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 »
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 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 »
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 (1), paid a terrible price for it: amnesia, and with it, his very humanity…
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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 »
The dichotomy between the “madonna and the whore”—between the woman one loves and the woman one desires—and the difficulty of reconciling them into one, was an expression coined by Freud that gained currency to denote a certain schizoid ambivalence inherited from the Oedipus complex in some men…
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When Love Alone Is Not Enough Read More »
Stalker—the protagonist of the 1979 film of the same name by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky—is a guide who leads visitors, lost to themselves, to “the Zone.” It is an abandoned place of indeterminate geographical coordinates where a meteorite is said to have fallen and where an extraterrestrial civilization once resided…
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Stalker, the Guide to Nowhere Read More »
Les Diables (2002), a film directed by French filmmaker Christophe Ruggia, is a marvelous work about two lost children adrift—Joseph and Chloé—who, having been abandoned at birth, flee from the rest of the world…
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The Devils and the Alleged Demon Read More »
