A mosaic of profound cultural miscegenation, the cradle of jazz and American music, a redoubt of dark African rituals and wild indulgence set against surrounding puritanism, New Orleans is a living homage to its roots that does not forget its literary children either...
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New Orleans. The Umbilical Cord of the Mississippi Read More »
We have grown accustomed to horror being present in an almost routine manner in our lives. The presence of bombings, massacres, natural disasters, and other collective tragedies is so continuous that we end up accepting everything, provided we are supplied with a narrative logic capable of operating behind the tragedy —even if it is a twisted, destructive, disproportionate, and often false logic. The logic of horror allows us to isolate it and assimilate it as just another piece on the chessboard...
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There are days when the universe seems to conspire against you so that you won’t get out of bed. Yesterday was one of those days. Ever since Marian left, I spend my days locked up at home without talking to anyone, slowly going mad, but yesterday I finally went out into the street intending to walk the entire city until I found her. Fortunately, laziness helped me abandon my madness the very moment I crossed the threshold, though it didn't stop me from ending up seated in the corner library, still blinded by my obstinacy, in front of one of those talkative machines that are causing such a rage...
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A fiction writer aspiring to be something more than a literary selfie-exhibitionist—and, by extension, any creator, whether a painter, a sculptor, a filmmaker, or a plastic artist—knows that their activity entails signing a contract with their audience. This contract is as solid and unavoidable as the contract established with the truth by scientific, social, and legal discourse—scientists, notaries, judges, and journalists, when honest...
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The Literary Contract and the Future of Artificial Intelligence Read More »
The "Consultorio de Elena Francis" was a famous radio show in Spain that began broadcasting in 1947, at the height of the Francoist dictatorship, and lasted—albeit with an ever-dwindling audience—until 1984, during the transition period that followed the dictator's death in 1975. The program, sponsored by the Francis Beauty Institute, offered advice on beauty and lifestyle, and answered selected letters from listeners—always women—who wrote anonymously by postal mail to ask for help with their romantic problems and confess secrets that afflicted and distressed them, but which they could not tell anyone in their immediate surroundings...
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The quotation above, delivered by the Italian semiotician, philosopher, and writer Umberto Eco during a press conference after receiving an honorary doctorate in Communication and Culture from the University of Turin, might lead one to wonder whether the same author who denounced the hijacking of culture in his most famous work...
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Of Desire and Deodorant Read More »
In the 8th century BC, there existed a powerful monarch who ruled the kingdom of Phrygia (in modern-day Turkey) whose reign was characterized by immense wealth derived from the vast natural mineral resources of the region, particularly in the form of alluvial gold washed down by nearby rivers. It was the richness of one of these rivers, the Pactolus, that funded the dynasties of Phrygia and later Lydia, giving rise to the appearance of the first minted coins in human history...
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We find it in the crestfallen gaze of two bodies sitting down to dine in silence out of inertia, as they have every night for years; in the frantic sliding of fingers over a collection of anonymous photographs slipping across the coldness of a screen glowing in the dark; in the lost gaze beneath the aging skin of eyelids that now only wait and dream; or in the anonymity of one who knows themselves invisible to the eyes of the world. These are all masks of the same involuntary confinement that poisons the body...
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The Alchemist's Solitude Read More »
Sometimes I think a dog is like a child who refused to grow up so as not to lose faith in human beings, though it proves to be far too high a price to pay. The only human who perhaps did so, Peter Pan, paid a terrible price for it: amnesia, and with it, his very humanity. If the real or figurative orphans of the 19th century—such as Oliver Twist or Pelle—represented a helpless childhood in an adult world of pure perversion, crime, and selfishness, they did not enjoy the privilege of suffering an existential crisis. For them, the danger of maturity was not becoming a kind of hypocritical, domesticated idiot, but rather a criminal, a slave, or a corpse. Throughout the 20th century, however, narrative stopped throwing its youth into physical battles for survival to lock them inside their psychological conflicts, highlighting in all of them the trauma of moral exposure caused by the disappearance of the adult man...
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In the film "Being There" (Hal Ashby, 1979)—a cinematic adaptation of a story by Polish writer Jerzy Kosiński—Chauncey Gardiner, an unforgettable Peter Sellers, is a simple man without a past, an ideology, or an inner world, whose life has been reduced to just two activities: tending a garden and watching television...
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The Algorithmic Gardener Read More »
