, and helped a lot to pass a bill to defend vicarious violence against women in Spain, perpetrated by abusive men during centuries in many forms. The goal was always to hamper the will and the rights of women.

However, José Bretón still intends to perpetuate vicarious violence against his ex-partner, admitting now the crime that has already been thoroughly proven to the author Luisgé Martín, an award-winning novelist, who has written in various genres. Martín is also known for ghostwriting the political memoirs and speeches of the renowned tightrope walker, who is currently the President of the Government of Spain.

Ruth Ortiz, determined to rebuild her life, sought the court’s intervention to stop the distribution and sale of the book titled “El Odio” –meaning Hate–to the publisher Anagrama. She described the author, Luisgé Martín, as “the devil’s pen” for perpetuating José Breton’s vicarious violence against her. Notably, the author had failed to even attempt to contact her before, seemingly indifferent to her pain and the fact that she was the victim.

Indeed, it was Luisgé Martín who initiated a correspondence exclusively with the filicide, who was enthusiastic about the entire concept, offering an opportunity to share his perspective on the events.

There are those who attempt to draw parallels between Truman Capote’s renowned In Cold Blood and Luisgé Martín’s Hate. Emmanuel Carrère’s The Adversary is also mentioned in this context.

While I haven’t read Carrère’s work, I think Truman Capote didn’t face any backlash or criticism during his time. Furthermore, the motive of the murderers Richard Hickock and Perry Smith was purely economic.

The judge says that without knowing the content of the book, he cannot rule to halt its publication. And the prosecutor has appealed and demanded that the publishing house Anagrama hand over the manuscript galleys to the court.

The founder of Anagrama, Jorge Herralde, during the decades of the 80s and 90s, sold the new batch of young British authors such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Hanif Kureishi, Ian McEwan, and Graham Swift... My library had a predominant yellow color, the color chosen for the paperback collection.

All things pass, and nothing remains. Herralde sold his shares to the Italian publisher Feltrinelli in 2010 when he retired, as he declared, "to preserve the continuity of the publishing house." Geez! Jorge, what have you done? Nobody could do a better job than you, the same who published a dark horse like Roberto Bolaño!

The last time I saw Jorge Herralde was when my mother-in-law was dying in a hospital in the upper part of Barcelona, and I ended up having dinner one August evening in the courtyard of El Trapío with my wife. I wanted to show my respects, but good manners and discretion only allowed me to whisper to Melissa how much good Herralde did in his heyday. And the time I submitted one of my novels to the literary prize that bears his name–short in economic endowment but with an abundant reputation–in the tiny apartment Anagrama had as an office, when I thought about something more corporate.

That being said, the paradox within the paradox. Like a Russian doll. In the near future, once Ruth Ortiz passes away, I don’t see any reason to prevent Anagrama from publishing the book, provided it still deems it appropriate. However, it’s simply unfortunate timing at this moment.

If you ask me, I shall pass on this one without the slightest doubt. As I do always with any biased recollection of the facts. Because it's an insult to the intelligence. At the end, whatever one does to control the narrative, truth effortlessly floats on the water like an oil slick.

According to McLuhan, the medium is the message. The issue lies not only in what the book says or how it is written, but in the book itself, its very conception: to put on sale the never-before-seen version of the filicide. But, alas, in front of the shattered mirror of a mother who only sought silence.

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 in a cold pan. 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.

I have mixed feelings after watching Chalamet’s Bob Dylan impersonation in the film A Complete Unknown. It is a superb acting performance. Still, there is an unsurmountable distance between an actor cast solely based on his looks and chameleonic aptitudes, and the real deal that shrines through, which is often disconcerting. The first impression of a successful folk star like Joan Baez was "I was bowled over. I never thought anything so powerful could come out of that little toad."

The biopic tries to portray Robert Allen Zimmerman, a Jewish lad from Minnesota that conquered as Bob Dylan in the early 60s the New York folk scene as a wonderkid. Nobody made it so fast, not even Joan Baez. These two became the protest song duo, performing With God On Our Side in the Newport Folk Festival 1963. That was the summer before President Kennedy was murdered.

Since then, the musician began a singular career. Something between a reluctant prophet that speaks in riddles and an electrifying I-don't-give-a-damn Like a Rolling Stone, roaming around the world on an endless tour, and clearly profitable, still performing at 80 years old with a gravelly whisper for a voice that has made of his once nasal tone a relic from a distant past.

Credit where credit is due. If someone truly deserved a Literature Nobel Prize, it was Bob Dylan. His lyrics certainly were not brainy novels, but rich songs riveted with mighty poetry and strong melodies that stuck deep in the collective imagination of three generations, me included. Fret not, I'm not going to make a list, but surely I'm going to resort to more hyperlinks.

In the Nobel lecture he recorded, I was moved by such common sense, anticipating the backslash of the writers’ guild, who were outraged that a performer, rather than an author, was being awarded. Dylan pointed out that "the words in Shakespeare's plays were meant to be sung, not read on a page."

He was damn right. All those lyrics from a love songs we have listened sometimes had a musical origin that began with wandering poets and performers called troubadours, a word that comes from the Early Middle Ages, during the Islamic expansion that reached the Iberian Peninsula, and it is Arab for "taraba", entertain or just sing for your supper. The roots of those performers are intertwined with the Arab-Andalusian music, brimming with Persian musical instruments like the lute, oud, daf, rebec, and the hypnotic percussion from Isfahan played with on drums like the tombak.

The Arabs valued Persia craftsmen and, above all, Persian music and singers. The Umayyads, both in Damascus and later in Al-Andalus, imported performers from Baghdad in the 8th century by the hand of the emir Abd al-Rahman like Abu al-Hasan, better known for his nickname Ziryab, Persian and Kurdish word for blackbird.

This musical poetry wasn't performed in the streets but in luxurious walled gardens called paradise, from the old Persian "pairi dez", with a profusion of sweet orange trees, water fountains, and exotic Eastern botany species, such as irises, jasmine, narcissus and marigolds. The gardens of al-Hambra in Granada have since then still remained like an untouched marvel.

Those first love songs dealt with melodramas like the old man’s jealousy for his enigmatic young bride, who yearned to escape with her mad lover. Before their wedding, he fled into the wilderness, where he would recite poetry to himself or write in the sand with a stick, becoming detached from the physical world. This left her heartbroken, confined to a golden cage, until she eventually lost hope and gave up on life. News of her death reached the mad lover in the wilderness. He travelled to the place where she had been buried, and there he wept, succumbing to the impossible grief and dying at the graveside of his one true love.

Audience reveled in "sama" or what we know as a trance or ecstasy, because a song about undying love involved devotion and the annihilation of the self. That love also means the longing for spiritual union with the divine. Remember Eric Clapton playing Layla to see that nothing has changed along the centuries in the story of the mad lover Majnun.

These wandering poets traveled to Christian courts in Southern France. And from the early contacts between these Eastern performers with the eclectic fusion of Arabic and Spanish and Jewish in the Mozarabic culture, coupled with the Occitan new version of Christianism known as Catharism–which main tenets were the recognition of the divine female principle as the goddess Sophia–lead to the popularity of "fin'amor" or courtly love, under the patronage of William IX, Duke of Aquitaine.

It beats me how this mirage of the Early Middle Ages would morph into the millennium along the Carolingian feudalism system with a treasure trove of chanson de geste as The Song of Roland, Cantar de mio Cid, and The Song of Nibelungs. This was the backbone of the new knighthood creed, the steroids for warmongering kings and popes that unleashed eight Crusades to conquer Jerusalem, and also to raze the hip and loving Occitania massacre of Cathars included during the Albigensian Crusade.

Back to Bob Dylan, when it was announced in 2016 that he would be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature he remained in silence for weeks to excuse his presence for previous commitments. Until he knew that at least he had to deliver a lecture to cash the 8 million Swedish kroner, almost a million dollars. So, he wrote the Nobel lecture about having an epiphany when he was eighteen, going to a Buddy Holly concert in Duluth, Minnesota, just before he died in a plane crash two days later—the Day the Music Died. And a Dylanesque dissertation about three books that leaked into his lyrics: Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front, and of course The Odyssey, to clinch the matter with a deep reflection on the warrior Achilles in the Underworld, where Odysseus found him sad and completely out of place.

Nostalgia was for Achilles the venom of being the king of the Underworld, so that the hero "would rather be a serf under a poor man's roof that has scarce bread for his household, if only I might be alive upon the earth."

With his playful touch, Bob Dylan concluded:

"That’s what songs are too. Our songs are alive in the land of the living. But songs are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read. The words in Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be acted on the stage. Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page. And I hope some of you get the chance to listen to these lyrics the way they were intended to be heard: in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days. I return once again to Homer, who says, “Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.”

Long before this era of senseless over-sharing, there was an intriguing piece of furniture called a rolltop desk, where our ancestors used to sit and write. It had secret drawers to keep handwritten letters and faded portraits of their loved ones.

These secret drawers were kept locked, and the key to open them was hidden. Sometimes, the women wore the key sewn into their garments.

I've just opened this Substack with the same intention as those women of the past -- that is, to keep these inklings hidden, unreachable -- unless you’re a subscriber, which means you have the key to open them. And thanks to the new tech, my voice will not fade away. Sound waves are as unique as handwritten letters. I've never understood why an actor must impersonate the narrative voice of the author and his characters, like on a radio soap opera. It’s like listening to a foreign movie. I don’t buy it.

Of course, an actor might have a perfect pitch and better delivery than many authors, especially those authors that smoked too many cigarettes -- and consequently had no pipes at all. Or those that drank themselves into a stupor, slurring all the words while reading.

But if I were forced to choose between…, the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas and a legion of wannabes, I would select that chain smoker and holy drinker, whose recordings on the BBC are still the best I have ever listened to. Hear me out, writing is not only about telling a story or presenting facts in an orderly fashion. For that, you can turn to some historian or dedicated journalist.

Writing a poem, a poem in prose, or a fine novel is the adventure of a solitary soul to reach out through the inherent beauty of words.

And mostly spoken words. That pleasing sonorous quality that scholars call euphony traces back to the Greek adjective eúphōnos, meaning sweet-voiced.

So, join me in this new adventure. Perhaps, you would hear birds tweeting in the background or the bell tolling from the close Franciscan convent. And yet, I love to record on my desk while writing. I swiftly catch a new idea and the dynamic spontaneity that makes fun such a lonely craft. Indeed, a recording studio is paramount while performing any song for the many instruments and all the voices.

On the contrary, this is me. The one who dares to think out loud and then write it down.

Keeping a newly completed manuscript in a drawer to rest for a while before editing it once you regain objectivity is not trivial advice. It’s true that after so much confinement and the solitude that writing entails, one wants to get up from the desk and celebrate the good news. However, with today’s immediacy, where one can send an original manuscript with a simple click, the rest in the drawer becomes more mandatory than ever.

Over the years and without even trying, these dilemmas of the art of writing no longer cause me anxiety as before. Maybe it has to do with hormones, which have changed my priorities and how the brain works, in the way of any woman who suddenly accesses the superpowers of motherhood for the first time.

I have learned that good manuscripts are like fine wines, which become great with time of rest, because they are detached from fashions and trends, from the moronic "it is no longer in style" with which an editor discard them.

I am at the zenith of the thrilling life of a fiction writer; when one is still young to wait for benefits from the future that looms on the horizon and not so old to condemn oneself to the sad idea that any past time was better. Every day counts, and I’m determined to squeeze every moment out of them, just like lemons.

I was watching a documentary about the portentous artists of the Renaissance, which made me blush, cringing for their absolute dedication and inordinate courage. It just so happened that it began with Filippo Brunelleschi, the Italian genius who devised the vanishing point in the laborious construction of the dome of the cathedral of Florence, with the patronage of the Medici’s fabulous saga.

Writing my second novel, using the blueprint of a Flemish triptych, Brunelleschi was a big help. Each narrative voice gave way to the next with a whiplash, instead of the required cliffhanger. As if I'm saying to the reader, with a swaggering attitude, “Stop reading me if I don’t have your full attention.”

The first voice was the most difficult, because the first relay in turn was to accept a defeat, with so much to tell. But knowing how to say goodbye is an art like no other, and to do it in the grand manner, to know the depth of desire is paramount.

Brunelleschi was my inspiration because I needed a vanishing point in the horizon of time, perspective—or what in Latin is for seeing through. I was thirty years old then, and in a biographical foreshortening about my eighteenth, I wrote what I would never have written then. That’s why this literary genre is known as auto-fiction, because every seven years, your thinking shifts at a ninety-degree angle, creating an entirely new perspective.

Still, I wasn't as assertive as any author should be. I wanted to publish so badly, given that I was in dire straits after quitting my day job and my savings would run out in a year, so I relied on a mentor who certainly was a generous reader but also my shrewd bookseller. After eagerly reading my original, he claimed that if I changed the Brunelleschi-style whiplash for a naughty bit, in less than a year Gold Plated would be in his bookstore’s display window.

It took me a while to see that situation as a simple role-play. I’m amazed that I couldn’t see it at the time. A middle-aged bookseller wanted to play the young and ambitious writer he would never be, given his lack of dedication or talent. Otherwise, he would be too occupied with writing his own manuscript instead of dramatically altering mine. I began to write in order to please him and tossed my whiplash for his cheap-soft-porno scene.

Lucky me, I’ve always kept the originals safe, so no harm done. But the bookseller’s role-play did not end there once he gained traction. He asked me as well to fire my lovely agent, who over the years made a brilliant career, bringing many authors out of anonymity. And currently, after she decided to change sides, she’s a fiction editor at the largest publishing house of Barcelona.

In all honesty, I consider such a dislocating experience as a privilege, instead of an epic failure. It’s true that I felt used and discarded like a broken toy. But I was born to be a writer. Quitting was never an option for me, not even in the darkest days. I learned a lot; in hindsight, it took me to cross the threshold on a fast-paced adventure in which I realized that, due to readings that had shaped me along the years and the many American authors I admired, I didn’t belong to the literary tradition that initially corresponded to me by my mother tongue, the Spanish Castilian. Consequently, I transitioned into the ranks of transnational authors in an organic way.

Thinking outside the box, I realized that after the Digital Revolution there’s no longer any reason why I should limit myself to printed books. Please, don’t get me wrong, I always love them. But print runs are dwindling annually, readers’ attention spans are being shortened by smartphones’ bells and whistles, and bookstores are closing due to exorbitant commercial rents. It’s a brave new world.

So, I bought myself a professional home studio with priceless analog hardware and equipment, where I can craftily record all my books, podcasts, and even commercials to support myself. It’s enough to know how to take care of the pipes, work out daily, eat like a pauper and healthier, and quit smoking and drinking—the pastimes of ancient literary lions who only managed to fry their brains and ruin their frail health at ages that nowadays would seem premature.

Back to Brunelleschi and his vanishing point, as I edit and translate my coming-of-age novel, Gold Plated, I experience a delightful sense of three-dimensional vertigo. From the emancipated eighteen-year-old lad I was attempting to portray in my thirties, I still maintain the same unwavering determination in my late 50s. And I have finally shed each and every one of his insecurities and self-doubt that crippled my good judgment and literary talent. Seeing is believing.