Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!

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. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

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 andhorse 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 herbut she can’t see them.*Green I want you green.The great stars of frost,come with fish of shadowpaving the path to dawn.The fig tree rasps the windwith its rough branches,and the wildcat mountainbares its sour agaves.Who will come—from where—?At her railing she gazesgreen flesh, green hair,dream of the bitter sea.*Compadre! Can I swapmy horse for your house?My saddle for your mirror-my knife for your blanket–?Compadre! I come bleedingfrom the Cabra passes.If I could, young friend,the deal would be done.But I’m no longer menor is my house my own.Compadre! Let me diedecent in my bed.A steel bed, if you please,laid with Dutch linen.Don’t you see the slashfrom my breast to my throat?Three hundred dark roseson your white shirtfront.Blood oozes and stinksin the sash at your waist.But I’m no longer menor is my house my own.Let me climb way upto the high terrace.Let me climb! Let meto the green terrace.Railing of moonlightand the rushing water.*Two compadres climbto the high terrace,leaving a trail of blood,and a trail of tears.Tin lanterns trembledon 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 mouthsleft a strange flavorof bile, basil, and mint.Compadre! Where is she?Where’s your bitter girl?How often has she waited!How often will she waitfresh face, and black hair,on the green terrace!*Over the face of the cisternthe gypsy girl swayed.Green flesh, green hair,eyes of cold silver.A moon icicle holds her,high over the water.The night was as cozyas a small plaza.Drunken civil guardspounded on the door.Green I want you green.Green wind, green branches.Boat on the sea andhorse on the mountain. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

As the dog days struck in August, I declined a gig to record audiobooks. And I was so low that I didn’t stop thinking, not even when I did laps in the Olympic pool. Climate change, many hellish summers this century, seas infested with microplastics and jellyfish and anisakis. And prawns expensive as f**k.I have no choice but to buy an AC if I want to work during the next summer. What world is this, how have we fucked it up so soon?I grew up loving books and wanting to write them myself. When I began handwriting, the words flew away. They were whispers, secrets, confessions to a blank page. I never kept a copy because I thought that the original was not original if there was a copy. It was just the other way around. All that is relevant is copy. And no story is relevant without a good conflict.That’s how foolish we are, looking for a fix, eternally head bowed, showing a goofy smile, with the tip of the finger scrolling into a cesspool. Click bait, scroll down, link here, fake news. So intoxicated with notifications. Last time you walked with a book on the street, no one filmed you. And it was lost forever.Don’t overthink, don’t you dare to write anything controversial, be discreet. But look for an alias to leave your poisoned slime. Hate in secret. Vote for the blabbermouth of the day. No check and balances against absolute power, even if it fills the streets with masked fat men, and takes the gardener who mowed your lawn for a fair price.The future that looms on the horizon is dark, as if the Great Depression and then the 30s are coming back. I foresee the brutal Nazi brownshirts coming back, herding Jews and gypsies into concentration camps or whoever is nowadays the sacrificial lamb.Sometimes, I remember why I write, not every day, and when I do, I never suspected that I would have to go back to Homer.There are no more rabbits in this hat, I said to myself this endless summer. I shall write and record in summer as well as in winter, always at a lovely 70 Fahrenheit degrees and 50% humidity throughout the year.I got a vocal chain and a beech wood matryoshka to record in grand style, as I always wanted to do. I rebel against Artificial Intelligence and its robotic readers. F*****s, you won’t be capable to beat my analog sound.This is Soda Mill Studio and if the wind blows and the night has quieted the neighbors and the traffic has stopped rolling, the abandoned pipes that go down from the terrace to the basement, whisper secrets between the owl’s spaced hoots.If I could use the words like scattered flowers and fallen leaves, secluded in an imagined world where I could get fired up, I would never leave the beechwood matryoshka or I would chain myself to the desk and thin myself out in what I tell until I don’t look back. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

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 Babe, 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 and flee, 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 the 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. I said: Stay with it. The wound is the place where the Light enters you. He said: Stay with it. The wound is the place where the Light enters you. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

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.” Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

Farmers, ranchers, and fishermen, the pillars of the primary sector, have been frequently depicted in literature throughout history. Growing up in the shoreline, from the Caribbean to the Mediterranean Sea, and even the Atlantic Ocean for extended periods, I’ve developed a stronger connection with those who make their living as fishermen.Yesterday, I was stunned while reading an interview with Vicenç Comí, the skipper of the trawler Sinera. He has been struggling to survive the absurd regulations imposed by the bureaucrats of the European Union. However, the most recent decision, which granted him only a 27-day fishing permit, effectively sealed his fate. According to the documents he has been diligently collecting in archives, his family has been engaged in fishing for four centuries, spanning seventeen generations.After two adventurous years in the Airborne, where I experienced military skydiving without any sense of mortality, due to my youthful age and the boldness that came with it, I landed a plum job as a seaman, which allowed me to read all I could for ten consecutive years, averaging twelve novels per week. I blissfully called my own PhD on Comparative Literature. By then, in the glorious 90s, I was convinced that the essence of being a fiction writer was more about reading than writing, lest I resorted to overused clichés and conventional themes, because the meaning of the word novel means write something new or unusual in an interesting way.From the dock of the marina, surrounded by slender sailboats and formidable motorboats, I witnessed every day the trawlers embarking on their journeys before sunrise and returning at five in the afternoon, preparing on the deck the boxes for the fish auction. Sometimes, they raced each other to moor their boats before the price of the fish dropped, and the mast of the sailboats began to rock between the clanging of the halyards, because they didn’t obey the three-knots speed limit of the roadstead.And those trawlers were lucky ones, given that seine-haul fishing was conducted during the night shift, sailing at ten in the evening and returning at port at eight in the morning. It goes without saying that fishboats raised a ruckus when they were informed by radio on their returning about the prices dropping in the fish auction, requiring them at the mouth of the port to throw boxes overboard full of fresh sardines and whatnot that the tide sent to the marina dock, in order to avoid losing money.I’m not getting political to affirm that the European Union razed vineyards before to satisfy the jealous French and did not move a pinky to protect the textile industry against China. But if the last intention of those bureaucrats is to send Vicenç Comí out of business, maybe it is reason enough to leave the Union like the British did before. As incredible as it sounds, farmers, ranchers, and fishermen had to comply with a bureaucratic rigmarole or be fined. I’m not surprised at all that youngsters don’t see any future in the primary sector that their fathers once had.Vicenç Comí is certain that the people who control his fate are a bunch of dumbheads, corrupted officials, or simply ignorant of his ancient craft. Perhaps they intend to outsource the capture of fish to distant seas and transform the Mediterranean coastlines into a massive tourist destination, like they already did with Balearian islands, catering to the preferences of pale northern Europeans. Who knows? But it’s certainly not a positive development. After skipper Comí, the fishmonger will follow, and their demise will condemn us to consuming frozen fish for the remainder of our lives, sending all the restaurants of the port to a new level of blandness.My memories are filled with the tantalizing fragrance of barbecued sardines and red mullets, which I always ate by hand, just like the fresh shrimp. I also remember hitting the living octopus against the floor before placing it in the boiling pot. To give you an idea of this, in this beach town, we cook the freshly caught squid in October, even with chocolate! I only experimented with this devotion to seafood in France, with oysters, and in Norway, with wild salmon, not the farmed salmon that they serve in supermarkets.When I was a kid, I spent all day long in the beach diving with harpoons to fish octopus and had a snack with the clams I saw in the bottom, as I was living in paradise. I’m still recovering from the shock I experienced when I discovered that someone had thoughtlessly mined sand from the sea, not realizing that they had destroyed the centuries-old clam-fishing grounds. All for nothing, because the sea always reclaims what belongs to it. Do you think they learned from this mistake? No, because the demand for a meter square of beach with beautiful sand is still high.Perhaps I should stop whining and instead commence writing swiftly a fisherman’s novel. But, as I had previously mentioned, reading has revealed me that conventional themes such as this have already been explored in literature. I recall Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, which depicted a world centered around whale oil with the island Nantucket as capital, predating the fossil fuel era. And Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, maybe the greatest novel ever written about repeated failure and resilience beyond human limits.During my ten years as a sailor, I had written numerous sketches about the characters I encountered, with the hope of finding Captain Ahab. But sailboats and yachts operate in a completely different realm, characterized by leisure and relaxation. Consequently, my sketches only depicted mundane, bourgeois individuals lacking any remarkable qualities that could ignite the reader’s imagination, unless they worshipped plutocrats like gods. These characters were either sun-kissed and carefree, driving expensive Italian or German cars escorted by bimbos, or they were intoxicated and clumsy, endangering divers with their motorboats while sailing dangerously close to the shoreline with their double helixes as a meat grinder. No kidding, I had to deal with that once.Only three characters passed the filter of infinite boredom: a drug dealer who was financially splendid with me when I saved his ass as a defense witness from an unlawful police raid, a yacht broker with an ancient lineage that harked back to the disappeared School of Pilots–opened while the trade with Cuba was thriving–and the last lighthouse keeper with whom I shared plenty of books and unforgettable nights in his humble abode. 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The novel Pedro Páramo by the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo is based on a popular trope: the son who returns to find his father. Juan Preciado’s story begins when, on her deathbed, his mother asks him to search for his father in Comala, a town she fondly remembers as a vibrant and bustling place.Upon his arrival in Comala, Juan Preciado encounters a desolate and decadent destiny. Along the way, his first encounter is with Abundio Martínez, who describes Pedro Páramo as pure hate. From there, Juan begins to piece together the story of his deceased father, guided by the ghosts he encounters on his journey.Pedro Páramo is structured into two distinct narrative lines: one that follows Juan Preciado’s journey and another that delves into the memories that shape Pedro Páramo’s life, a cruel and unscrupulous cacique whose actions are paradoxically driven by the love he holds for Susana San Juan, a woman he has known since childhood, when they were kids diving together in the river, who slowly became a splendor of beauty with aquamarine eyes like the very Aphrodite, the Greek goddess, the one who rose from the foam to make us ponder about the playful laws of attraction, never-ending love, and abundant sexual desire.Susana San Juan and Pedro Páramo had an affair until Susana’s mother passed away. After her mother’s death, her father, Bartolomé San Juan, took her to a lonely mining region where she was sexually abused by her own father. Later, she was traded to Florencio, a man with whom she fell deeply in love, but he suddenly died, leaving Susana in a fragile state of mind. Devastated by grief, she soon spiraled into madness, seclusion, and raw nymphomania always under the shadow of Florencio. The death of Bartolomé, ordered by Pedro himself, serves as the final trigger that sets the course for Susana’s mental health, which was already weakened by insomnia and fear of the dark.Pedro is unable to forget her and desires her, he’s trapped into a treadmill of unrequited love and sorrow, leading him to find no other way to heal this wound than abuse the power of his money to extort sexual favors from his housemaids and the whole neighborhood, scornfully referring to them as “a handful of flesh.” All the other women in Comala have black eyes, a common trait among Mexican Native Americans, except for Susana. This fact holds significant importance, as it is the reason behind Pedro’s curse and misery. The exotic blend of colors and shapes.Sandro Botticelli’s Italian Renaissance painting, Birth of Venus, the Roman name of the classical and hellenistic goddess of love and beauty, depicts Aphrodite-Venus as a blonde woman with possibly straight hair. Her eyes are usually green or brown, but more likely, aquamarine. Her face, adorned with hair longer than any goddess, and her full legs completely bare and exposed, glows like the Sun. Her hips are both slender and voluminous, with her knees flexing above her shins. A defining characteristic of Magical Realism is that all its authors pay homage to Faulkner. I wonder whether bookstores in South America were poorly stocked. Albert Camus’s victory cry was that Old Bill made it. But prudish readers since the middle of the 30s had already canceled Faulkner for penning Sanctuary, a pulp fiction novel—there is no story without conflict—where Ole Miss coed Temple Drake ends up as the sex slave of a gangster named Popeye.Faulkner faced criticism for his new heroine, Temple Drake, the triple Maiden-Mother-Crone Goddess, and how all that evil flowed off her like water off a duck’s back, both in Sanctuary and Requiem for a Nun. Albert Camus adapted the latest for a play and also wrote the preface to Maurice Coindreau’s translation of the novel into French. I imagine Camus deeply moved by the painful experiences that shape us all, despite our pride in surviving them and our belief that they are forgotten forever. Faulkner’s famous line about the past is just an observation of the lawyer Stevens, while Temple Drake says that her old identity has vanished, and no one cares about the depth of her wounds.Beyond his literary achievements and the broad recognition of his peers, including García Márquez, Rulfo was a multifaceted artist. His photographs gained widespread recognition and meticulously documented the indigenous peoples of Mexico. He found a stable and fulfilling sinecure until his passing at the National Institute, where he curated and edited collections of social anthropology.Post-revolutionary Mexican conflicts like the Cristero War, during the early years of Juan Rulfo, in the late 20s, a reactionary movement against the implementation of secular and anticlerical articles of the 1917 Constitution, in his own words: "I had a very hard, very difficult childhood. A family that disintegrated very easily in a place that was totally destroyed. From my father and my mother, even all of my father's siblings were killed. Then I lived in an area of devastation. Not only of human devastation, but of geographical devastation. I never found, nor have I found to date, the logic of all that. It cannot be attributed to the revolution. It was more of an atavistic thing, a fate thing, an illogical thing."I find myself spinning about Faulkner and Rulfo because of a recent trip back in time, inspired by a book I read in 1984, thanks to a suitable film adaptation on Netflix that I highly recommend to those who have read Pedro Páramo. And especially to those who never did, given that their reading abilities have diminished like the new barbarians they are.Pedro Páramo, according to Netflix, left me with wonderful expectations as a pledge, because of the impending premiere of One Hundred Years of Solitude for the Xmas season, the decades-longer, self-censored film adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel.Yes, I have a long list of niggles, mostly because the author wrote the novel just to make fun of the cheap and greedy ways of producers. It was a love-and-hate relationship. While he was selling copies by millions, García Márquez never sold the movie rights. We shall see; maybe I will toss away my niggles as I did this last time watching for the first time Susana San Juan, like the one who rose from the foam. It really paid me off to change my mind. You’ll never know, will you? But I shall admit that it’s a good thing to be alive. Time is a flat circle. 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In my very long mailing list—which this platform insists on distributing a newsletter instead of leaving the reader alone at his own free will—I also have writers whom I admire. One of them, Antonio Muñoz Molina, a well-known Spanish novelist and columnist, wrote last month in El País that he is fed up with unsolicited emails.Twenty years ago, in the early days of the blogosphere, there was no newsletter at all. If one wanted to add the blog he loves to read as a bookmark in his browser, he just did it, instead of this nuisance of a newsletter that equals targeting the craft of a prolific author along with all the pounding commercials written by a robot that clog everybody’s email inbox.I write between five and seven thousand words a day, given that I am a graphomaniac. I use most of them for my manuscripts-in-progress, of course. But I also devote a small part of my output to other needs, that is, journaling, correspondence, and finally these installments, where I always try to be as succinct as possible. The reality is that I cannot help myself; I love pounding away at my keyboard, as a virtuoso pianist does, and it’s the life I choose, at tremendous personal cost, since being a fiction writer leads to giving up a lot of things, like raising children and the kind of security that makes ordinary people happy.Precisely for this reason, when this author whom I always admired so much once gave me immense joy when he was kind enough to respond to me with a few lines. Since then, I’ve dubbed him “Maestro” because his disarming humility hid an astounding literary talent.I wrote to him a long mail in one of the darkest times of my life, sixteen years ago, when I tried to keep the warrior's morale afloat amid rejections. I had lost the silent company of my books, then stored in boxes, and took one plane after another, with no direction home, embracing the kindness of strangers, and scribbling furiously a medieval trilogy.I told him I was a whole acrobat. In fact, I had more lives than a cat and incredibly always managed to land on my feet, convinced that I was within an inch of achieving a sparkling destiny like his. Not for nothing, Antonio Muñoz Molina is considered by broad consensus, even among those who envy him the most, the best Spanish writer alive. Reading any of his texts out loud literally gives me chills, an unequivocal sign of being channeling a whole Mozart unleashed. No matter how much trade I have as a narrator, I am not immune to what I read, and I have to settle down, take a deep breath, and try not to break my voice.I also wrote about a blog that by then he was writing from New York, where he was residing for several years, giving master classes at Columbia University. He had written about one of the greatest moments in English literature, which was the second part of Virginia Woolf’s novel, To the Lighthouse, titled “Time Passes.”I can’t quote that long mail I wrote to him, as I lost everything when I melted the MacBook I had at the time, an occupational hazard. However, I believe it had sufficient punch for such a living legend to dedicate his attention to me. What he wrote to me, I have never forgotten.He wrote back saying that what I had said about me reminded him a lot of his days as a civil servant in Granada, where he was organizing jazz festivals, when he submitted his manuscripts for literary awards and no one paid the slightest attention to him.Until one day, like a surreal fairy tale, a friend of his left a booklet of press articles for the literary director of the very same publishing house Seix-Barral, Pere Gimferrer, known also as an exquisite poet in his heyday and a prestigious scout, who was passing through to give a conference.Nine years later, Antonio Muñoz Molina became the younger academic and had already won a lot of accolades for his novels. He was a notorious dark horse.That's why I had to keep writing, he told me, and stay impermeable to despondency. Virginia Woolf, he added, did not have the slightest idea in her day that we would all be celebrating her a century later, because she was quite busy and perhaps very worried that her hand would stiffen and the pen would fall to the ground, in one of those dizzy spells that the poor woman had and that she was so much impaired.Perhaps it serves as a finale to describe the night before I got married, when my eccentric bachelor party consisted of attending a talk by the Maestro about his latest book,To Walk Alone in the Crowd, in the forum of a modern library, which I went with my partner in life. It was the last night of February 2018, the tail end of that winter; heavy rainfall, freezing temperatures, and a snowfall forecast. As there was hardly any room among so many readers, we had to climb a lot of stairs to find a place in the last row, something that Melissa hates because of her wobbly feet. After the introduction by the editor, Antonio appeared wearing a cardigan and corduroy pants, nothing fancy, almost apologizing for so many people turning out that they had to squeeze in. My original plan was to ask for the blessing of the adventure that began the next day. But after a while, I knew that with such an audience, raging to get an autograph in the copy they carried with them, it would be mission impossible. So I had to settle for seeing him talk to the presenter about an experimental book that he had come up with while walking down the street, recording casual scraps of conversation with his iPhone, and making collages with press ads in his notebook, like a child playing. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

The rumbling swell woke me up in front of a breakwater wall that blocked my view of the sea, but the water sprays climbed above it, like a ranging whale expelling air from its blowholes, in each assault with the force of a geyser. Through the windshield of the car, I spotted Leire walking over the dike without caring about getting soaked from the volatilized foam in the air; she was barefoot to walk on her own.I opened the door and shouted her name, assuming she wouldn’t hear me. Returning to the car, I removed my patent-leather shoes, dress blues, beret, and tie, which were already starting to bother me after the formalities of the wake.Although autumn arrived, it was still September, and the nights were still mild. I bolted on that washed concrete until I got beside her and asked her what the sea was called in Basque.“Itsaso,” she replied. There was also a word for the late Joshua: “indar,” which means strength. I agreed. I couldn’t help but wonder where he got that laid-back vibe. Did she know?“It was something passed down through their family,” she explained. “But it wasn’t the kind of gift that could be freely given. It had to be returned to the earth at the first sign of corruption.” “I don't quite understand what you meant,” I said. “He didn't commit suicide. It wasn’t an accident. It was bound to happen.”Without acknowledging defeat, after relentlessly battering the boulders, the waves receded with a deep sigh. A slow but determined rolling motion began, as many tons of salty water surged back, shaking with white crest towards us. That formidable blue monster that the night concealed unleashed its full power, causing the earth to tremble. I thought it was time for us to retreat. I was unprotected in that dike with those dark masses rocking to assault once again. And Leire struck me as strange when she spoke about Joshua’s fate. The feeling of not knowing where I was treading with the woman I was sleeping with when Joshua ignored her, afflicted me, if by affliction is meant causing pain or trouble.Would Leire recall Joshua's most loving caresses? She was moving towards the end of that dark breakwater, right where the beast had kicked, sweeping away everything in its path, and whatever I was shaking, following the beat of the same swell, which had regrouped for a heart-rending charge, I found myself unable to accompany Leire, who followed her walk unperturbed by such a threat, a walk with love and death.I was losing her, and I knew it. Why fool myself? If things had been different, I wouldn’t have felt such crystals lodged in my throat, those that prevented me from shouting their name with the feeling of my gut. Without Joshua’s natural flair, “indar”, the same strength I needed to make her hear me over that rumble, I chose to kneel and sit on the concrete while the water sprays came to dress me in bubbles.I was weakness and loneliness with outstretched arms. I searched for Leire in the darkness, but I couldn't see her anymore. I remembered those whispers when I stealthily approached her, when she told me that her warmth was reserved for someone else but me. But I was a star of mutable light and candor was touch, and love a game full of curiosity and defiance. Like a mélange in which globules of iridescent walls fluctuated, emerged, and exploded where I caught glimpses of pretensions, hopes, fascinations, paroxysms of the soul and flesh and blood, presumptions, whims, silences, and absences, quarrels of dissatisfaction and mistakes. Leire loving me, and I loving Leire—the mirror of lies.In reality, it all boils down to a fundamental mismatch: she getting lost on the jetty, and me waiting for that elusive miracle that lovers always yearn for. Why did I compel myself to endure so much? It would have been enough to go to the car, and that pain would never reach its peak. But no, in the narrow world of lovers, there are only two paths: the one that leads towards the object of desire and the one that moves away. Just like that breakwater. Either it forced me to go to where Leire was, or she would walk away. The centuries of wisdom accumulated in libraries or the Apollo XI moon landing held no relevance. In the end, I would be as vulnerable as any man at any given moment. I would be swept away by a force not as spectacular as the waves, yet as simple and measurable as a woman who hopelessly distanced herself. There was no other force in nature that dragged me so far, not even that shown by the blue monster. I owed myself to the explosive nature of a love affair, to the lady and her shards.What else could compel me to turn back? I recalled the many times when her hands went up on my back, the leftovers I picked up hungrily on the rich man's table, the delights of the naïve naked, and the passionate touch that ignited my desire, the spontaneous lives born in countless wet kisses, the torrid jizz in the shadows of licentiousness. Of course, I lacked “indar,” but I felt like a fading star: a dense concentration of matter that eventually collapsed inward. Nothing, regardless of its lightness, could escape the intense gravitational pull of my being, not even light. I had become a black hole.Leire returned safely and sound from her walk along the jetty’s end; her black silhouette advanced towards me, and for a fleeting moment, I yearned to believe in the miracle I had eagerly awaited. She was drenched, her clothes clinging to her body, and her hair cascading down her face. She rubbed her arms to warm herself, and when she sat beside me, she requested a hug because she was freezing, extremely cold. I obliged with a joy that made me burst into laughter. Leire remarked that the tone of my laughter was peculiar, almost hateful. But I couldn't contain myself: I knew that this was the last time I would hug her and laugh so as not to start crying. She was aware of it and remained indifferent."What am I supposed to do?" I couldn't answer her. I had enough work to do with trying to contain my nervous laughter. She bite me on the chest of my shirt, and I stopped laughing hard enough to let out a groan. I would let her do it, would let her be loved with a passivity provoked by that calm that the sense of an ending gave me. Whatever she did, whether it was good or bad, Leire was going to leave anyway as soon as she finished.Whenever we made love, I secretly harbored some hope for the future. But not then. And yet, I felt good, at ease, comfortable in the role of poor, hopeless idiot. I accepted the slurp with equanimity, without a shadow of becoming crazier than I was about lending myself to a civilized farewell. Why become sad? Leire tried to take off my shirt, but the fastened cuffs kept me handcuffed and clumsy. My dress with a thousand crackling bubbles, she couldn’t manage to take it off at all. Salt water dripped onto the tip of her nose and onto her locks, and I couldn't get those drops off with my shirt turned inside out. In the swaying of the waters, I found that music that I had not noticed until then. I contemplated the waves with another gaze, a stare that wasn’t lost in the whirlpools, the fearful blow rushing with all its weight, and the roar of defeat, but a gaze that sought serrated manes between the crests of the foam, the serrated manes of a runaway horse. And so she had taken me and was putting me in her to wildly ride me."Don't move."But I didn't intend to move at all. I was too engrossed in that swaying that had initially been so menacing, unable to follow her because of the fear that the blue monster would strike me with all its fury. She moved in rhythm with the waves, and pleasure wrapped us up in each bellow of the beast and its water sprays. And each time pleasure gained a greater echo, each time it achieved that nothing distracted us more than the pleasure itself. In that slow pace, the fearsome blow was the most intimate of kisses, and the roar of defeat was a promise. She brushed away with one hand her face’s dripping locks and also they were dripping on me, and with the other she leaned with her palm open on my chest. The stars still hung across the firmament; soon, I stopped listening to the waves and heard within me the clattering hooves of a galloping horse approaching from nowhere, the bantam animal that did not ask for explanations in its path, more terrifying if possible, merciless in its march, almost ebrious of speed and the music of blood. It advanced without stopping, advanced until riding into the ground. As Joshua when he went to meet his death. And as I would do myself if one day I ever had the chance. And so in that ardent jizz that was about to burst into her womb, there was nothing but despair and its fleeting colors, there was nothing but the avidity with which it felt the last time. Nothing but the shadow of death, the longed-for click that proclaims non-being: the mutable glint in the eyes of a runaway horse.The small death and then the intense cold—the opposite of the real death experienced by someone who bleeds—yet it was no less a death and no less the sorrow that compelled one to withdraw into oneself. Especially when I knew that the time had come to bid her farewell, and that goodbye deeply hurt me. She lay on my chest, curling up against the cold, refusing to let me slip away. As if the goodbye was not thorny enough and needed to be extended until the beast’s eternal kicking subsided. I tried to be complacent, even though I already felt the venom of spite, and embraced her with a warmth that would remain forever sealed in the heart’s lounges, those lounges where light, water, and dust do not filter, but keeps its treasures timeless, waiting for the chance that never comes. 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Since I quit drinking alcohol and smoking pot or tobacco to avoid running out of steam and finish sentences skidding at the top of the gravel voice, my journaling has regained the life it once had, which is a pleasant surprise and a valuable benefit. When I did thick spirals of smoke, my quiet thoughts were lost forever. Or worse, if possible, from the deep buzz only reached to the edge of awareness such bland trifles as "I smoke. And I draw the leak from my breath." Of course, with that trivialities, I missed out on the precious foam of the days and the hours that shape fiction in all its forms. Now, the only thing left for me is to read between the lines, to find out what I deliberately omitted because there is always more in what is quiet than in what is said.Before presbyopia and those bad habits took their toll on me, I wrote both correspondence and journals by hand, allowing myself be carried away fearlessly by the stream of consciousness, listening intently to the graze of the nib on the paper, as if someone were riding the waves with the intense fury and spontaneous imagination of a runaway horse.Unlike the great authors whose calligraphy is sheer shorthand, mine was so affected that frills became psychedelic a bit out of my control, a reflection of the sensuality that overcame me, the secrets and whispers of dangerous writing. Kundera rightly said that youth was the quintessential lyrical age.So, one day, I stopped writing by hand. The combative Japanese pen became a sort of Excalibur, the sword in the rock, waiting for the return of the true king. There was an old correspondent who complained bitterly and who, after much begging, managed to convince me to go back to paper and ink. But I felt a bit ridiculous feigning the frills that once effortlessly came out of me. It was like forging the signature of someone who wasn't me. And of course, from the carnality that overcame me, I only have the deep relief of not waking up every morning with that irritated cobra looking for trouble while it hisses the music of the blood. All of which brings me to the gastronomic dichotomy that I intend to deal with.On the one hand, I present a raw piece of fish with a strong odor and a sticky texture. However, marinated beforehand and seasoned with dill and juniper berries, it is as appetizing as, say, that marvelous salmon I ate in Bergen, Norway, day in and day out.On the other hand, the same piece of fish, since in Norway salmon is not farmed but a national treasure, which, for a change, I also learned to make between fjords while listening to Edvard Grieg in a log cabin, always with a stopwatch in hand, using a bamboo steamer basket seasoned with ginger, leeks, and butter sauce.The first is the dictatorship of pleasure, and the second is perpetual frigidity. Apologies for this perverse logomachy, but it’s crucial to manage the dosed thought so as not to frighten away members of the audience from the outset.OK now, let's get down to business.To go through the rocky lyrical age, one needed bold authors like Henry Miller, who wiped their asses with the censorship laws of their time and didn’t mince words. Like so many other readers, I had a great time with Tropic of Cancer. Bored with implied and unnecessary complexities and debatable meanders, reading with no-holds-barred of any kind was quite refreshing, to say the least. What would have happened if Gustave Flaubert hadn’t held back narrating the same vicissitudes in Madame Bovary? Why didn’t he do it in his heyday?The answer is somewhat disappointing. No publisher would have dared to publish it, not for lack of courage, but because in Flaubert's time, there were laws that restricted the freedom of creation under the pretext of obscenity. In fact, the poor b*****d had to face a trial for morality and decency simply for daring to write on the subject of adultery in 1856.Henry Miller had to endure nearly two decades of censorship before his work was finally published in America, once the outdated censorship laws were repealed. On the other hand, Gustave Flaubert had to witness his sexual fantasies being confined to the private realm, specifically his correspondence with his lover, Louise Colet.It’s hard for me to grasp how we’ve transitioned from raw fish to steamed fish in such a short span, considering all the reasons explained earlier and right after the Golden Age of Porn. I know that, at the end of the day, it’s just sex, and our sexual habits are largely anecdotal and private. But we are back to a new era of sexual repression, where misguided Western countries tolerate Gender Apartheid, and women walk in public covered with burkas, chadors, and hijabs, akin to second-class citizens, under the foreboding threat of their male partners, families, and Salafist imams. Patriarchy at its best!The French-Lebanese filmmaker and writer Audrey Diwan, who has dared to film a remake of the classic of the 70s Emmanuelle, made some public utterances to which I felt personally alluded, perhaps because in writing I feel sometimes slamming into the same wall.She said, "Regarding pleasure, I think we're not so interested in sex anymore. We are not interested in touching each other. Even for my generation, despite AIDS in the 80s, sex was very important. Despite the risk, the attraction was still there. Now I'm not saying it's gone, but it's completely different, and it's something I've tried to understand. What's going on? I have realized that the way we look at each other is in a very critical way, like scoring each other. It's not easy, because we are subject to people's eyes, but most of the time it's to like or dislike, and so it's very difficult to leave room for desire if that's the way we look at ourselves. I have found myself with a lot of loneliness and I have tried to portray it in this film." End of quoteNot trying to be funny, but I think dentists and cosmetic surgeons are the sole guilds who benefit from this hypercritical way of scoring at each other with a magnifying glass, looking by default for imperfections and losing along the way, almost irrevocably, the desire to eat fish, thinking that perhaps a worm will enter our brains if we do not cook it thoroughly first. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

I don’t believe this record can be broken, but who knows? All it takes is a madman to allow American missiles to be launched at Russia from Ukraine, similar to the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. Yet the final year of the last century still holds the record. Plus, in my lifetime, I won’t witness another turn of the millennium.But it turns out that yesterday, I received the news of the passing of a friend who suffered a heart attack. Astrid was two years younger than me. In 1999, she used to host gatherings at her old and somewhat ramshackle townhouse, where my old friends and I would smoke weed in front of a wood stove until we were pretty baked. And we split a gut laughing over the stupidest things and have soft drinks to avoid the cotton mouth.When the weather was nice, we would go up to the large terrace to cook Argentinean asado, cut into slices that we slowly ate for almost six hours, paired with red wine, and enjoyed it, if anything, along with more joints. We often watched wonderful sunsets, which, with such a buzz, sometimes had a suspicious crimson splendor.I used to live alone on Zeno Hill at that time, in a small studio with a single barred window because it was on the first floor. Sometimes, the girls who came home from school would greet me while I was writing on my desktop computer. When the sun went down and I wanted to get some fresh air after being confined in that hideout for so long, I used to go to Astrid's to meet my friends, much like someone going to a pub.That year was my annus mirabilis. In March, I penned Gold Plated, after hesitating for long as to whether to set it during the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995, and highlighting the appalling behavior of the Dutch troops who allowed the Serbian general Ratko Mladić to pass in exchange for beer. Due to financial constraints, I was unable to travel to Bosnia to conduct thorough research. As a result, I maintained the three characters and developed a somewhat auto-fictional plot, a Faulkneresque tour-de-force. I could do now what I couldn't do before, but the somewhat auto-fictional plot was compelling enough for the legendary Carmen Balcells to express interest in becoming my agent.Of course, each passing day without any news, I found myself sinking into the quicksand of anxiety. I hoped to hear something before summer arrived, and I thought that maybe rewriting my first manuscript would help. And so, I deeply sank without hardly realizing it into the quicksand. Additionally, the cannabis licenses that were intended for Astrid's ended up instead in the wrong place, that is, on my desk. In early July, I had a stay in my mother's hometown for a change of scenery. My good friend Fred had a penthouse by the river, and I could watch the otters from the balcony. However, I was shocked to discover that Fred was deeply involved in experimenting with chemsex using MDMA, a fad that seemed such a load of tripe to me. Instead of pursuing his passion for playing the saxophone, he often spent days in an endless orgy, drooling on his philosopher girlfriend and his other friends. That was a sticky fly trap, and I felt very disappointed with that show. Looking back, I realize there were signs that something was off, such as his frequent mentions of the French poet Henri Michaux in our correspondence.Following in the footsteps of the master Rainer Maria Rilke, it did not take long for me to garner the complicity that a young writer attracts, especially with the appearance of a musketeer straight out of the French novels of Alexandre Dumas. I couldn’t write during those chemsex sessions, so after my birthday, I landed in a historic stone house attached to the Romanesque cathedral. On August nights, I could hear the storks noisily bill-clattering on the patio. Over there, I might have been able to regain the focus required to write, if it weren't for the fact that the stone house had stocked a hundred bottles of Verdejo wine in the cellar. Already struggling with cannabis, using the joints as appeasers, that easy-drinking white wine in the infernal heat of August finished me off.I went to the Matrix to reclaim the full strength of my mother's language, as if I were drinking from a magic fountain, but in forty days and forty nights, I had wrought my downfall. Yet, I managed to have a moment of clarity to bid farewell to my grandpa, who was in his last month of life. Maybe because of my sailing years, I could clearly see how he heeled over in his armchair like ships slowly heeled over before they were claimed by the depths forever.I almost ran back to the stone house to pick up my things. When I got into the taxi that took me to the nearest airport, I ran across a talented sculptor who was making ends meet by trafficking MDMA. Fred had introduced me to him, and we almost became good friends. I didn't hear anything more from him. In fact, at that time, I had begun an endless flight forward, a scorched-earth policy.Once again in Zeno Hill, there was no message from Carmen Balcells on the answering machine. Instead of writing another manuscript, I felt the urge to continue rewriting the first one, just like I did in spring. This time, I aimed to create a grand cathedral of words.If I could go back and talk to my younger self, I would disguise myself as one of his confidantes or beautiful muses to get his undivided attention. I would tell him that the abuse of appeasers would undermine his confidence. It would be costly for him to concentrate and would worsen the symptoms of his mild dyslexia while impairing his judgment. A total clusterfuck. After all, he had just acquired that weakness, but he could still overcome it as if it had never existed.There’s no harm in asking. I might as well approach the young writer as I am now. I may intimidate him with my streaked silver hair and the eyes of a castaway of time, instead of the mesmerizing gaze of before. Like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come penned by Charles Dickens, I would choose to remain silent in his presence.I would take him on this diaphanous September morning to hold the wake of our old friend Astrid. She never took her foot off the gas until she finally managed to burst her heart, abandoned by the friends she pampered so much and with increasingly sinister partners, mostly cocaine users. Like people with poor judgment and too much heart always ends.Here’s to you, Astrid. May you rest forever in my heart. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

September is my favorite month for several reasons. Once the haze dissipates, the crowds that come with summer in a beach town also disappear, especially now that social networks have attracted swarms of people to remote places. It is also a time for farewells to summer romances, a theme often found in coming-of-age novels. The posh urban girl promises to keep in touch with the besotted villager but ultimately doesn't, as the intense passion often fades with the return to daily life.I'm fortunate enough to sleep in front of a folding window. Until the cold arrives, I open it wide so I can look at the Moon and constellations rising from the east behind a pine grove. This killing view often motivates to get up early before the sun comes up and blinds me completely if I am a slacker. Just yesterday, I witnessed a fabulous aurora where Sirius rose–the Dog Star–twinkling madly with flashes of red and blue. Above, the constellation of the hunter Orion was drawing his bow.These are the constellations of the end of summer that I know by heart. They are like the brilliant coming-of-age novels that flicker in my imagination. I will proceed to name them as distant stars, pointing to the beautiful women who inspired them and to the brilliant authors who sang them to grace them with the kiss of eternity. And the communicating vessels that all these works have.They are nothing more than short novels, also known as novellas, far from the canon of the twelve hundred thousand words of the classic novel. Even the brightest among them is so short that it can be read aloud in an afternoon, something I used to do when I was young for anyone who had the patience to listen to me.Back in the day, I was quite forward-thinking. Nowadays, most young people don't seem to read more than a paragraph, nor do they understand the experience of staying up all night immersed in a book, like my turn-of-the-century generation did on the brink of the Digital Revolution. For the contemporary illiterate, stories are only experienced through spoken word, like oral literature at its finest. Who would have ever imagined this?November by Gustave Flaubert is considered one of his most sensual works, portraying a time when sexual initiation was often guided by anonymous prostitutes who served as priestesses of pleasure. The story is narrated in the first person, allowing the reader to empathize with a young man burdened by romantic imagination and prematurely disappointed, possibly stemming from intense anxiety, a common experience for teenagers overwhelmed by the weight of the world. The protagonist's inability to see beyond his own concerns is likened to someone fixated on their own problems and unable to see the bigger picture. Although there is no historical record of the anonymous pleasure priestess, it is known that Flaubert was a utter whoremonger, ultimately succumbing to syphilis and sporting black teeth, hence his characteristic walrus mustache.The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was written in America to alleviate Consuelo’s jealousy. She was the wife of an aristocrat and aviator who enjoyed flying at night over the sea to deliver mail between countries of the late French Empire. It's quite extraordinary to imagine a French Count as a bold mailman. He was shot down by the Nazis over the Mediterranean.The Great Gatsby by Francis Scott Fitzgerald is often considered the Great American Novel. A self-made man squanders his fortune of dubious origin to rewrite his romantic past and finds a way to meet again with the lost flame of his youth. But he miserably fails because he is out of his depth. During this time, the author's wife, Zelda, his Southern belle was partying and flirting with a French aviator, an affair that went subtly in disguise in the novel.In closing, Le Grand Meaulnes –sometimes translated to English as The Lost Domain– by Alain-Fournier was the character of Jay Gatsby still in his embryonic stage, and also the childhood bliss of that blondie lost in the desert. I guess both de Saint-Exupéry and Scott Fitzgerald read and also committed art theft from this novella where a particular child becomes a wondrous beauty, Ivonne. Still ”le passé peut-il renaître?” Which is in Nick Carraway’s words to Gatsby “You can not repeat the past”“Can not repeat the past? Why, of course you can!”Someone might say I am intentionally leaving apart The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger unattended. Yes, of course, he is the rising Dog Star.Charles Chaplin stole his sweetheart, Oona, the underage daughter of the American playwright Eugene O’Neill, while Salinger was serving in World War II. It was a sheer backstabbing and also a famous scandal because the 36-year gap between them further fueled the controversy. Salinger must have experienced immense emotional turmoil. It's difficult to fathom the profound impact these events had on him and how they influenced the writing of his iconic coming-of-age novel. The book, a war novel without war or heroes, delves the struggles of troubled teenagers. Salinger penned this masterpiece while enduring the tumultuous Normandy landings, believing he might perish frozen in a foxhole during the Battle of the Bulge and confronting the horrors of Dachau, where the stench of burning flesh permanently scarred him. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

With indescribable relief, I note that the summer storms have finally arrived and two-thousand-year-old festival known as Ferragosto is behind us. The festival, originally a celebration of Roman Emperor Augustus, was once a time when beasts of burden were adorned with flowers after the rigors of harvesting and threshing wheat and workers bet their wages on horse races, a ritual which is in some places preserved, such as the Palio di Siena. The ancient tradition is so instilled in the unconscious collective, that the Digital Disconnection reaches its zenith during these holidays.I am still confined in my studio writing another novel with Spartan discipline, so that when I hear some folkloric shouting as tribal as repetitive or teenagers under the influence returning to their parent's house talking in loud voices at six in the morning, which reverberate in the very narrow Mediterranean streets as if their insufferable nonsense were of vital importance to the hood, then, I put in my ear plugs without losing a stitch and keep sewing words lost in thought. So there is no actual Digital Disconnection for me. Because the Flemish triptych of screens on my desk has me by the balls, excuse my French. With the first hailstorm of the summer, as promised, I also caught up with the podcasts that I had not been able to record during the dog days.And of course, I keep reading–making notes and underlining–the authors that stimulate me compelling me to write more, better, faster. Well, if someone doesn't know what I'm saying, writing is a ranging passion, as for others it will undoubtedly be gambling or politicking. It is for all these reasons that I consider it appropriate to comment on Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor, considered one of the one hundred masterpieces ever written.The first work of any author is sometimes a surprising literary debut. Although at other times, on the contrary, the first sorrow of many others. Anyone coughs in the face of a first-time author to show in turn that the manuscript was read diagonally–or with an atmospheric reading as has been so fashionable lately.However, Mary Flannery did not give in one iota to the requests of her publishers to sweeten her fiction according to the usual commercial standards, nor did she sell herself short. All this took her from one publisher to another, until she managed to publish Wise Blood almost unnoticed. Then, ten years later, word of mouth turned Wise Blood into a cult novel; I imagine that editorially I would have to classify it as a long seller, one of those novels whose reputation is based on the generosity and intelligence of its readers, not on the crazy greed of getting hold of a literary novelty that after a year no one remembers.But let's go back to the beginning of her journey. Her short stories had opened the way for her in 1945 to scholarships and creative writing workshops at the University of Iowa, which could take her for a period of time of the backward-looking background of her native Georgia, a former Confederate state determined to stop time in an idealized past, based on the undisputed racial supremacy of whites over the descendants of black slaves, never mind that in World War II, which had just end, they fought and bled together in Europe and the Pacific.Apart from the racial injustice that would take twenty years to even begin to confront, religion became a consumer product in which to take refuge from the many apocalyptic fears that the new atomic age had awakened. Even avowed atheists with impious customs tried to educate their offspring under the precepts of any of the many Protestant variants to choose from or the Roman Catholic, if they had Irish or Italian ancestry. Americans under the old-fashioned concept of a Christian nation rather than being godless commies.In this particular temporal and social context and avoiding the intellectual bias of presentism, I entertained myself during this past Ferragosto by delving into this dazzling literary jewel, until I managed to find a digital copy John Huston's film adaptation in 1979, in which Harry Dean Stanton played his role as a crook.I was amazed when I reread the reviews and the brainy essays of the University of Georgia, now that Flannery O’Connor is dead as a doornail–and does not bother anymore–spoils her as a cultural icon, only the scholar Ted Spivey corroborated my first impression, that is, the very long shadow of Cervantes' Don Quixote cast upon Wise Blood.In the fall of 1974, Dr. Spivey wrote Flannery's South: Don Quixote Rides Again, in which he describes the author as a Frenchified and wittily wonders if the name of the farm where she lived, Andalusia, was a mere fluke of the Spanish legacy. I don't consider myself a worthy Cervantine, but I saw fit to reread Don Quixote with undivided attention because of Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel, and I quote: “Once upon a time I too thought that the future was the only competent judge of our works and actions. Later on I understood that chasing after the future is the worst conformism of all, a craven flattery of the mighty. For the future is always mightier than the present. It will pass judgment on us, of course. And without any competence. But if the future is not a value for me, then to what am I attached? To God? Country? The people? The individual? My answer is as ridiculous as it is sincere: I am attached to nothing but the depreciated legacy of Cervantes.” End of quote.And I ask myself, is it really possible to ignore the precursor of the modern novel? Why do the rest of the American scholars stay in Kafka or Shakespeare for everything else? What a stubbornly insular bunch!The comic hat of the preacher Hazel Motes is identical to the shaving basin that Alonso Quixano comically puts on in the manner of a helmet. The beat-up car that leaves Motes stranded is identical to the Rocinante nag that Alonso Quixano rides. The misunderstood fantasy of founding The Church of Christ without Christ is identical to the misunderstood madness of an avid reader of chivalric romances like Alonso Quixano. The lascivious Sabbath Hawks is identical to the idealized peasant Dulcinea. The bore Enoch Emery who follows the crazy Motes is identical to the simpleton Sancho Panza who follows Alonso Quixano. The paid copycat preacher is identical to Don Quixote of Avellaneda who led Miguel de Cervantes to write the second and final part of Don Quixote to reveal the plagiarism. And final redemption of the failed and blind backward preacher Hazel Motes in the rooming house with the marriage proposal of the greedy landlady is identical to the final defeat Alonso Quixano against the Knight of White Moon on the beach in Barcelona.I could go on sharpening the pencil, but I won't go into more detail because the novel Wise Blood has aged as well as those cognacs that are kept in a safe place and can be read as one who visits a lost world. That's what the great classics are like. In addition, despite the parallels between Mary Flannery's genius makes for breathtaking dialogues throughout Wise Blood, so I am not surprised that John Huston did not modify them, a commendable case of loyalty to the original text at a time when film adaptations were the fury of the scissors. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

Marcel Proust had an epic quarrel in 1895 France with the literary critic Charles Sainte-Beuve on what the reader should know about any author and also wrote that every detail of the author’s life had to be kept in mind because his characters were simply an elaborated extension of the self, not natural creations.The most celebrated French author of the past century strongly disagreed. Consequently, he wrote an essay about that issue, Contre Sainte-Beuve. Readers who tried to make associations with people the author could or may well have known were always lost in the fog of writing, as it should be.Consider Jean Santeuil. The unfinished manuscript in which Proust tried to portray himself as the ultimate snob, a character sharp like a tack, attending long soirees in the selected Parisian society at the end of the century, revered as the brightest guy in the room, even though he is surrounded by aristocrats of ancient lineage, eminent doctors, and ministers of the French Government.Proust needed a decades-long effort to go back to that manuscript. A lazybones, a daydreamer, a reclusive homebody, he had busy nights in the cork-lined bedroom because of his condition; high like a kite with the amyl nitrate he sniffed nightly to soothe his asthma, half-destroyed his memory by incessant medications of barbiturates and opiate extracts.Already a middle-aged man, a hopeless bachelor without any occupation apart from spending the inherited fortune, Marcel Proust had a stroke of genius and found the long way back, writing his well-known masterwork like a magnificent quest by both the time lost and the time regained. With the same adventurous spirit that John Ruskin traveled to France and wrote about the cathedrals, but without leaving the desk he had on his lap, assisted fully and on time by the loyal Céleste.First and foremost, that presumptuous guy disappears completely. Go, and you try to find the narrator's name on À la recherche du temps perdu. You will not.Second, he invented a style that broke any grammatical standard—long and multi-faceted phrasing, which is his literary vengeance for the shortness of breath due to his asthma. And third, if you want to retrace all those characters he invented in his life, you will end your days like Bob Dylan’s hardcore fans. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

Yesterday, after waiting six months for the release, I could finally gorge like Pantagruel in a bookish streaming series about the one and only Truman Capote, directed by Gus Van Sant and produced with infinite prodigality by the actual king Midas of showbusiness, Ryan Murphy.Two years ago, I wrote a post on this very writer’s platform about Truman’s swans, when Laurence Leamer’s book came up. But when I began from scratch last June to cut podcasts, that post went to the pile. So, it’s time to rescue my pedantic musings or inklings, as I used to call the deleted account. Because, make no mistake, before a fiction writer, I am an indefatigable reader, and as such I am fascinated by the rise and fall of this literary lion.All began with a scene from the movie, To Kill a Mockingbird, where an abandoned child speaks almost hidden by a gigantic sprout. The acerbic Gore Vidal used this stinky vegetable to describe his high-pitched voice, that self-assured voice with the power to flip everybody, which was just an attention call he kept all his life because in fact, once he grew up, was a male baritone.That child was abandoned by her mother, whose only ambition was to live on the Fifth Avenue of Manhattan at the expense of a rich man, and when the fortunes of that man changed, Lillie Mae Faulk killed herself at just 48 years old. It's a sad story, even though Truman left us an inverted mirror of Lillie Mae on that lively character Holly Golightly, performed with extreme elegance by Audrey Hepburn on Breakfast at Tiffany’s.With this background and the bestseller In Cold Blood that he wrote about a brutal murder and could not send to print until the real assassins were hanged, so the greedy publishers could sell it as a non-fiction novel, an oxymoron per se, the promising career of Truman ran aground and he became an alcoholic, trying to emulate the masterwork of Marcel Proust.However, when Marcel Proust wrote about French society, he was already a middle-aged recluse, and his models, ghosts of the turn of the century. In other words, Marcel was free of any non-disclosure agreement or the elemental discretion of an author to his beloved muses. In fact, the core of Proust’s work was the affaire Dreyfuss that divided French society in two, it was by then a forgotten issue.I guess Truman Capote was heavily influenced by the gossip culture to choose his models between contemporaries, a poor choice that ruined his draft and by extension all the reputation he got after In Cold Blood.Back to the bookish streaming series after this necessary digression, I would have started from the beginning because the actual audience surely has no idea of what could push a literary lion to ruin his promising career. Money? He cashed 20 million dollars of that time with that wicked bestseller and was the envy of his peers. Alcohol? As we can watch, people of that era were drinking liquor and chain smoking like the end of the world was near. Drugs? The scourge of cocaine was later when he became a fixture of Studio 54. My personal bet is hubris, that curse of the gods to keep mortals in line, born from immense success and endless adulation. And the poor confidence his mother gave him with that traumatic upbringing, which is sufficient enough to seek recognition beyond limits.I have no idea about the next episodes, but with that intense pilot, everything is already told. In fact, the second episode is redundant for me. One of the reasons I cannot stand streaming series anymore is because that idiom of beating a dead horse always comes to my mind.Wrapping up, the most satisfactory experience I had was the haunting music by Julia Newman, the daughter of American Beauty’s soundtrack composer, Thomas Newman. It has an idiosyncratic signature, especially on the oboe, that produces me always goosebumps. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

Today, the Olympic Games in Paris will finally open after the mayoress has tried to convince us that the Seine River is cleaner than ever by taking a dip in a wetsuit, which offers some protection. The last time I visited Paris, I didn't even consider swimming in the river. However, I did enjoy my morning run along the riverbank, and it was priceless.The only time I had swum by myself in a river was a day before a rowing competition, and it was scary to do it, in fact, I did not stray just twenty meters from the shore. Because in the current of a wide river, there are no arms to dominate it and neither lungs to sustain the effort.That singing angel named Jeff Buckley died drowned in Memphis swimming in the Mississippi River in 1997 when a passing tugboat put him underwater, where some branches would trap him. The English writer Virginia Woolf only needed two stones in the pockets of a winter coat to fulfill Shakespeare Ophelia's ambition and find a muddy death. Of course, all this was in my mind when I swam among the green algae and never ventured to the other shore. And when the rest of the crew arrived the next day, despite the fact that rowing against the current left us exhausted because it was the last week of June and the heat was unforgiving, we chose a safe bend to bathe.That same evening, we saw a catfish of two meters and almost 176 pounds that a British fisherman caught, so the lonely adventure of crossing the river by swimming stayed with me forever in my memory like a daydream. Now, it has leaped over the water like a nimble fish chased by a larger one. But it will take me a while to see it again.Those who have never read the French philosopher Henri Bergson might think that Proust created the concept of involuntary memory, the only memory that transcends, the memory that is triggered by a sensation, itself attached to a previous event, suddenly brought back from a distant, seemingly forgotten past. I also did think so for many years. But like an archeologist delicately brushing away layers of dirt and dust to reveal an ancient object, I freed myself from this misconception while reading Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Bergson distinguished between a quasi automatic memory which, inscribed within our body, facilitates our everyday actions and, on the other hand, a “pure memory” which requires an effort of our mental faculty to bring back to our consciousness specific moments in our life, in the shape of “image-remembrance.”A century later of that period of unparalleled narrative experimentation, we have not managed to move the pointer of the beam balance. In the pan that concerns us, we have put Post-Modernism and Digi-Modernism. With the latter, the span of attention of the reader has dramatically collapsed, and the authors catering to their audiences boast without blushing of using AI to write without the slightest hint of complication, lest the snowflake reader feel overwhelmed, challenged, stunned, or offended immediately by a forbidden word.And decide instead to quit reading to binge-watch any TV series while dozing, or worse, a reality show of alleged celebrities, while doom scrolling his social media like a goddamn digital junkie. I am not exaggerating one iota. That is the hollow reality we are living in 2024."I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality," wrote Flannery O'Connor.Those who adore the quicksilver, the depth of mirrors, and their mercurial amalgams, those who write autofiction because they think fiction itself is already stylized in its sinuous forms, do not conceive the genre of memoirs as an unbreakable chain of facts, but as a narrative abstraction as well.The only thing that can be compared to swimming across a wide river knowing the currents, the catfish, the algae—or the dragged branches that can carry you down at any moment—is to write about yourself without hiding.I once read an American author—who I believe still lives in Portland, Oregon—called it Dangerous Writing. His name is Tom Spanbauer, although he has not written for a long time, sick of always staying away from the sales of his first works. Back in the day, I read Faraway Places, The Man Who Fell In Love With The Moon, and Now Is The Hour.But the funniest of all, by far, is Gore Vidal writing about the first forty years of his life before retiring to Italy, with a memoir that already says it all. Palimpsest. Namely, the multiple corrections made by medieval monks with a tissue of paper on the incunable books they patiently reproduced by hand. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

Last week I suggested a biopic called Wildcat, based on the brief life of the American writer Flannery O'Connor and the extraordinary work she was able to write before lupus, a chronic and complex autoimmune disease, the same one that her father suffered from and that left her half-orphaned at the age of 15, took her at the age of 39. In circumstances such as those described, it is by no means accidental that her work is imbued with a premature spirituality.I, during my thirties, was free of family obligations that stressed me, in excess of health and privileged with a bohemian existence, the only spirituality that worried me was that of some medieval characters that I was writing at the time.I remember that in order to give play to the medieval characters, The Chronicler's Chant—a recreation of the historical Jehan Le Bel and Jean Froissart—had to be extended in the wrath of God, which in that historical period was absolutely awful. That is the four horsemen of the Apocalypse doped with immense fury, spreading plague, war, hunger, and death in equal parts.However, The Jongleur’s Chant was the counterpoint, the grace of God, as if it were a magical courage that made him invulnerable to the bloody splashes of the massacres of that fateful year of 1358, the year of the genuine French Revolution, later minimized as a peasant revolt, although the shock wave reached all the countries and city-states of Europe.Both wrath and grace of God were then woven together like a woolen thread in the newly brought from the East spinning wheel in The Spinner’s Chant. Set among the Beguines, the first religious women, free from the marriage yoke, tireless workers both with wool and silk and the helpless. Among the most famous Beguines, Marguerite Porete, condemned to the stake by the Inquisition in 1310, whose The Mirror of Simple Souls is one of the masterpieces of mysticism, which transcends each and every one of the religions and cultures—Western and Eastern—to lose itself in poetry and philosophy.Having told my experience with the medieval concept of grace, I would like to return to Mary Flannery, as her patient mother Regina called her. As I am naturally curious, I was rereading the author's work and then I became interested in how Ethan Hawke—director and screenwriter of Wildcat—understood it, given that the biopic is not based on the hackneyed structure of the rise and fall of a cultural icon, but intertwines her life with her short stories.That's how I was entertained by a long interview on YouTube by Bishop Robert Barron with Ethan Hawke and Maya Hawke, the nepobaby daughter of Uma Thurman who plays Mary Flannery and her various alter egos.To my surprise and bewilderment, there was grace again, the same grace that I had reduced to the magical courage of the mythical Greek hero Achilles.At first, I thought of the typical flattering interviews that end up boring due to the accumulation of compliments and cheap psychology. But it turns out that they were three fans of Mary Flannery, the three profound connoisseurs of her work, delighted to illustrate all the ins and outs, even the most abstruse of concepts such as grace, distilled with exquisite elegance in the short story Good Country People that is also recreated in the film in question. And this is where I was extremely intrigued when Ethan Hawke quotes Mary Flannery's letters. “This notion that grace is healing omits the fact that before it heals, it cuts with the sword Christ said he came to bring.” And then “All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.”In other words, or at least that's how I understand it, grace is a kind of courage that we involuntarily acquire in each of the debacles of our stupid and insignificant lives that fill us with humility... Until foolish pride deprives us of that perspective again and we immediately return to cheat at solitaire, what can you do!It’s obvious that since I master the sublime art of deceit—it’s called fiction—also practiced by organized religions, all based on the Monomyth that Joseph Campbell described in detail in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, I understand the concept, it is familiar to me, but I do not buy it.That idea of a God interested in our troubles is ridiculous, as ridiculous as children who invent an imaginary friend to shake off loneliness and fear.I understand better why Mary Flannery's characters had that comic part, despite the disasters they faced, which also reminds me of Russian playwright and short-story writer Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. She wrote, “If I were to live long enough and develop as an artist to the proper extent, I would like to write a comic novel about a woman-and what is more comic and terrible than the angular intellectual proud woman approaching God inch by inch with ground teeth?” Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

One day in June, during the three-year period of covid, a girlfriend whom I lost track of at the turn of the century so that her phone fell out of the agenda–like so many others before–despite the fact that I tried in vain to keep in touch at the time, suddenly appeared on Telegram, that app that is supposed to be better encrypted than WhatsApp.From what I found out, when such apparitions happen it is because they are looking for you. And she would probably write a message and then delete it. Since I promised her back in the day that I would always respond, I did. But I received no reply. And even more, she disappeared from Telegram.Six months later, intrigued, I launched a Google search and it turned out that she had recently gone on a trip. Just a week before! From her Twitter account, where several opinions of cancer gurus appeared, I imagine that she would be one of many people with cancer treatment for whom long-haul covid brought forward the trip. Or not. Who knows!The only certainty I have is that she tried to say goodbye. But perhaps she would be so bald that her curly red hair would be a postcard from the past. And since the unfathomable feminine vanity is what it is, then whatever happened happened. If it hadn't been for that surprise on Telegram, she would have remained in the deep catch-all of memory that we storytellers use to make golems–as my mother made croquettes–until in the end they become solid and plausible characters where the good reader projects himself with such generosity.However, now I listen to her as if she were a Celtic ghost with unfinished business. Luckily I don't believe in ghosts and I know it's the writer's imagination, who, unlike the imagination of ordinary mortals, makes infinite sketches in the form of pristine prose tirelessly until the happy time of hitting the keyboard arrives. Like right now.And hacking as usual, I found a literary biopic, where at least I entertain myself during my convalescence learning the art of some literary lightning rod. And here comes my recommendation for those who like the genre. Wildcat by Ethan Hawke.What is its relationship with the above? Well, Elisabeth, that was her name, the first time we dated, invited me to the cinema where a very young Ethan Hawke played a sweet charlatan in the extremely famous Before Sunrise, a modern exercise in medieval courtly love from Occitania in Eurorail Vienna where there is not a hint of sex out of respect for female empowerment. Which is why the damn ghost was a pain in the ass while I was watching the movie.It is about the short life and grotesque characters of the American writer Flannery O'Connor–look up in the Southern Gothic section–who also went on a trip too early, at only 39 years old due to lupus, she called it the French Wolf, which made her lead a life of a recluse during her last fourteen years, where she channeled everything that tortured her intimately,  the loneliness imposed by the disease, which made her a cripple, her Catholic faith, which represented a constant battle, and the racial question, since she had to live through the last years of the brutal Jim Crow laws in her native Georgia.I have read other Southern Gothic stories like Eudora Welty’s The Petrified Man, and William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily. Each story possessed a morbid or violent ending that stuck in my mind. Sordid endings that employ mystery and terror are a defining feature of Southern Gothic fiction, which is characterized by grotesque, macabre, or fantastic incidents. In such authors, especially Faulkner in the iconic novel Light in August, the racial question was also the proper of their era.For this last matter, the demented revisionists of literary history have tried to pillory her repeatedly, to decontextualize her words to bring them to the present prudish in which we live–laugh at the Spanish Inquisition. They do the same as the infamous Torquemada! They take authors out of the general index so you can't even find them in a public library. However, Flannery O'Connor did not mince words and categorically stated in her private correspondence.“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds the emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints. Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.”The grotesque grabs the reader's attention and compels them to grapple with that truth. I am also thinking of The Night of the Hunter, the literary debut of Davis Grubb, based on the Depression-era bluebeard Harry Powers, who was brought to life by an immense Robert Mitchum in 1955 under the direction of Charles Laughton.In short, it's hard for me not to fall in love with Flannery O'Connor's creativity. In addition, in the family country house, she collected birds I imagine to relieve her loneliness, where she had up to ten peacocks. Here is a snapshot of the moment she has her sought-after epiphany and puts thread on the needle. As it should be. 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Emerging from the dark and foreboding forest, the jongleur made his way to a stunning glade adorned with a vibrant array of wild flowers. Over five hundred peasants had gathered around red flags with a palpable spirit of resistance. Those humble folks, known to the Parisians as Jacques Goodfellow, bore the weight of displacement caused by the harsh trials of war, plague, and famine. And their revolt was somewhat a consequence.At twilight, beneath the ominous shadow of the storm-ravaged castle, a scene of macabre celebration unfurled. The Jacques with their spoils dripping with the scent of battle—weapons still gleaming, stolen finery draped over blood-stained garments—gathered around roaring bonfires with a frenzied fervor.Amidst the flickering light, the jongleur Henri Guiot beheld a scene that teetered on the edge of the surreal—a defiant carnival in full swing. Each peasant was clad in elaborate, grotesque disguises, a chaotic blend of fabrics and forms. The atmosphere crackled with tension, yet the revelers abandoned themselves to wild celebration. Crimson cloaks billowed like victory banners, embroidered hose and plundered regal garments gleamed, all taken from the castle’s coffers. This chaotic array of costumes formed a vibrant, jarring tapestry of colors and textures, symbolizing their rebellious conquest.That was a unique way of stripping away inhibitions, the jongleur noted, reminiscent of what he had witnessed in Paris. There, he was genuinely shocked by the scandalous orgiastic displays of the goliards with their bawdy drinking songs. Yet, he found the peasants’ simplicity to be almost magical, akin to an abracadabra-like charm.The jongleur was welcomed like an entertainer as he advanced with the jingle of his colorful attire, children and women approached him to celebrate his arrival with cheers and the clamor reserved only for kings; the peasants considered him a distinguished guest and ensured he was fed and had something to drink.Henri Guiot’s stomach was shrunken from the hunger he had endured in the forests, and he accepted only a sip from a jug, a slice of roast meat, always so moderate and respectful, returning the exaggerated bows of the peasants who badly imitated the courtiers of a castle and then touched his small bells with devotion, as if he were indeed a holy man.A young woman offered him a gittern to play, something he did gladly after tuning the strings, starting with a festive melody. When he finished the piece, Henri wanted to return the stringed instrument, but the young woman insisted that he take it as a gift. She could not play the gittern but she could sing instead.“Would you like to convene to rehearse an aubade song?”, she asked.“Why not? But I guess you should tell me your name first, if you don’t mind.”He made her blush for being interested in her name when anonymity was a customary precaution.“My name is Azalaïs, like my grandma, a trobairitz from Porcairagues.”She told him that her grandma’s songs were still sung during that time of revolts, even though those were old love songs, an unthinkable emotion in the middle of such cruelty. Her family had hurried from Occitania fleeing from the ravages of the bubonic plague, losing everything in the process, and getting stuck working the land in Compiègne for a feudal master until her parents and brothers were killed in a brutal English raid. Since then, like a bird in a storm, she wandered aimlessly until she joined the peasant's revolt, living day by day.“And yes–Azalaïs said with raging pride looking him in the eye–I slit the throat of a rich old man for the first time in my life with a sharp big knife, like everybody else, when we stormed into the castle this early morning.”But she tried not to dwell on that. She felt lucky to be alive because it could be otherwise if that castle had been protected by loyal knights. But it wasn’t. And all she wanted then was to sing to all the shadows that engulfed her life so soon. Indeed, Azalaïs didn’t expect to live to see another spring like that one.“I hope that we would face an army of knights later rather than sooner, and that would be the end of the revolt and probably my life. Because I don’t want to live again under the yoke of a master.”To Henri that confession sounded like the remorse of a child. Of course, she had been disturbed after her first killing. The jongleur was incapable of committing a crime, but after hearing her story, a very common one those days, he asked himself if he could kill in cold blood like she did.When you lose everything, you lose your humanity as well. That was what all those people shared, a sense of impending doom and certain demise. They knew at some point they were going to be hunted like rabbits, hence it made no sense to pass judgment. They already assumed their fate and accepted it. All of them.So, Henri began to tune the gittern and smiled at Azalaïs when he was ready. She began to sing with a golden voice that he certainly could use in the unlikely event she left the revolt. What kind of life could he offer her? What would be tempting? A walk with Love and Death? And then what? She would be probably raped a hundred times by flayers or mercenaries that roamed the woodlands before reaching the sea. He couldn’t fall in love with her. Maybe in the next life they they could have a chance. As the flames of the bonfire danced in the dark night, the frenzied atmosphere was filled with a sense of thrill. The mesmerizing song of Azalaïs provided a moment of solace for the Jacques, turning their hearts from fear to longing.The lyrics were an aubade song, Before the Cold Winter Comes–the time of frost, snow, and mud–evoking the bittersweet emotions of lovers bidding farewell with the promise of a future reunion to rekindle their passion. And a petition to the jongleur of cheerful heart. Take my song far away!In the dim light of the bonfire, he plucked the gittern, blending it seamlessly with her soulful singing. Her voice painted over a vivid picture of the dawn, drawing his audience to the brink of their deepest emotions. The hushed stillness that enveloped the listeners hinted at the profound sorrow and heartache hidden within their own personal goodbyes.Gathered around the flickering fire, a diverse group of people, more strangers who’d been randomly thrown together than kin, leaned on each other spellbound by the enchanting music emanating from Azalaïs and Henri. They were not merely performers, but a humble conduit for the poignant melodies weaving around the night air.The peasants yearned to draw closer to them, to share in their world, to feel the warmth of camaraderie as palpable as the flickering flames that danced alongside their enchanting melody. The aubade song wove through the early morning air with a hypnotic grace, its notes like tendrils of mist that wrapped around the hearts of those who listened.They stood entranced, souls swaying to the music’s ebb and flow. Beyond mere notes, it was a passage through buried emotions and uncharted dreams. Each refrain sketched distant lands and whispered untold tales, stirring a restless longing to roam hither, thither, and yon. Like a tender breeze through fields of poppies, the melody beckoned them to chase elusive echoes, to follow where heartstrings led, in search of the lover’s embrace.As the melody unfolded, its allure grew stronger, pulling at the very fabric of their existence. They yearned to step into its embrace, to dance amidst its intricate rhythms, to lose themselves in its timeless melody. But the casual pair who conjured this ethereal symphony remained as enigmatic as the dawn itself, elusive and free-spirited.The peasants quivering with a blend of awe and reverence, bewildered and entranced, they found themselves suspended in a reverie, like fragile links in a chain on the verge of snapping. And so they lingered, caught in the spell of that mesmerizing aubade song, so wondrous and deep, with their souls resonating with its haunting echoes. 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After the February killings of the marshals, the new governor of Paris Étienne Marcel was having trouble finding supplies in a city suffering from scarcity, using its last resources to fortify the walls against the imminent retaliation of the Dauphin, who ordered his allies to confiscate all property from their lands and raised taxation to his subjects, causing more harm and rampage than the Black Death and the Hundred Years’ War combined.That cold and rainy spring, the peasants rose in revolt, unable to support their families anymore once all the resources were depleted, disrupting or losing in this way trade routes, because of unreliability and danger of passing through conflict zones, and assaulting the castles out of sheer desperation and burning them, after hung, drawn and quartered their feudal masters.In parallel, Charles of Navarre expanded his influence along the south bank of the river Seine and around Paris after reclaiming his county of Évraux in Lower Normandy. He harbored aspirations for negotiations with King Edward III of England, who had captive in the Tower of London the French king Jean le Bon expecting a large ransom.The jongleur Henri Guiot left Paris in order to gain ground and watch the sea with his own eyes before dying, where he hoped in vain to escape the brutal hornet’s nest that both contenders for the throne had created to the delight of the English side, whose troops had been quartered on standby to the north, west, and south of the ancient kingdom.Hence, it was no easy feat for an unarmed and isolated man to reach the north, especially amidst rampant plundering, when the worth of human life was unnoticeable.His adventurer spirit vanished as soon as hunger struck and left him dizzy, living off berries and watercress. He stayed out of the road and went into the woods to avoid being targeted by the soulless bands of robbers, which used to skin his victims alive by pure evil, throwing himself under thorny bushes to sleep during the day; marching at night became quite difficult. Only when he walked through a meadow or a clearing could find the lodestar, but those were counted occasions.One night he heard a commotion, screams, and horses’ clip-clop, and then nothing. As if silence overwhelmed the interior of the forest in the wee hours, apart from the hubbub of the birds in rut; he thought he had a fever, walking in the darkness searching for the nearby river to cool off. At the bank, he undressed, touching his armpits and groin, afraid that he had contracted the plague.While plunging in the water, he closed his eyes and tried to settle down remembering a pleasant moment that would stay in his memory. He tried to cheer himself up in vain, but it was pointless. All of a sudden, he was really frightened when something soft touched his back, the stinking corpse of a naked red-haired little girl. He climbed out of the water as best he could, stumbling and hurting badly his shin with a rock, while he saw the sad spoil slide down the stream. Who could have thrown her into the river without giving her a proper burial? He finally got angry with himself for such cowardice and dove in to reach her. Being kind was like a profound revelation after his endless struggles. He took her in his arms without caring too much about her buboes.Then, as they emerged from the water, a gang of mercenaries mounted on stamping black horses and holding blinding torches appeared by magic. The horses recoiled at the stench rearing out of control, despite the efforts of the riders to make them ford the stream. The mercenaries shouted at him to move away and give way to them. But Guiot had found in that red-haired girl a sort of talisman and ignored them as if he were deaf while he continued to hold her in his arms.She was so light! She shouldn’t have even six years, perhaps. He thought he was going to die and meekly closed his eyes waiting for a fatal blow coming from those brutes. But it was not so because the captain of the mercenaries gave a shriek of rage and ordered his men to ford the stream below, avoiding the lone jongleur and the corpse.He buried the kid with rolling stones. And then he walked away and dove again into the river to clean himself, convinced he was already sick, while he sang at the top of his lungs an improvised ballad, expecting that brought about some courage to his erratic existence. Like he saw many times in a glimpse of women doing laundry in the bank.“How many words are born from the heart, how many words never reach my mouth, how many words are lost forever in sighs, how many words I raise with my thought to the darkness like this prayer, how many and so many words make their way back to the heart.”And for the first time since he left Paris, once he stopped shivering and dried out, he was inspired enough to play a woodwind instrument that a sly Armenian merchant traded for his good old gittern, which was too cumbersome and fragile for inclement weather. The merchant confided to him in a noisy Parisian tavern that the duduk was in fact the oldest musical instrument ever known–probably two thousand year old–and the jongleur thought until that moment he had been ripped off like an idiot. Because of the droning tonality, murmuring like a migratory call, and less festive than his gittern that had given to his lewd audience so much joy. But that night, panicking with the proximity of his demise and so close to the legendary mirror of the sea that he imagined smelling it for a little while, he found in the Armenian duduk a genuine extension of himself, and on its soothing sounds, a balm for the sorrows of the soul.  They say the chant is somewhat a distant echo disappearing among an elm groove, and always remains suspended in the air like the unbounded memory of the wind or a sudden rattle of leaves announcing a storm. The jongleur’s chant became closer to the divine grace everyone wanted so badly and nobody found it yet. Nothing seemed to disturb him after that new sunrise came. Hunger and need, fear and horror, death and oblivion. Everything seemed to fade in the flow of time and life as a fleeting episode. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

In my younger and starry-eyed years, like many other Jules Verne readers, I only knew Nemo as the daring and somewhat megalomaniacal captain of a submarine called Nautilus. It wasn't until later, while I was expanding the field of knowledge and therefore increasing the horizon of ignorance, that I realized the name was an homage to The Odyssey by Homer. This ideal everyman is found in many significant stories, creating what is known as the Monomyth, the framework that underpins all legends, fairy tales, spiritual awakenings, and of course organized religions. You can learn more about this concept in The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell.In fact, the disputed title of the books of books, the one you would want to have with you on a desert island, is not the Bible of King James–an overrated glob attempting to combine the ancient Jewish Torah with the whopper of a prophet that the historical records of that time don’t even mention–but the epic story of a war hero, who tried to get home with his brothers-in-arms, while a storm threw them off course to an adventure through the Mediterranean Sea in which no one was spared but him.To make a long story short, Odysseus and his crew found themselves trapped behind a boulder in the cave of the godlike Cyclops Polyphemus, who–rather than being a good host–had already eaten six sailors; Odysseus thought about a clever ruse to save his skin and the rest of his men. He tempted the Cyclops with plentiful wine, a mysterious delicacy that the giant savored as if it were ambrosia and nectar. The guard of the giant waned as he inquired about Odysseus' identity and pledged a generous gift.“My name is Nobody,” the Greek sailor said and asked for the promised gift too, which was no other than eating him the next morning, only after the rest of the crew. So, Odysseus blinded the Cyclops in his drowsiness "with a piece of olive wood that he put into the fire and held it there until it was a glowing coal." When Polyphemus howled with pain and bellowed in rage, the rest of the Cyclopes came running to his lair while he yelled: “Nobody is trying to kill me!”Of course, such words were taken as pure nonsense for the rest of the one-eyed Cyclopes who thought he’d gone barking mad. The next morning, when the blinded Polyphemus moved the cave boulder to let the sheep out to graze, Odysseus and his crew, hidden under the bellies of the flock, managed to escape and boarded their ship as fast as their legs would carry them.As soon as everyone was on board, Odysseus boldly unveiled his real name to Polyphemus out of sheer hubris. Enraged, the giant hurled a massive boulder from the shore with all his might, narrowly missing the ship. He then fervently beseeched Poseidon, the god of the sea, to seek revenge on his behalf.Given that the Romans retold the Greek story at its convenience, changing Odysseus for Ulysses, based on an oral tradition that transcended languages and ancient borders, Nemo was the name of Nobody that had been successfully adopted.All the above hit me like a lightning bolt while I was crafting the punchline for the latest podcast. But my life partner didn't take it as a lighthearted joke. She accused me of lying through my teeth, much like a meticulous journalist might. In hindsight, her accusation isn’t far from the truth–my American beauty wouldn’t dare call me ‘Mr. Nobody.’ The naked truth is that it’s something I do to myself when a publisher rejects my manuscript after years of hard work and countless drafts without deigning to write a letter. Fiction writers, after all, often blur the lines between reality and poetic license. Truman Capote captured it perfectly: "Never let the truth get in the way of a good story."Furthermore, I’d never claim to have written a single essay. For me, using the first person implies a biased point of view, and that’s the beauty of auto-fiction. This genre weaves reveries with facts, confessions with thoughts, creating a unique blend, a mélange. My favorite authors, such as Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, Yukio Mishima, and the one-and-only Virginia Woolf, made virtuoso displays of writing and their works were far truer than any journalism. Sometimes, it is a dark art. Should I recall the unhinged readers of JD Salinger donning the iconic red hunting hat outside his Park Avenue townhouse? This is why he moved into a falling-down barn on a rocky knoll in Cornish, New Hampshire.That being said, the internet has brought about a magma of misinformation, fostering the paranoid conspiracy genre, rewriting history with political agendas, and spreading lies about decent individuals with viral intensity. We live in a strange era where everyone feels entitled to shout out their crass ignorance from the rooftops with unwavering conviction. Remember the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol, where each member of that mob had a different, raving, and incoherent motivation and brazenly thought they could get away with murder. In a bizarre twist or irony, many of them recorded their criminal activities with their iPhones, even pausing to take stupid and narcissistic selfies that ultimately made it easier for law enforcement to identify and apprehend them.  The only way to protect Western civilization from this deadly lava flow is with good and efficient journalism. But not founded by political parties or any government, who shamelessly take advantage to place their servile pawns, which is not precisely speaking truth to the power. Otherwise, we are going back to black and fast. I mean, to the dark thirties of the last century, when the lack of moral fiber led them to think to a bunch of softies and appeasers of fascism that the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze.I am settled in a Mediterranean beach town mostly because of the turquoise waters, but not because I feel the colors of a bloody rag, or I should feel a particular attachment to a highly subjective identity. Lucky me, I have been successfully vaccinated against any patriotic nonsense since my late teens, after volunteering in the Airborne Squadron like a runaway kid. Since then, I always remember the wise words of the English writer Samuel Johnson: “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”I tell you what. If the alt-right wins the next elections thanks to the hate speech, after paying fortunes to writers-for-hire in order to churn out fake news and abounding in the constant demonization of the Other, I swear I will look up the closest Point Nemo–no pun intended–a geographical term, also known as a pole of inaccessibility. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

Had my fill of Karen Blixen for a long time. Because all the dramatizations I have watched this week about her are based on corny clichés, masquerades, and debatable constructions that cannot stand the passing of time. Anyhow, I have learned from her a lesson in courage to bear in mind. My intention, to share all that as it came to me, like a private investigation.Well, first of all, for a year, I was waiting for the release of The Pact by Bille August, based on the memoir of the Danish poet Thorkild Bjornvig. So, when I finally found the film on a streaming service, I rubbed my hands. Because Bille has recently released Ehrengard based on a posthumous tale of the Baroness –as Karen always demanded to be addressed. Just in case, I got Thorkild’s memoir, expecting the several questions failed to get a mention.This mentorship between the Baroness and the young poet was a cause célèbre and helped to build up her dark legend as a witch, matchmaker, and malignant narcissist. But I only have to bemoan another case of unconcealed misogyny according to that era –late forties and early fifties. A mentorship between a celebrated author and a young poetess instead would have never raised an eyebrow. Remember Henry James and Edith Wharton.And secondly, The Dreamer, the six-part drama series is set in the thirties and follows the Baroness’s return to her childhood home in Denmark after many years in Africa, broke, mentally depressed, and physically sick from years of mercury and arsenic treatment for her syphilis, at the mercy of her family who decides to give her a miserable allowance of 40 kroner to get by, while her younger brother has inherited all the properties after the father suicide because is a man.Though as nails, she decides to follow her late lover’s advice –the aristocrat Denys Finch Hatton–and write down all the fantastic tales with which she entertained him in Africa. But fearing the rejection of the myopic and prudish Danish literary circles, she becomes a transnational author and writes in English. And thereby it makes a lot of sense, given that such is the language of her beloved references as well. In order to succeed, she goes under the masculine pen name of Isak Dinesen.And here is the catch! When Seven Gothic Tales is selected in the US as Book of the Month Club, the Danish publishers offer her a deal and a translation entrusted to a very well-paid academic –two thousand kroner. But when she reads the galley proofs, to her bewilderment, she finds one blunder after another. And like a fierce lioness, she decides to translate herself to keep the necessary humor between the lines, a strategy to keep the full power of her prose that will not abandon ever again.This fascinating biopic is intertwined from the beginning with one of the Seven Gothic Tales, The Dreamers, and evades the simplistic rules of the genre that so much bores me. Moreover, it stops in 1939, right after the passing of her mother, when she sets out by herself in Rungstedlund, the manor-house that healed her.Thirdly, and lastly, after going through the black legend of her twilight and the lesson in courage of her dawn in the depths of the Great Depression, I should visit again her zenith, the book that we all associate with her, Out of Africa. And in doing so, I have to go back to my late teens, in 1985, and the iconic movie starred by Meryl Streep and Robert Redford to which John Barry added the most corny soundtrack ever.The conundrum of such experiences revisited are the issues raised. That English aristocrat was filthy rich and had enough money to bail out the farm from debt. So, his lover could stay, and the Kikuyus kept their jobs and not be uprooted to a sordid reserve. Instead, he comes and goes as he pleases like a free spirit. One day appears with an airplane, a Gipsy Moth, which was not precisely a cheap toy. Meanwhile, the storyteller in dire straits demands help from the stingy British over and over, and the only reply she gets is avoiding commitment and stalling after he had been benefiting from her generosity since the Swedish Baron left. What a douchebag!My private investigation ends with a toast.During the warm nights of May, while I lived in that bookish bungalow, I used to call my friends to eat pasta and drink red wine in excess under a lush rosebush. All of them, like I did too, watched Out of Africa badly dubbed in Spanish. And we adopted what we thought was the Denys Finch Hatton toast, that is, “por la cándida adolescencia” –or to your understanding– for the naïve adolescence.Never trust a cheap translation.The original toast came from the English poem With Rue My Heart is Laden by AE Housman. The exact line is “for the rose-lipt maiden” because, on that safari day Karen shot a charging lioness and while pointing with her rifle, bit her lip until she bled. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

There was a long-past era when I used to rely on my shameless sex addiction to keep me feeling creative, lively, and protected from more harmful addictions like emotional co-dependency and the very stupid ones, alcohol and drugs. It felt like the energy and passion within me were pouring onto the blank page, creating an unstoppable force. Not for nothing, the stream of consciousness was the literary device I was fond of.I didn’t fuel my wild imagination with corny MTV music videos–the sign of the times–but with the nihilistic characters of The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis. Those characters were always lost in the dense fog of college days, partying so hard that they forgot what they did and with whom they did it. Life had the uncanny poetry of a postcard from the edge, the sex drive filled with a huge hormonal upheaval, and casual feelings that they mistakenly mixed up with love.But it wasn’t love at all. These casual feelings were hot-swappable–as described in The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell–to such an extent that they served multiple purposes. It was the rogue spirit, and I never felt any remorse or had a shred of guilt. It was a harmless costume party and compared with the ghosting ways of that digital meat grinder called Tinder, I would say it was emotionally healthier because at least it was the real thing. There were no “swipe left” or “swipe right” actions, just a brief exchange of looks that could be as intense as rolling thunder.  After a truce to heal wounds with a disappointed lover, sometimes gained a valuable confidante to share a laugh with. Only the ones who wanted so hard to be the victims of their idiotic nonsense, the self-righteous divas capable of pounding at my door in the wee hours, were lost forever. And for their unacceptable harassment, merely an advance of the slender respect I could expect on a foreseeable future, I always had ready Sean Bateman’s detached line from the aforementioned book.“It’s over. Deal with it. Rock’n’roll.”All these sexual flings were expected from a confirmed singleton until I got married in my fifties, when I finally discovered the roots of my deep detachment, once the rule of hormones gave me a break and I could think clearly without a boner in between. I am, indeed, a sapiosexual because I cannot help myself against the brilliance of a beautiful mind. Physical beauty is always appreciated, by all means. Nonetheless, it’s overrated and it’s just a sexual lure like the eyes and colors of a peacock’s tail. It works out for many in the eligible age; it creates a solid sexual bond enough to raise a family, and like the Americans bluntly say ‘to own your ass’ with an exclusivity agreement and shared assets. It doesn’t matter the sexual orientation or gender identity one has; the biological trick is always the same.Some modern couples skipped children for cats and dogs, even snakes or horses. Me, a total freak as well, I did that with my literary works because I put my heart and soul into them. I used to call them ‘my children of paper’ before the Digital Revolution razed the world where I grew up, and I guess I should find a more suitable term of endearment. Just in case, I have my originals on paper and well protected, lest a nuclear war or a deadlier virus than the last one sent the world back again to the Dark Ages.It is from this perspective that I would like to offer some food for thought.This week, I’m reading Holding the Note by David Remnick, a collection of essays he wrote for The New Yorker about the musicians he loves. In the book, Stevie Van Zandt, the guitarist behind Bruce Springsteen, made an interesting statement about artists who continue to perform, even if their contemporaries are six feet under or retired. He said, and I quote, “[this is] the birth of something I call ‘wisdom art’–art that the artist could not have created when they were young…so there is a legitimate justification for continuing to create.”It rings at first like a platitude but is not. During the most recent Cannes Film Festival, when I read how some journalist–the name of which I have no desire to call to mind–was attacking Francis Ford Coppola for putting up his personal fortune to make the movie of his dreams and Kevin Costner following suit, just a clickbait for iconoclast youngsters, I lost my temper and wrote to him that his observations were befitting the dirty walls of a public shitter. Yeah, I know what you are thinking; journalism is having a hard time after massive layoffs, and some will do whatever they must to put food on the table. But that’s the drug dealer’s moral as well and always takes its toll.My point: unless I lose my memory or brain cancer kills me in two months’ time, I have a lot of work to do with ‘my children of paper’. This includes copy editing, translating Castilian Spanish nuances, and narrating. I now write at least ten times better than before I got lost in Rip Van Winkle’s forest. How can that be? I thought I was finished, excuse my candor. But I guess I am a resilient individual who still tries to learn from his many blunders. I have confessed that the energy and passion of my younger years are gone, but so are the fear and lack of confidence. It’s tit for tat. Nature always does a perfect job in creating its beings and keeping everything in balance.One more thing about the Cannes Film Festival: George Lucas, who has been criticized for constantly editing the Star Wars saga, shared an anecdote of Michelangelo and his Sistine Chapel ceiling; the artist dismounted several times the scaffolding to fully see his work and remounted it again, convinced that it wasn’t done but just abandoned. As for me, my life partner jokingly calls me “Mr. Nobody” when I disappoint her for my shortcomings, rubbing it in my face that she is published by Penguin Books and has contributed to several major American magazines. So, who would even notice if I reassembled the scaffolding? Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

For the last two months, I haven’t cut any podcasts. Oh, wait! A clarification is needed. Some people still think this is another newsletter, but if you look closer, will see a green rectangle over these words with the “play” symbol. And the one who reads aloud is me, a professional voice crafter, and not a lifeless synthetic voice or a famous actor. I know from my own experience that when I read a book, I miss the storyteller and the performance of the narrator. But some people don’t, because they use the written words of the author to bring the story to life through their own imagination, as was mandatory for the old school. The crux of the matter is that the attention span has been irreversibly damaged since the invention of the iPhone and its addictive apps, spoiled by endless doom-scrolling and click-baiting, which in turn has resulted in the collapse of sustained reading, even among those who used to read. Yes, you hear me well, but just in case I will say it once again loud and clear: even among those who used to read. Call me crazy, but I am feeling very optimistic about the future, no matter what it holds. We need stories just like our ancestors did in the African savanna, when the storyteller built a fire at twilight and all the tribe listened to him very closely to forget the roaring lions. That’s why the first stories were about heroes facing fearful odds–to inspire courage in those with weak limbs and trembling knees. No matter what kind of delivery I choose–written or spoken words–I’m telling a story. If can deliver both, the reader or the listener will be equally satisfied. Nonetheless, I draw my thin red line with the image or any theatrical representation, because the use of imagination is paramount; if you subtract that component from the original equation, you break the spell. That being said, I've been an early adopter of tech, from word processors to iPhones, even before the internet came. Tech itself isn't the issue but rather the rational and proportional use we grant it as a productivity tool. Like everything else in life, one has to set boundaries to protect our brains from the fast pace of the modern world, considering that our older layer is reptilian and with no improvement in sight. As a voice crafter, I'm amazed by the journey I've taken from using my first recording tape to now operating a state-of-the-art studio that allows me to distribute my reels worldwide. Over the past two months, I've been learning how to remaster the majority of the podcasts I've recorded using Spatial Audio without adding reverb. This is because the latest AirPods Pro provides a much-improved listening experience compared to earlier models. It's interesting to note that the legendary music producer Phil Spector, known for his "wall of sound" technique based on mono mixing, would perhaps not have anticipated the advancements in audio technology that have rendered his techniques comparable to the cave paintings of the Neanderthals.In regard to the lonely act of sewing words, as the fishermen mend their nets in the nearby docks, I have three 4K screens arranged like a Flemish triptych. I do this because I always write in two languages, Castilian Spanish and American English, and I need a third for quick notes, infinite nuances, and documentation.I guess an author of previous generations would curse me for not writing in hand. So, I have the Japanese fountain pen on the desk, just in case the ghost of Yukio Mishima came unannounced. Do I miss handwriting? Hell, yeah! Precisely for this peculiar work method described before it’s counterproductive for me; besides the preciousness and allure of my mother tongue are so tempting that I could get lost on the flow and struggle to find the way back to my second lingua franca, which is widely known for her economy of words. Some say that one should only write and speak in his native tongue, above all when it comes to literary works. But those idiots are mistaken, just like the ones who incorrectly believe that Jack Kerouac wrote the early draft of On the Road in English instead of French; his real name was Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac and he was born and raised in the French-American community of Lowell, Mass. I could mention the Irish author Samuel Beckett as well, who stated that he tended to write in French, because it made it easier for him to write “without style”, and he translated his works himself. The list of transnational authors is larger than you might think, and the reasons that led them to do so are always quite interesting. I would go with Beckett without the slightest hesitation.And yet, there is another reason for me that connects with the beginning like a Möbius strip. In hard times like these, with a scarcity of new readers and former readers lured by the dark mirror, always fearing missing out on the latest, as if their lives depend on it, either I ask myself to bring out the best of me or I may sell myself short as have many of my peers. This lovely train ride called life speeds up with each passing year, and I am deeply grateful to my old man, even though I hate that he knew me so well, because he never sugarcoated the challenges and the adventure I was so determined to face. The only painful thought is that he will never witness how far I have come. But when I shave in the morning, I realize that my former snub nose has evolved into his big fat nose, which I once laughed so hard about. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

I have a confession to make. A friend of mine who still lives in Lausanne taught me a long time ago the only attractive thing about the internet, something that has brought me infinite joy over the years, to wit: being a ruthless pirate of content in the form of the many films, books, and series I couldn’t afford while I was a digital nomad living on the road without two cents to rub. Certainly, I admit it was against the law and looked awful for an author. Where were the principles to protect the sacred copyright? I tell you where... In the dustbin of history! Now that I have money again, the copies I order on Amazon are the ones of my revered Maestros, always in the original language because I’m fed up with cheap translations. One must learn from the best; Goethe learned Spanish to read Calderón and Cervantes, for instance. The curious thing was that my friend inherited a fortune. And yet, he was a monumental cheapskate. But with me, while we were inseparable best friends, he was splendid beyond measure. Nonetheless, we parted ways due to his annoying habits and countless shenanigans that subsequently made me lose my temper and good nature. Most of the time, I miss that rogue. I still have in my drawer a hot manuscript about his iconic mother–Paule Rizzo, a Parisian mannequin of Coco Chanel from the late fifties–that someday I shall top it off with a proper epilogue.Among all the satisfaction that being a ruthless pirate brought about, I have to write up a delightful surprise. As if I would do in a logbook while sailing in the middle of nowhere with my eccentric friend, when we used to cast off with the fair weather, and during the warm nights, we slept with the sails jibed, battered for the breeze into the deep, while glowing ship cruisers were setting their bow to the island of Minorca.It’s about how Gus Van Sant’s Feud series about Truman Capote ended. My peers didn’t upload the season finale because, in the penultimate episode, he died in the arms of Joanne Carson, and they thought the story was already told. For two days, I was clicking over and over to no avail at the Pirate’s Bay, and the season finale wasn’t there. I read the recap in the New York magazine media column Vulture where the praise of the line-up of actresses went to Demi Moore, and I quote, “Her Ann Woodward may have been the swan we spent the least amount of time with, but my God, did she make every gesture and every scathing line feel like an event.”This morning some pirate uploaded the long-awaited season finale, and while it was supposed to be a bland posthumous fantasy, it instead struck me as a moving work of art, one that put me on the verge of tears. Am I getting old? Or maybe I’m still mourning my late father, my own private black swan. If he could read me without any further consideration would dispatch me with the same derogatory adjective that Truman’s mom did. Frilly. Oh yeah, all of us have something to forgive and to be forgiven. No doubt about that.I live very close to Palamós, at that time a small fishing town where Truman–always accompanied by his partner-in-life Jack Dunphy–sought for three semesters, alternated with their cottage in Verbier, near to Lausanne, at the top of the Swiss Alps, the necessary peace to write his most accomplished manuscript, In Cold Blood.On April of 1962, they tried Corsica for a change but in the very hotel they stayed at, they were robbed of $500, the equivalent of over five grand in today’s money. And quickly they went back to Spain. Local oldtimers who treated him, remember Truman with a bottle of gin under his arm yelling “My lady friend died!” at the newsstand the day headlines screamed that Marilyn Monroe had fatally overdosed. And if this series of setbacks were not enough, a frightening wildfire just outside the villa they had rented almost cost them their lives, because, in that rocky Mediterranean shore, the pine groves always have been used as parasols and windshields as well, regardless of the blaze risk involved. Truman only had time to grab his precious manuscript and flee, hoping that a fishing sloop rescue him from that hell. In late September, the furies of the equinox unleashed a deadly flood in Catalonia that further terrorized them, and they changed their minds, putting an end to that productive stay on October 1st when they left for Switzerland. At the French border, however, the Gendarmerie stopped them because the car documentation was outdated. They spent two hellish days in the border town Perpignan going from office to office to no avail; Truman blew his top and called his friend the French Minister of Industry. Three hours later, they drove the car into France with everybody bowing and scraping like mad. The cynical moral of that adventure was: never bother with petty officials–go to the top (if you can). Despite his efforts, he was unable to finish the manuscript until the Cluttler’s killers were hanged, 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.”Assuming that was an inescapable part of the author's fieldwork, Smith asked Truman to be present when he and Hickock went to the gallows on April 14, 1965. After that grim episode, Capote could top it off the manuscript on June 10 and began to reap the financial benefits by running installments in The New Yorker on September, before the publishing date with Random House on January 17, 1966. And selling In Cold Blood movie rights to Hollywood was extremely lucrative. After that, Truman Capote left his modest apartment in Brooklyn Heights for the 870 United Nations Plaza, with sweeping views of the New York skyline and East River. But instead of getting back to work with the same stern and unsmiling discipline that was a constant since the beginning of his career, he dilapidated that rare gift from the gods trying to revenge 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 readers I know speak glowingly about the scintillating Breakfast at Tiffany’s and his short stories, and with each passing year, I can relate to that. In Cold Blood and society’s fascination for true crime has aged badly because television and modern media have been beating that dead horse ad nauseam. But adoration for Breakfast at Tiffany’s continues unabated.What kind of emotional imbalance could have led a very gifted author to become a walker of rich white women–the so-called swans–a fat gossip hack, a hapless alcoholic, a cocaine snorter, and a talk show buffoon who passed out on live TV to the delight of the idiots? Look no further, it’s all about that Southern belle called Lillie Mae Faulk, also known as Nina Capote. A black swan that Gus Van Sant brought to life like a disturbing phantasmagoria, a never-ending regret that fueled his genius. And perhaps the only similitude that kept with his revered Marcel Proust. As the 13th-century mystic poet Rumi wrote, “Pain and sorrow. Stay with it. The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

Writing is all about juggling two completely different ideas like when you’re on deck back-stitching a broken sail that the wind tore apart while you were sleeping. But today I feel so confident to do it with three—just to live up to the title which is not wanton.One of my dear literary heroes, Joseph Roth, was a German Jew writer born in Brody in 1894, East Galitzia, in the easternmost of what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, actually Ukraine. Roth began a career in Vienna as a best-paid journalist for left-wing newspapers as “Der Rote Joseph”—a play on his surname—fought in WWI and was a privileged witness of the implosion of Austria.Later on, he relocated to Berlin and wrote for the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung, and became a correspondent from France, the USSR, Albania, Poland, Italy, and of course Germany. In the meantime, he began to write novels with a melancholic nostalgia about the Habsburg Myth, like The Radetzky March. Ideologically, he went from being a stern socialist to a monarchist, an entire cycle. Igor Stravinsky doesn’t need any introduction. But for the ones who never listened to this classical Russian composer, I would highlight one thing: he was the first to use violins like percussion, in a way that his contemporary audience considered outrageous. To describe, the well-mannered Parisians left the theater in a stampede—succès de scandale in French—when they heard The Rite of Spring. Indeed, they were terrified. But you should know that there is no real art when you don’t get stricken to the core.And finally, Rutger Hauer, a German actor who passed away in 2019. For me, he will be always in my mind an icon of that futuristic movie called Blade Runner. Where he performed a murderous and contemplative android with a farewell proper of a Wagnerian Siegfried. Like Klaus Kinski, he did shitty movies and commercials just for the dough. But when he found the chance to shine, he nailed it.Well then, these three juicy oranges I’m juggling now come to terms with a movie based on Joseph Roth’s swan song, The Legend of the Holy Drinker, an astonishing novella he wrote in Paris in 1939, knowing that his days were numbered because of Hitler and his antisemitism that went nuts.Imagine one of the best German writers—who has a patron like Stefan Zweig—sinking into the hopeless emptiness of alcoholism while hearing the Nazi boots getting closer. What kind of story he could write? What else he could feverishly be scribbling in those cafés? He drank himself to death but was always incredibly lucid.  Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

Lucas Folch took at random a book from the stack of copies, placed by reflex the reading glasses at the top of the nose, and without noticing it, began to move his lips, as if instead of reading perhaps was counting money. Every morning, he went to the book distributor to restock some backlist and widely-publicised frontlist titles as well, many of which were the repetition of the same old promises: you are going to be captivated by this and by that, even for what follows beyond the first page.Those highfaluting promises were diluted pretty soon in a string of pathetic clichés and simple-minded screenwriting —with an eye to a never-ending streaming series— crammed with drivel and filler, disguised as dialogues with petty conflicts that didn’t even deserve an atmospheric reading. All the same, he still bore in mind what the hell was looking for. And the cardinal reasons why he was pouring such heart and soul into the thrill of the huntMore than a diligent bookseller, Mr. Folch saw himself as a mere procurer, a pornographer in the proper sense of the word, whose job was to sell black-ink typeface printed over white-paper scroll, to be folded and bounded and cut as a copy, with the ultimate goal at stake, to wit: get the reader’s imagination run wild into a made-up paradise, although plausible but always forbidden, chased, hidden.With his attention centered upon such capacity, he weighed up those first pages and ruled them out if he was not knocked out on the spot by well-aimed punches due to the narrator. Well-adjusted, and without further restraints, he eventually came to wonder about everything he read. By way of illustration, how could some historical fiction authors spend so long documenting about clothes and whatnot while at the same time, in a sex scene, they were unable to elicit a ripping boner from the reader. Not for nothing, Mr. Folch maintained, the prominent characters in which they concerned so much, passionately loved each other, did they?All the bookseller wanted was to read for once a writer who was not the minor god of a corny garden, someone whose words would wake the colorful fantasy of hanging out with a buddy of many adventures, a true storyteller whose voice jumped from the pages, a Celtic ghost with unfinished business that in sleepless nights blew his mind beyond remedy. That was the real stuff. Otherwise, the bookseller was at risk of selling snake oil, a scam beautifully printed and so devoid of content that perhaps it found its utility as an inert decorative item, but not the required fiction by the willing suspension of disbelief.The book that he had chosen at first sight seemed to him extremely odd, and he wanted to leaf through it; however, he could not do it since the page borders were not trimmed by the paper cutter, something usual in some poetry collections which it used an excellent paper of bone color. Although in this case, more than a poetry collection it was about an author who had ended up publishing his work, at his own risk, probably not getting the printing costs right, given that the cover —which graphic design was the map of a circular labyrinth with a clover in the center— did not credit any acknowledged imprint. That enigmatic copy went by the title The Uncut Book and the author preferred the anonymity, something unexpected in a self-publication. The bookseller Lucas Folch did without publications of this kind for many reasons: because they lacked an editor job, a proof-reader, a layout editor, and a competent printer that in the case that it came upon a mistake, immediately, he would get in touch with the publisher before starting the machinery.That copy had a bit of particular. The bookseller certainly read for a living, but also he did it for fun, passion, and curiosity, reason enough to decide to open that book in his hands and get on with the job. The story begins openly, in some kind of aside with complicity’s ease. As if the narrator really was acting on a theater stage. A first line that (without further ado) he cooked up in a farewell from a floating world, in that case in question, a sailboat moored in the marina from which he would debark soon, not before leaving as a token to his confidant, patroness and first reader, an ambitious manuscript. Where he tried to tell the unexpected event that brought him writer’s block to his very lonely life, except for the occasions that, with her, abounded in oral tradition. And the brilliant way in which he managed to turn the tables during the first night aboard that laid awake because of the halyard’s tintinnabulation, to wit: taking her as a narratee, in such a manner that his boundless imagination could lead him —just like that!— at the edge of time.In the same way, he would do it, Lucas Folch thought, on the off chance that his doc diagnosed him someday in a check-up terminal cancer. Whoa! He would write at full force! He was convinced that he would tell his wife Olivia things that he had never told her. All of a sudden, he raised his eyebrows reading the grand finale of that theatrical aside, where apparently the favorite meeting place of the affair between the artist without a name —halfway vagabond and guest— and his discreet patroness it was in a Barcelonian bookstore, that it might be his own or perhaps the one in the ground floor of the department store with which he shared chamfer.The agitated Mr. Folch had no other choice but to assuage the unease by trimming the edges of that handmade paper —something that he did without further care— pulling out from the first thing that he found in his wallet, in that case, a credit card. He realized out of the blue that the story had as a protagonist someone, which it seems is his spitting image. Because he shared with that one the same occupation. However, it had not still arrived the day that obliging booksellers were characters so colorful as always had been the authors troubled with writer’s block —quite often fighting hard with the anxiety that was getting them paralysed and let their morale rock bottom until a depression swallow them— with which he didn’t take further importance to the issue.But the circumstances that such an anonymous narrator got to detail after were a copy of his everyday life, extensive to the extreme by a realist description, sometimes poetic and always thorough. With specifics that his attention had not noticed until then, and by which he unexpectedly was feeling spellbound without achieving to explain to himself entirely, just like a mirror ink that to another dimension was able to move him, losing in this way his whole person into a phantasmagoria without bottom where he never reached to set foot even though he wanted to. 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During the past week, I have learned how to drive on Substack without fear, as I did one summer on the narrow paths of the island of Majorca while taking a literary retreat in Portocolom; the olive fields had stone walls so that I stood my ground and hoped the other driver was not intoxicated, and if such was the case, he would not brake in time, and we might crash head-on.The locals advised me to honk the horn repeatedly, but I was fearless and loved the peace of the inland too much to bother people. The only incident I had along the summer was in Formentor with Marion, who was attacked by vicious jellyfish –after I insisted we should plunge into such crystalline waters– and I had to drive fast to the south of the island before she hated me forever and ever. The night was falling at the end of the run and the car lights did the rest, so there was no need to honk the horn. We arrived safe and sound at Portocolom. But Marion still hates me and doesn't say hello anymore. What can you do?But I digress.What I learned is to add my email list on Substack, to reissue my most personal podcast, and to stand my ground against Offensiphobia (according to Corlett, the belief that offensive speech ought to be censured in higher educational academic freedom, because some expressions are perceived as being racist, sexist, etc.) that it actually extends like wildfire to media, entertainment, and literary works.Some of you may be familiar with my podcast "American Fiction" from this very February; a college professor is forced by his dean to take a sabbatical, because a snowball of the late generation Z, also known as Zoomers, from a privileged class, was deeply offended by the use of the N-word written on the blackboard, while discussing a short story written by Flannery O'Connor.    You see, I know a lot of people because when I was younger, I used to spend time handwriting with elaborate strokes long and passionate letters with my fountain pen. Perhaps to indulge my curiosity and expand my point of view, the people I know have a wide range of opinions, beliefs, and tastes. However, after the covid pandemic, people became more polarized and less tolerant of each other compared to before. Is the mental immune system compromised after the long lockdown? Some people I really have loved and admire now are the shells of what they were once when we used to have fun together and show complicity. For years now, we have been surrounded by cancel culture, which has become a fever that doesn't seem to break. Maybe we are like those crazy Europeans who were killing each other in the infamous Wars of Religion of the 16th century. Time is a flat circle. When the enslaved Israelites wanted to leave Egypt, they had a leader called Moses, ready to summon the wrath of Yahweh with ten plagues each worse than the last to break the resolve of the god-like Pharaoh. Following Moses’s instructions, the chosen people marked with lamb blood their doorsteps to ensure that the destroying angel would pass over them. On that legendary first spring night of the full moon, the chosen people were not concerned at all with the bloodcurdling screams of the everyday Egyptians and their stubborn ruler when their firstborns died. The holiday is called Passover for a reason. It’s a frisson of schadenfreude.I named "Don't You Dare to Think Out Loud!" for a specific reason. A fiction writer who doesn't take the risks is limited by fear, with his poetic wings and imaginative abilities clipped and the creativity of a copy machine. A fiction writer uses to write novels and as the very word implies, it is supposed to be a novelty. And here comes my question. What kind of novel could I possibly write from now on if I succumb to the fear of offending others? The very existence of me is in shambles. This is the life I have chosen. And I could tell a story about my struggles with the painful writer's block, long years of self-hatred, and endless procrastination. But not today.I have always been empathetic towards my friends and acquaintances and their life's ups and downs, but I never write for them. One should write for the audience that one doesn’t know, for the anonymous reader, in order to not measure what is said and to avoid preaching to the choir, being biased, and falling into clichés and platitudes; note that I'm not suggesting falling in lunatic ravings, but instead express oneself with the boundless joy of an emotional athlete.I loved Marion with all of my heart. She is still a very successful fashion designer and by the time we fooled around in Formentor, she was kinda neurotic due to lack of sleep, frequent intercontinental flights, and was burned out. I swear the warm waters were sheer vert celadon and the jellyfish did not dare to attack me. Perhaps it was my wild imagination, but I think the cold white wine we had with the grilled fish at that beach stall made me feel a certain way. Later, on the way to that paradisiacal cove, the branches of the pine trees were warped by the north wind probably since they sprouted, in the style of magical figures. Under the golden Mediterranean sunshine, I felt invulnerable to any harm like the warrior Achilles. But Marion was scared, and instead of taking the plunge, she was dog-paddling.One should embrace the madness and hope for the best. And learning to fail, to fail even better, to be at your best game. Otherwise, the jellyfish will take you. But being quietly indoors while the destroying angel passes over your roof, do what you’re told, avoiding saying things that might get you in trouble, emasculated and under constant suspicion, compliant to this Orwellian Newspeak that makes the skin crawl even for respected academics, and accepting cancel culture war as the new normal, it's the coward’s way, the ultimate insanity and beyond any doubt the death of the author. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

In the first month, my New Year's Day happiness went wrong. I donated my old printed books to a friend, thinking sixteen years of storage would not go badly. And Hell, yes! It did. More than half went to the fire due to its moldy state. Paper is alive like a mummy and cannot be moist. The last picture I had of all of them was on a luminous loft above the club Razzmatazz where I lived in 2008.When I became a Digital Nomad, I left my mighty books behind because I read them all during my teen years and twenties, when I thought I had to listen to all the voices before having the audacity to listen to mine someday. For me, they were my loyal friends on lonely nights. Most of the time, I remembered passages I had read as a memory alive in me.I was a very fortunate kid who hopped from one library to another. The first was almost magic because it was a centuries-old monk's library. I spent over there half of my childhood. Try to imagine the wonders that come to mind just with the dense perfume of those mighty books. But the altar boy changed his voice very early and had a farewell to never look back again.Then came the age of innocence, when one thinks to shine like Socrates, saying the unexamined life is not worth living. And what better way than writing? Yes, I thought, I would have had my father as a supporter. However, he never bought me the books I wanted. And he despised my activities as a pastime, a hobby, nothing that might end as a solid income as a provider for my future family. He had a keen understanding of my problem. Indeed, how come a ridiculed stutterer wanted to be a harmonic and smooth bass, a dyslexic person wanted to be a distinguished author, and a slow reader in the fast and dynamic writer of all sorts? I guess all I wanted was his endless admiration for my endeavors. And that was my calling. An artist is a crazy dude willing to take his lumps before believing that he has something to sell. No shortcuts for me.I landed in a public library and finally borrowed books, though with the limited credit of one at the time. No wonder then that the first thing I did when I earned a salary was buy premium white paper, ink for the fountain pen, and the many books I remember reading or wanting to read.My third library was in the Airborne Squadron, where I had to zigzag between translations of Dien Bien Phu in exchange for having funds to assault the bookshops of the nearby city and a quiet place to read whenever my commando training let me rest. And suddenly, the Air Force gave me a diabolic word processor where I wrote without using the correction fluid.So, when I finished my tours, I rented a bungalow where the bookshelves were everywhere upstairs with a brown corduroy sofa and a desktop with a personal computer and a noisy printer fed by continuous form paper. Never before was I so happy and also so lonesome.I began talking to the dog, and I thought that could be cabin fever. I needed female company, getting laid, or romanticizing about a girl. The problem was the span of attention included and all the drama attached. Like a Leonard Cohen's song. I need you, I don't need you, and all of that jiving around.In twenty years, until that October of 2008, I wrote novels I couldn't even imagine. At that point, with a laptop in my backpack and the Anna Archive website sharing 25 million books, and a connection to the net, I left my mighty books for storage, because I became a Digital Nomad.And all that won’t mean that I achieved being a fast and dynamic writer of all sorts, but having long stances on solitary confinement in literary landscapes. My top ten list begins with a sailboat and ends with the House of the Winds. At the marinas I used to moor, the older ones with a British members-only distinction had a seasick hall within a library and plenty of bookshelves and well-thumbed books, mostly paperback, that lovers of the bookcrossing left behind.Now, I love being firmly detached, grounded, and cornered to my home studio and expensive vocal chain after decades of wandering in the wilderness. I have been there, done that. Living on the edge is really awesome, like living on the road, but I already made my humble part.I wish I could go back to my bungalow and feel again that illusion. This is when I miss my loyal friends. From the very moment I bought them to the second-best read, when I swore to have written that line before. But it was just the burning desire to write my own. Who did not read Fahrenheit 451? That near future with printed books censored –we say now canceled– when the readers became book-lovers of the disappeared or abridged books thanks to unlocking photographic memory. I wish I had that gift!I cannot memorize not even my own writings. Sometimes, I had heard music coming from that storage, and now, knowing the fate of half of them burning bright because of mold, what a poisoned chalice for my friend, I think I'm ready for due penance at least to unlock the power of such mighty books. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

Sometimes, I wonder why the mere reading of some books stirs in me the irrepressible appetite of writing. Like just yesterday, when I watched with an old friend of mine a French movie about the creation of the first restaurant, Delicious by Éric Besnard, and we ended up so hungry that we checked if we had enough butter on the fridge. Lucky me, the craving vanished, otherwise I would have ruined my one-meal-a-day diet.Nonetheless, I swear I was hungry until I fell asleep reading Erasure by Percival Everett on which is based the highly recommended film American Fiction. And this morning, at the crack of dawn, while the first drops of rain after a drought were cleaning my dusty window, I was furiously writing –as it should be!– keeping in mind the inspiring words of Whit Burnett to the young and ambitious Salinger, “are you willing to devote your life to telling stories knowing that you may get nothing in return?” For the sake of the argument, let’s say all of you already have watched the aforementioned film played by Jeffrey Wright. And if not, press stop right now and quit listening, given that I’m going to be specific about the plot.It's all about the ups and downs of fiction that veers depending on sales and nothing else. There was a time when publishers were the guardians of quality standards and good taste, at least I believed the spirit of Max Perkins from Scribner’s was hovering among them. But not actually. And since the invasion of dumb-phones and the subsequent collapse of sustained reading, I begin to think there will be much worse each day passing because of the poverty of imagination that includes. We have this fine black author with a jazzy name –Thelonious Monk Ellison– trying to teach American fiction to snowballs in a Californian college ridden by the Woke fever and its radical extremes, with a female student outraged by the use of the N-word that denounces him to the dean, and he receives a disciplinary sanction that he uses to visit his family in Boston, where he is dealing with the problems of a middle-aged man, like the slow descent of a mother into senile dementia, disturbing revelations about his late suicidal father, and the sudden mortality of his sister, who has been the caregiver for years.The combination of these situations and the rejection of his last erudite book for not being black enough pushes him to write the Hood lit that the book industry wanted so badly –or fiending their black trauma porn– under the false identity of an ex-convict, recreating all the stereotypes white publishers think are genuinely black, including Afro-American vernacular English. Namely, drugs, ghetto life, deadbeat dads, and rappers.So, he tackles with this Faustian bargain all his problems at once, cashing with the help of his savvy agent all the money he needs to take care of his ailing mother. And a juicy Hollywood deal to free him once and for all from the servitudes of the academia he has endured... Until the plot twists and he is invited to be a member of the jury of some prize where the prank he churned out is the unstoppable winner with the F-word as a title. During a recess of the deliberations, he has the chance to confront his nemesis, a young black female author, who possesses an intellect similar to his own, even if it’s not on display in her work, with no problems catering to such tastes if that is what the market demands. Precisely the excuse of a drug dealer, as he points out.All that lovely plot, reminded me of the fate of my last editor after the dawn of the MeToo movement, compelled to publish young women's romantic fiction not because she wanted to but because it was the new niche. Of course, the authors must be young women too, so the female readers can easily relate with them, through Instagram and TikTok clips, abounding the idea that if you are not a woman, you cannot write about women, which is against the imagination and the creation that fuels any fiction. I really believe Gustave Flaubert must be revolving in his grave. Do you remember his joyful statement? "Madame Bovary c'est moi!"I think we are living in the best of worlds. We have the internet and access to a wonderful variety of cultures that our ancestors didn’t have. However, the audience became at the same time dull and stupid.How come? Is there a correlation between these two things? I wrote about my long strife to have mighty books close to me when I was young and the immense delight of reading them all that went far beyond entertainment. It was a cultural pursuit. All I wanted was literary books without tags full of universal and riveting characters.Now we have tags on supposedly literary works. We have Hood lit, Metoo lit, Sick lit, Victimhood lit. As Percival Everett describes is just an unashamed pandering for commercial purposes.The only legit tag I know is the original language the author uses to write. But I couldn’t care less about his race, gender, sexual orientation, social status, or citizenship. It’s irrelevant. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

It came to my attention in Russia by Antony Beevor, a British military historian whom I have followed since he wrote the astonishing Stalingrad, the story of the Devil’s apprentice that he quotes from Sentimental Journey by Viktor Shklovsky. In the story, to reforge the old man into a young one, the Devil’s apprentice needs to set the old man on fire. Leave the old and embrace the new. After the fire, the Devil’s apprentice tries to perform the miracle. And he finds out that could not revive the old man. How could that be that age and wisdom also in turn carry gullibility and poor choices?With this simple folk tale, Antony Beevor summarizes the Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent Civil War, a conflict that would be embellished and sold as propaganda that millions of desperate and poor people bought without questioning. One can be proud of posing as a communist without considering the massive killing, the millions disappeared where nobody could find their bones.That was Lenin’s idea to reforge the Russian people. But he never thought about the raging fire that unfolded for five long years and left him consumed by a stroke. And looking forward to seeing how Trotsky or Stalin would conduct their fight for absolute power. Stalin won always surrounded by paranoia and the never-ending need to purge his old comrades, citizens, and so many generals that Hitler mistakenly believed he could win.These days some people are celebrating the century of Lenin’s passing. His embalmed body is in Moscow’s Red Square like a touristic attraction inside a mausoleum in red granite, the mineral I found close to a basilic of Barcelona, in a minuscule square where the rebels against a new and corrupted French dynasty are buried, the same dynasty of idiotic kings that later on sold half of the US to the French revolutionaries for peanuts, and then Napoleon to President Monroe for fifteen millions of dollars. After that, the rest of the Spanish Empire went down the drain.Today, I read in a nationalistic digital outlet about the red granite, and it’s Ukrainian, from the quarry of Slynka. And this red granite is called Kapuscinki. So, the nationalistic horde is proud because they have something in common with Lenin’s mausoleum. I hope they don’t try to reforge Barcelona as well, now that it’s already so populated for American ex-pats and European tourists that the rents went up, and with miser salaries, the Barcelonians must leave the city by droves and move into cheaper places, like the boring beach towns. And back again to the Devil’s apprentice, I have read something similar in Faust by Wolfgang Goethe –which is mandatory to fully understand the literary idiom “to strike a Faustian bargain”– where Faust calls the real Devil sick of being alone between books. In exchange for his terrenal soul, the Devil promises Faust to be the wiser of the men and also mundane pleasures during the Walpurgis Night, the Northern European festivity of witches and telluric icons.That Walpurgis Night always fascinated me when I was young, so I decided to include it on my first novel, not because I was trying a devilish topic. It is the last evening of April. And when I was writing on my word processor, before the internet was up and running, my lovely landlady shouted at me in fear across the courtyard because the paragraph I was writing was on her television. I guess there was an electrical explanation for that. But it was the Walpurgis Night and I wanted to believe in magic. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

Three weeks ago, I lost my father. He was 92, a retired pediatrician revered and loved by many generations of patients, and I was his caregiver in the last years, a unique chance to reconnect with him after having a long and stupid battle of wills and pride. My old man wanted for me the same prosperous career that he had as a doctor, instead of the risky and ambitious adventure of being a fiction writer. I was only 13 and solemnly declared to him that my goal in life was not healing the bodies of patients, but the souls of unknown readers. If we had not been so alike he would have liked me a whole lot more, that’s a given. So, I treasured any stolen kiss, any furtive smile, and any complicity of his penetrating gaze I could get.Dear subscribers, imagine how irate I became yesterday when this grieving son read about the latest trick of the AI, which is having the voice of the deceased, talking via those stupid chatbots with a lookalike avatar, in a piece of The New York Times titled “Using AI to Talk to the Dead” by Rebecca Carballo. Have they no sense of decency? What’s wrong with these greedy b******s? Why they are treating us like idiots?The European Union last week passed a bill to begin to stop the abuse of trust by AI tech companies, while the US Congress still has to deal with a powerful system of lobbyists that paralyzed any initiative to put the genie into the bottle before it is too late.And please, don’t call me Boomer. I do love tech when is a helpful tool in the same way that I hate tech when it is a loaded gun inside my mouth. Let me elaborate on this.When the Digital Revolution began 25 years ago substituting paper for screens, I thought how convenient it was for a nomad to have an entire library inside a laptop. And now, you can have that library stored within a secured cloud if you lose the laptop, or even better, the ubiquitous tablet. I have sailed a lot, and sometimes I had seawater-related incidents. So, I say this from experience. However, when social networks began to lie about security and privacy, you could find yourself in a pickle, because of a Facebook tag or a tweet written after two drinks or texting to a dubious friend, a loaded weapon that ruined artistic careers in a flip.And yes, fearing the worst, I closed all my social media accounts, and tried to convince myself that a writer must remember always Homer, a blind man who told stories despite being illiterate. So, if we are facing the collapse of sustained reading thanks to the so-called smartphones, I still have my own voice to strike with.But now, with the latest advances in talking AI, we have to react. The answer is not slapping fines that tech moguls can afford. Instead, it’s time to confiscate fortunes and send people to jail. I mean it. How is it possible that we can now listen to bedtime stories told with James Stewart’s voice and drawl? Did he consent to that? That recent 5-month-long strike of writers and actors in Hollywood struck at the heart of the issue. This challenging future demands decisive actions and laws from every government, including China, where teen girls have virtual romances with avatars and walk the streets like real zombies. As Tristan Harris recently said: “A few cats are out of the bag. But we haven’t released the lions and superlions.”   Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

After a summer like the one we endured, it's an honor to write again and record a podcast without a fan whirring at my feet. Still, the paradoxical issue I want to explore in the following post is the AI in Substack that is totally robotic, and it made me think about standards for narration.I’d always thought that reading aloud and faking another identity made the craft of narration sound cartoonish, despite my respect for the artist who recorded Donald Duck in the Walt Disney early days. Can I do that? Of course! But it sounds like an awful overwrite.I once had a friend, Arantza, who made a living reading books aloud for the blind people. Sometimes, reading a book about horticulture, for example, could be hard, so Arantza adopted a neutral tone, the standard so the listener could follow her narration unhindered.This last summer, my iPhone began to read out loud when I checked my Substack with a feminine doll voice, which was surprisingly good at least as far as the diction went. But the voice had a normalized volume without any breathing of the human pipes, and such a know-it-all tone that killed all my soul with the first line.Arantza has probably lost her job because of this damn AI. However, I don’t think I will lose any advertising work to AI, because an educated listener cannot be seduced by a robotic voice. And if he fall under the AI spell, it would be… cursing to one of the usual gatekeepers! An electronic supermarket cashier, that virtual assistant Siri from Apple, or her stupid cousin Alexa from Amazon!In the meantime, I bought a new preamp because I want to sound as natural as I am. I’ve also learned to record inside a cozy tepee to avoid reverberation. But hey! If you expect me to roar like a cartoon lion, notice that arresting words are just whispers of a unique sound wave, a bit of quantum mechanics running through the nineteen billion of transistors of your iPhone.I have nothing personal against the neutral tone of my long-ago friend. It was lovely to hear how well she did pronounce some vowels and consonants. However, a narration must be entertaining, a treat to enjoy, a pastime. And that's my luck because while I’m recording inside the padded interior of the tepee, I have the best time of my life and lose track of time. On the spur of the moment, I have not the slightest idea of which tonality could be better, what it’s commonly known as ad-lib, and all I have in mind is the flow of words and why the hell Romeo and Juliet was written in unrhymed iambic pentameter or blank verse. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

There is some kind of relief when old flames reach menopause and practice ghosting by default. For starters, I have more time to read the many books I badly ought to know like the back of my hand, and of course, I can write more focused than ever. A big improvement compared to 25 years ago when I began this wandering in the wilderness.  Most of the time, I was deeply hurt. Because I found myself opening the mailbox for an awaited letter that never came.  It was like constant bleeding. No wonder why unrequited love was the subject I explored from all sides in my first novel. I was also dealing with the heartfelt admiration for Harold Brodkey, and that iconic collection of short stories,  First Love and Other Sorrows, which gave him credit enough to spread the legend about being busy writing the next big American novel.  26 years to this day, I quit a job that I considered a plum job, where I could read no less than a dozen books a week, less in summer when I was pretty busy and had no time at all. And to make that decision cost me a lot of struggles until I began hearing voices as if I were insane.  But I wasn’t. Simply put, it was about time. Nine years ago, I got that job to have time to read all the novels I needed before began to write following the advice of an old writer I met. More than all of this, I was dangerously close to my 30th birthday, and as the prudent people made their choices by then to find the right partner to raise a family, I chose to write my guts out and make manuscripts for the rest of my life.  So, I moved into a white apartment on the seashore by myself, bought IKEA simple Nordic furniture to avoid color distractions, and mounted a desk in the living room. I remember waking up early and hearing the radio of fishermen chatter when they were working the clams at six fathoms.  There was a fish farm out at sea, and I thought I might reach it swimming, but powerful currents made me change my mind.  Strange ironies of life, I chose that apartment because of a red-haired girlfriend once I had, who loved it two years before. And I wrote to her explaining my situation. I knew it wasn’t what she wanted. Anyhow, I celebrated alone my 30th birthday doing what I loved to do, that is, typing in that Toshiba laptop I had. And printing to add the page up to the sheaf of paper, which became my first manuscript by the end of summer. I remember as if it were today what I did instead of blowing out candles while making secret wishes. I just put my right hand over that sheaf of paper with much more love than I had ever felt for anybody. About that red-haired girlfriend, I finally received in the middle of August a postcard from Prague with one written exclamation: Shhh!   Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

Bored to death with these ramblings of the so-called modern cinema, where all the novelties are about superheroes as if the audience became idiotic, I had no choice but to find some thrilling films harking back to the 40s. When cinema was the ultimate art form. And Agfacolor challenged Technicolor and Kodachrome.The twelve years of nationalist revolution and collective delirium that was the infamous German Third Reich, besides a brutal war in order to achieve the same privileges as the declining British and French colonial empires, also brought back a fair amount of propaganda films with endless funds provided by a totalitarian and criminal state.However, at the end of that bloody trail of tirades against the Jews, old-fashioned European folklore, precisely when the British-American raids were leveling entire cities day and night –like Dresden, Munich, Hamburg, or Berlin– something peculiar happened. And we might sort it out as the Agfacolor Swann Song.Technicolor and Kodachrome were Hollywood’s first innovations to enhance black and white films. But the Germans had their system, the Agfacolor. Joseph Goebbels, a genius propagandist, thought that the best way to cheer up the morale of the beleaguered population was by giving fortunes to film productions where the element of phantasy was like an acid drug. Can you believe that? In case you’re confused now, I’m talking about using cinema as a mere escapism art form, which is not far away from the purposes of fiction, that is, amaze, persuade, inform, entertain, explain, and describe. I was a child when I saw for the first time in the encyclopedias that my Pa bought that image of the Baron of Lies, Münchhausen, riding a cannonball. Alas, I didn’t pay attention to the year the film was made, and either put two and two together. That was also what the beleaguered Germans were having as entertainment. While they were dying by bombs or their own hand. Still the most fanatical were trusting blindly the last wonder weapon. Riding a cannonball doesn’t capture my imagination anymore. I shall tell you what it does actually. If you have some philosophical readings on your bookshelves like Friederich Nietzsche, maybe you find yourself in the same spot I am.Consider watching Rite of Sacrifice without prejudices, and think about the human beings who knew their fate in advance. That collective delirium’s last stages certainly were a bitter end after such monumental hubris. This film was directed by Veit Harlan with no apparent Nazi topics at all. The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek also thinks is a masterpiece, calling it a hallucination within hallucination. What a trip! Is not that what we know simply as fiction? Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

William Faulkner is the best writer I have ever read. He first got me with The Sound and the Fury, which he wanted to print in four different inks, to make it abundantly clear that they were four different monologues. As you might imagine, the publishers of that era were too focused on profit to take risks and alter the intensity of black letters on white paper.Even today, nobody has tried to make good on Bill’s wishes in 1929, and I quote, “I wish publishing was advanced enough to use colored ink… I’ll just have to save the idea until publishing grows up. If I could only get it printed the way it ought to be with different color types for the different times in Benjy’s section recording the flow of events for him, it would probably make it simpler. I don’t reckon, though, it will ever be printed that way, and that will have to be the best, with italics indicating the change of events.” End quote.As a fervent believer in new ways to explore the publishing world since the internet has changed newspapers, magazines, and eBooks since the beginning of the 21st century, I was hoping that perhaps we have the chance to fully realize the vision that Faulkner had of his fiction.And not only Faulkner but also Julio Cortázar, who wrote Hopscotch ––” Rayuela”–– in the context of a particular musical key. I remember reading that masterpiece backward and forward, with true and sincere devotion in my younger years. Alas, I couldn’t properly catch all the musical references because at that time we didn’t have streaming services like we do now.So, when Cortázar’s characters listened in communion to their jazz heroes like Benny Carter, Earl Hines, Lonnie Johnson, Coleman Hawkins, and the like, I couldn’t fill the blanks.I remember many years later, a true friend of mine, enlightened me about the fabulous After the Rain by John Coltrane when he was closing up his pub. I was dumbstruck, so he poured me a glass of red wine. Then we listened to Dizzy Gillespie, and that night we went to sleep at dawn after emptying many bottles.Sadly, I lost forever that valuable friendship after I had a torrid affair with his girlfriend. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

Inside my head, I knew it was a summer morning. But I didn’t know anything else in my childhood. And yes, indeed. I could hear the thirty-second notes coming from that wooden pipe, a pan flute. Like a migratory birdcall, blew many times announcing the peddler’s arrival, after a full year of absence. All of a sudden, the help comes with big scissors too, and many men pack the knives with a cloth.The knife-grinder, maybe the last of his kind, bends over the stone rolling fast, and everybody is expecting luminous sparks when the blade gets sharpened enough, and the steel is solid. But I don’t have a knife. I don’t want one, I just don’t need one! I just want to hear again the knife-grinder playing the thirty-second notes. Children of the hood, beware of the malignant Pied Piper!I was fascinated like any other child by that pan flute because the knife-grinder was the herald of summer with plenty of rice salads in Tupperware, eternal beach days, and reading German legends about Hamelin’s rat-catcher. However, legends have many versions. Children’s Crusade in 1211 was a historic failure that wound up in thousands of slaves on the shores of Tunisia.And, the popular way to tell the story afraid of the parents of the royal’s wrath was a malignant and greedy Pied Piper who tricks rats and children with thirty-second notes. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

There are lazy sounds that are coming one at a time to me. As if these sounds rose slowly from the underworld. Or they would have crossed a remote distance before ringing, a tintinnabulation that fades out to come back higher after a few moments to drift again into silence. Flags and rags --both at the sailboat and fishing trawler fleet-- keep gently awaiting the offshore breeze.There are backfires from a diesel motor that comes rough, and afterward, it goes away, followed by an aquatic gurgle and an anchor drop. A fish auction voice comes amplified and sings breathless numbers down.Outside the breakwaters, a big blue giant is swaying tons of waves until they shatter against the rocks with a blow that carries a rolling thunder-distant echo.I watch reflections in the water like quicksilver spilled. The sky appears in the middle of a roadstead, just a picture that floats. First is the color of infinite sadness. And then, shapes of sunset clouds flowing westbound.The breeze flow is dim over the face of the waters and draws enigmatic forms. Fading tongues of fire from the depth, wings of a flock of seagulls flying and floating fish scales.In the docks, street lamps are lit and flicker by rectilinear stretches. Still, some parts are kept in the shadows. And for thousands, these reflections in the water crawl up to the hulls of the anchored boats. As if they were sailing asleep. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe