Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!

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

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

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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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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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

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

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