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Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Javier Truben
A transnational author and voice crafter. Wrote a few novels and a medieval trilogy. And works hard to upload them on ACX before the inevitable vocal fold atrophy. javiertruben.substack.com
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- 1 weeks ago17 min
The Life of the Mind
While the kids shrieked in the streets like they owned the place because sweet-toothed Halloween had arrived, so as not to hear them, I did a movie double feature about writers of fiction without a name, without success, without readers to worship them. They are known, of course, in the singular as a ghostwriter. Like the Other Woman, the mistress, they are never invited to a wedding and even less to the launch of the book they have written.It’s a movie genre about losers, nothing like the well-worn narrative arc of established writers. Much like hitman movies finding redemption. Although instead of a string of shootouts straight out of a kids’ video game, this genre faithfully portrays the shattered dreams of so many—far too many—writers. Namely, those whose unsold copies are sent to the guillotine so that the publisher who bet on their talent doesn’t at least lose the paper pulp. That’s 99% of them, and I’m falling short. Nothing gets recycled quite as well as the nauseating publishing industry.Those who escape the guillotine, seeking refuge in digital publishing, are complete idiots. Amazon pays authors who publish on Kindle based solely on what the reader reads. And everything digital—Substack included—is measured graphically and by the second. Just like the actual listening of a podcast. The unbearable, hypocritical posturing of readers of paper books, who used to brag so much about reading when in reality the book had fallen from their hands, whether out of laziness or lack of concentration, or from using it as the cheapest of sleeping pills, doesn’t have the slightest place in digital publishing.And this leads me to untangle the revealing parallels between The Ghost Writer and Verity, both films based on novels of fiction, of great public success and in turn well-deserved critical scorn, signed by Robert Harris and Colleen Hoover, respectively.Not for nothing did Alfred Hitchcock tell François Truffaut that only bad novels could make good movies, given that their material was quite malleable to twist them at will as is usually done in a screenplay. And that for this reason, much as he liked Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, it’d never crossed his mind to adapt it. Because it had so many words, all of them had a function, and of course they all fit together to perfection. Like a blessed puzzle.*The Ghost Writer, written just like that as a concession to the original title of the novel that director Roman Polanski adapts, puts the likeable actor Ewan McGregor in the skin of a writer without fortune yet a skilled ghostwriter, with books to his credit that several protagonists in the film confess to having found stranded on the nightstand, to his utmost derision.The subject of the memoirs he has to edit, given that he is replacing another ghostwriter who perished under mysterious circumstances, turns out to be a British prime minister who is the spitting image of Tony Blair, alongside his influential and anything-but-decorative wife Cherie, holed up in an unrecognizable and gloomy Martha’s Vineyard amid all the suspicions surrounding their involvement in the War on Terror, Halliburton, and the torture committed in Iraq, which paradoxically turned the United Kingdom increasingly into a vassal state of its former overseas colony. And increasingly distanced from Europe.Of course, Polanski can’t set foot in America because he has been wanted for statutory rape since 1978, which is why the scenes of idyllic Martha’s Vineyard were actually filmed in Peenemünde, on the Baltic Sea—curiously, where Hitler manufactured his miracle weapons, the first missiles. Thus, the Shangri-la that seems to be a cliché of every film in this genre is this time ominous and dark: a brutalist fortress made of glass and concrete with an abundance of security personnel and comical maintenance staff trying in vain to clear the fallen leaves amid an infernal storm.And also like every film in this genre, the ghostwriter is manipulated every which way—that is, by the sheer weight of money and sex, and even for the sacrosanct good of international justice—to whitewash this disgraced, Napoleonic British prime minister, whom only a sniper redeems.The cherry on top arrives at the end—not with the beginning of the memoirs, but with their beginnings. In the manner of an acrostic, we learn that the character standing in for Cherie Blair has been a CIA agent all along, much to the delight of paranoid conspiracy theories. Behold the redemption of the charming ghostwriter as a champion of the International Criminal Court in The Hague.Thank goodness for Polanski’s magic as a filmmaker! Because he treats us to a memorable shot of McGregor being run down off-frame at the hands of the omnipresent CIA, while the loose pages of the manuscript are carried back by the breeze of the grey London afternoon.**And then there
- 3 weeks ago16 min
Pathos verging on bathos
October sunrises arrive late because, until the coming weekend, they simply do not decide to set back the clocks. Every year they promise that this seasonal turn will be the last, and every year—back in October and forward in March—they keep shifting the hands. We remain subjects governed by proven incompetents and hustlers, while the best and the brightest are far too busy giving free rein to their greed.For that very reason, I do what I can so that filthy mediocrity does not splash me, thinking of October as a lazy month, humid and ever hotter. In this little beach town where I stitch words together, it is no scene of Magical Realism to see, on the main street, the smoke from the roasted chestnut and sweet potato stand intertwine with the queues at the Italian ice cream parlor.If it were up to me, I would make October last forever because I am furiously productive and the visionary within me is operating at peak form. So I try to stitch my freewheeling thoughts and some hardcore truths, thinking that once the cold arrives I will have time enough to edit—though at times I think that editing is sheer cowardice, a concession to the censors of official groupthink.When one has enjoyed the fortune of living a long life and, in turn, seen successive generations of censors pass by, one recognizes all the tricks of semantic dilution inherent in political correctness.Homage to Catalonia, Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays demonstrate the obtuse need of power to turn thinking into a low-flying flutter.Who wants us so idiotic? Who instills in us the fear of the inner voice? Perhaps ourselves? Are we so frightened to think out loud?These questions were lingering in my mind while I was watching the before and after of a phenomenal American actress, Frances Louise McDormand, in two films spanning thirty years: Mississippi Burning and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.Even though I had seen both movies back in the day, displays and sound have improved so much that I had the impression it was my first time watching them, a feast far more interesting than alternating Italian ice creams with roasted chestnuts and sweet potatoes—as frumpy housewives do to appease children they do not even bother to discipline, busy as they are with doom-scrolling or recording messages with an iPhone held out like a slice of toast with jam.McDormand is an actress of chiseled features with a cleft chin, a horsy beauty that bucks and kicks out of pure despair. There is a scene in Ebbing where she dishes out kicks to the groin equally to boys and girls because, out of sheer cowardice, they threw their milkshake at her car’s windshield. But there are so many other scenes in that movie that listing them would exceed the scope of these lines. Suffice it to say that in Mississippi Burning she plays the exact opposite role: a woman married to a racist cop whom she covers for despite herself.I would bet that Martin McDonagh wrote Ebbing as a bespoke gift for McDormand—a gift I envy since, in novels, it is the imagination of the generous reader that does the casting. And there is little generosity while reading on the diagonal for unmentionable reasons of laziness; all the more reason to bet on oral storytelling.It goes without saying Mississippi Burning was painted with a broad brush: highly sensationalistic, at times even comical when it tries to be tragic. Or as critics often say when referring to the lack of skill in inept drama: pathos verging on bathos.By the way, in Ebbing it was not McDormand but Sam Rockwell who made me truly laugh, playing Dixon—a racist, useless, torturing cop who nonetheless possesses redeeming qualities that only the accumulation of his blunders and a letter from the beyond manage to unlock.I am convinced that human kindness is equally distributed, provided one awakens from mental laziness. And art that does not awaken kindness is not art, but something far more sinister destined for a state of constant stupefaction. I could search for a name for it, but dawn has just broken and I want to go for a run so as not to lack breath when it comes time to record this podcast upon returning from the lighthouse.I am also convinced, without a shadow of a doubt, of everyone’s innate capacity to fill the gaps in thought with the wonder of intelligence. Even when we hear the voice of the Orwellian Big Brother hollering, “Don’t You Dare to Think Out Loud!”Then the weekend arrives and the late October sun that had warmed the coastal light gives way to a dark, relentless downpour. Sitting in front of my Flemish triptych, listening to the water drum like a tambourine against a nearby corrugated asbestos roof, the realization hits home: the musings written in the glow of dawn we
- Oct 14, 202623 min
The Billionaire, the Goddess, and the Daredevil
That Young Sailor—who by no coincidence then answered to the name of Javier—was signed on aboard Leviathan, a sailboat just over a hundred feet in length: a job he considered from the very start an outright steal for what he intended to do with his brand-new life, a favor offered him by his twinkling fate, and one where, by his own choosing, he was already secluded at the time, studying Comparative Literature on his own.It was a lot of sailboat for a single man—a wooden-built classic gleaming with varnishes, bronzes, and abundant rigging. However, that Young Sailor, who most of the time passed for a freak given his striking extravagance, was actually a seasoned airborne veteran who still retained the martial demeanor worn for years, since he was honorably discharged just a few months ago.Philippe Leroy, the shipowner, had met Javier at a soirée held on a rooftop along Barcelona’s Rambla with killer views, arranged by a French expat, Adrien Joffre, whom every last soul knew, judging by the turnout and the constant stream of people on the building’s ancient staircase.Besides serving Catalan wine in abundance—especially the hairy grenache—Adrien had set up a Brazilian-style barbecue, also known as picanha, which would at least prevent all that wine from landing on an empty stomach. As was the rule on such occasions, at least among friends, when Fatboy Slim’s music began booming through the speakers and the dancing got underway, the one who wound up turning the meat over the mesquite embers was the only one capable of staying sober and skillful amid the mounting chaos: the ever-watchful Javier.As night fell over the nearby silhouette of Montjuich promontory, a moon on which could be spotted with the naked eye the ash of its shadowed face ended up tragically impaled on the slender Calatrava Tower, in the manner of an olive that at the bottom of a glass of dry Martini rests, a magical moment when Philippe arrived, in the midst of his inseparable cloud of smoke—a chain-smoker like few others—accompanied by a woman of bewildering beauty whom there were who took for Helen of Troy herself, though the name of that Parisian model was in all truth none other than Malou Guex.Drawn by savory aromas, Malou proved somewhat demanding toward Javier, asking him for ever thinner slices of the picanha, because, despite it being an early June night, he was dressed head to toe in stark black, and without the slightest malice she came to mistake him, in the first instance, for part of a catering service—something altogether normal for a model accustomed to crowded events—though nor did he do anything other than give her whatever she asked for without a word of complaint, provided he could savor in quiet delight her Parisian splendor.As soon as the host, Adrien Joffre, stepped over to check that part of the terrace to make sure all was well, he in passing dispelled that understandable misunderstanding and formally introduced them; instead of slinking off embarrassed for having taken such liberties and vanishing for the rest of the night, she stood staring at him fixedly for a full minute without saying a word, and straightaway went in search of Philippe Leroy, who, utterly detached from the bustle of the party, was smoking leaning on his elbows against the terrace parapet overlooking the Rambla, lost in thought as he watched the very young African hookers offering b******s to overly drunken tourists for peanuts.“Haven’t you noticed that guy?” she said, agitated. “It’s Patrick come back to life!”“Who, Adrien?” Philippe said. “You’re wrong. I met him at a party two years ago. I think it was at Samantha Rowles’ place in Ibiza, though I can’t quite remember now.”“No, Philippe,” Malou insisted. “The guy tending the barbecue. My hair is still standing on end! Go on, get over there and don’t make a scene.”Upon confronting Javier, Philippe noticed the astonishing physical resemblance to his brother, who had recently died of an overdose. He barely managed to ask in a low whisper, as if expecting this double to clear his doubts:“Patrick? Are you supposed to be here?”Of course, with Fatboy Slim still booming through the speakers, Javier could only read his lips, point to his ears to signal he couldn’t hear a thing, and go right back to his business: tending to the hungry crowd hovering around the fire waiting their turn.When Philippe managed to gather himself after the thrill, by dint of sharp elbowing and securing a spot beside the embers, he finally managed to strike up a conversation with Patrick’s surprising doppelgänger, and they even shared a few laughs all together when Malou joined in, at the expense of the supposed catering service, an opportunity Philippe seized on the spot to suggest meeting up early the next day to go sailing on his sailboat and so get to know each other better, since they couldn’t really talk mu
- Oct 6, 202614 min
Some Books I Have Dreamed Of
Once upon a time there was Michael Morris, a professor trying to instill at eight in the morning a sliver of love for novels in a bunch of teens, who were either yawning with sleep or simply not paying attention. Because the rush of hormones disturbed them terribly within the shadow of young girls in flower. I was one of his students, stuck there and convinced that no one was going to teach me anything relevant about literature, given that I had been an avid reader since childhood.As for the beauty sitting by my side, Mary Palmer, I let her write in the margins of the textbook the word “sleepy” as many times as she pleased and with whatever calligraphy she pleased. If she had asked me, without hesitating an instant, I would have also let her write on my hand, on my forearm. And if I had been alone with that freckled girl of curly mane, even on my chest I would have let her write the word “sleepy”, where my heart beat out of pure desire, thinking about each of her wet kisses.Michael, that literature professor, I wouldn’t say his job enthused him either, but it was his only source of income. He showed up to morning classes smoking his pipe and in a mild state of intoxication with some sufficiently discreet substance—gummies, perhaps? A cold beer for his whole breakfast? There was no way of knowing. Or we were projecting our crazy fantasies, which might also be the case.Instead of boring us even more, if that were possible, by patiently instructing us in endless tropes or figures of speech—as so many other professors had done before—he took advantage of every opportunity to read out loud whichever author he felt like. Like Edgar Allan Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym, a gripping story of shipwrecked sailors who draw straws to kill the youngest among them—and eat him.One morning he brought with him a boombox and played us a jazz piece by Dizzy Gillespie so we would wake up once and for all. Next he told us the reason why he had brought the boombox, which was none other than to prepare us for the reading of Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar, an Argentine expatriate author in 1950s Paris, whose pages are soaked with multiple references to the venerated jazz musicians of that era.And not only jazz, but also time jumps, counterpoints, doublings, disordered chapters, or alternate reading orders. That’s why Dizzy Gillespie. And Benny Carter, Earl Hines, Lonnie Johnson, Coleman Hawkins. Good God! The f*****g book that Cortázar had written in the manner of a game for mischievous children was an encyclopedia.Wherever professor Michael Morris is—which might be heaven—I want to thank him for that spring morning of 1983. Because he instilled in me not a sliver of love for groundbreaking novels, like Hopscotch, but a boundless passion.It is no exaggeration to say I must have read Hopscotch fourteen times over—which is to say, endlessly—not only because Cortázar built a labyrinth, but because it poses a trial for someone with mild dyslexia—that chaste kiss the archangel Metatron gives on the forehead to certain writers who proceed by slow degrees. And the maze is not deep down a trial, all things considered, but a lovely cure.Today, sitting at my console with a Substack feed ready to drop, I have everything I need to build an audiobook of Hopscotch myself—weaving those jazz tracks straight into the narration. It remains one of those books I have dreamed of, and never could have—a seamless score Cortázar could only imagine.That said, today I am radiant, as usually happens to me whenever it rains. Why might that be? Let me explain. Old Bill—William Faulkner, to drop the familiarities—wrote The Sound and the Fury in 1929, to my understanding the best novel ever written using the narrative technique of stream of consciousness. For the sake of conciseness, I am not going to get into the highbrow considerations behind this statement. Faulkner demanded to publish it with several colors of ink so as not to lose the reader given its complexity. But in 1929 no one took him seriously, not even his publishers, because he was not a celebrity.Then, in 1933, Bennett Cerf at Random House proposed a multicolor limited edition printed by the Grabhorn Press in San Francisco. Faulkner was thrilled and marked up a copy with colored pencils. However, the Great Depression hit, and the technical nightmare of running multiple letterpress passes to align single words and lines on a page made production financially impossible. Faulkner agreed to use italics as a compromise for the 1933 Modern Library edition.It was a shrewd Victor Weybright who turned Faulkner into a bestseller by reissuing his complex and out-of-print novels with suggestive covers under the Signet Books paperback imprint of the New American Library, which sold en masse for 30 cents at newsstands and drugstores. The pulp fiction style covers, with sensationalist illus
- Sep 25, 202616 min
1856: The Year of Mighty Books
The pleasure of reading lies in time travel—when I lend my imagination to the page and arrive in worlds that have vanished entirely. I am not talking about historical fiction, far from it, but about works that were, back in the day, groundbreaking and revolutionary. For surely not all my attention should be squandered on the incessant trickle of novelties, trivialities, and insubstantial drivel paraded across bookstore displays, fueling the fear of missing out. Missing out on what? Is literature ephemeral? I don’t think so.Last week, I combed Gustave Flaubert’s walrus mustache—strictly from a personal, intimate, and evocative perspective, of course. I also made a few observations regarding his harsh, chauvinistic disposition as an unrepentant whoremonger, which was common currency in his time. Who among us hasn’t heard the term “The French Pox” used to describe those suffering from syphilis? An attentive reader shared a clever pun with me, describing Flaubert simply as “a flawed person.”His greatest contribution to literature was his full embrace of Realism—which, as he wrote to his favorite correspondent, demanded a narrator who “must be in his work like God in creation, invisible and all-powerful; felt everywhere, but nowhere seen.” After the stylistic excesses of Romanticism, it was a welcome return to common sense.Hence, his crowning achievement was dissecting the adultery and eventual ruin of a woman married to a country doctor in a small town in Normandy in Madame Bovary. It is not my intention today to linger on that fatalistic mammoth of a novel; nearly everyone has had occasion to read it.An avid reader of novels—especially one willing to run the risk of writing them—derives the greatest joy from weaving them together across time, nationality, and style, uncovering unexpected connections and shared currents. An author without references beyond their immediate horizon has little to offer save for their own audacious ignorance.Back in 1856, in Second Empire France, Gustave Flaubert scandalized his readers to such a degree that he was put on trial for offenses against public morality—a trial that provided Madame Bovary with invaluable free publicity. That very same year, the Swedish writer Fredrika Bremer ignited a widespread public debate, resonating even across America, known as Kvinnofrågan—the Woman Question. What a time, when a novel was a portal of human consciousness!With Hertha, Fredrika Bremer does not merely portray a domestic drama; she raises a blistering indictment against the legal guardianship system that condemned unmarried women to perpetual legal minority. Under the absolute authority of a father or an appointed male guardian, a woman possessed no legal standing whatsoever. In the novel, Director Falk is no mere household tyrant; he is the very incarnation of the paternalistic state. By hijacking his daughter’s maternal inheritance to crush her spirit, he turns the home into a financial prison and obedience into a life sentence.There is a bitter paradox at the foundation of this drama: centuries before the adoption of Roman law and state codification locked women inside the cage of legal guardianship, High Middle Ages Scandinavia granted them an autonomy unheard of in the rest of the continent. The mistress of the estate during the Viking Age, carrying the keys to the homestead at her belt, managed property, exercised the right to divorce, and held sole ownership of her wealth. The confinement of 1856 was not the inertia of an ancient tradition, but the refined craft of modern paternalism, which had reduced women to perpetual minors. Seen in this light, Fredrika Bremer’s outcry in Hertha demanded no unthinkable utopia, but the restoration of an ancient sovereignty buried by law.One must not misjudge the weight of faith in the North. If Catholic dogmatism built an insurmountable wall against female autonomy in Southern Europe, in Protestant Sweden Lutheranism operated as a double-edged sword. The State Church preached blind obedience to the father as a divine command, yet Luther’s own theology demanded that every woman read the Scriptures for herself. Universal literacy was the fracture in the foundation. Fredrika Bremer did not need to renounce her faith to demand emancipation; it was enough to remind the King and his bishops that a soul bearing individual responsibility before God could no longer remain, under human law, the property of a guardian.The impact was seismic. In 1858, barely two years after Hertha was published, the Swedish Parliament passed the law restoring legal majority to unmarried women. While Flaubert’s Emma Bovary was consuming her tragedy in the suffocating solitude of provincial Normandy, Bremer’s fiction was becoming the blueprint for a new civil code in the North.The contrast between these two endings reveals the chasm separating Gust
- Sep 20, 20268 min
Weightless words
I am blessed with an inexhaustible optimism, and every moment I live feels as though it overflows with infinite meaning, provided I give it my undivided attention.That is why I read aloud like someone eating after a long fast, savoring every bite slowly. And now, having finally learned to handle the audio console—after tweaking the knobs of the irons for four long years, and no longer recording rumble and hiss—it strikes me as quite an achievement, one that still feels as fragile as it is surreal; until now, my performances were simply winged words scattered to the wind, given their ephemeral nature. That is to say, I am now capable of recording my dreams without anyone else’s help.Forty years ago now, as beach days drew toward the end of summer, the coarse sand of these coastal latitudes required no towels, and the suffocating heat had given way to fair weather, I used to read Gustave Flaubert aloud to a girl who had come to visit me. For a soundtrack, I had only the murmur of the waves.Even back then, I was resolved to follow in the footsteps of the old masters, to write relentlessly for the rest of my days—which is hardly the same thing as merely stringing words together. In fact, I had already been writing poetry since 1980, though I now realize they were actually love songs.Like the rock songs I was listening to at the time. I say this without the slightest petulance, because when I began reading true poets, I immediately realized they did not write to sound “pretty”; rather, they wrote words with weight, in the manner of sculptors carving marble, stripping away everything superfluous from the words until, from a raw block extracted from the quarries of Carrara, they brought forth the wonders of Michelangelo Buonarroti.Unless you think them—unless you make them your own—words can find themselves reduced to the murmur of the waves. That was precisely why I had chosen Flaubert’s Novembre to entertain the correspondent who had actually come to say goodbye, having found the love of her life.Novembre is considered a work of juvenilia in the French writer’s canon, written when he was twenty and still steeped in the Romantic movement soon to be displaced by Realism. In fact, Novembre was published in 1928, nearly fifty years after his death. Like any true-to-form juvenilia, the magnificent writer Flaubert would later become is right there, devoid of the slightest artifice, pure and raw literary talent.The plot could not be simpler: a sexual initiation tailored to the era he inhabited—that is, at the hands of a prostitute who charges him nothing for her services, swept up, perhaps, by the ardor of the young protagonist. Though this last detail, clearly, is another romantic fantasy.Flaubert was such an inveterate whoremonger that he ended up consumed by syphilis. That walrus mustache of his mature years seen in all his portraits—he is, after all, an icon of French literature—was actually grown to conceal the teeth he lost to the mercury cure, those blue pills that wrecked his gums. But this biographical detail stirs no pity in me; if anything, pity is what one ought to feel for those poor prostitutes.Eulalie Foucaud, fifteen years his senior, initiated the young and reckless Flaubert at the Hôtel Richelieu in Marseille in 1840 while waiting for a ship to carry her to French Guiana, where her husband, a colonial official, awaited her. Perhaps all too aware of the severe hardships awaiting her, she feasted upon the jeune écrivain, who was likewise waiting for a ship to carry him to Corsica.Marseille in 1840 was the gateway to the Mediterranean for Frenchmen enduring the harshness of continental cold, naturally and effortlessly inviting relaxation. What is more, the lovers met at summer’s end, a time when farewells in the port city—heading toward destinations as exotic as they were sunlit—disposed one to all manner of sexual adventures.It is said that Eulalie was smitten with the jeune écrivain and wrote him letters he didn’t even deign to answer—perhaps caught up with the prostitutes of Corsica, insufferable in his erotomaniac delusion, beyond any doubt. Furthermore, her marital peace came to an early end in French Guiana, as her husband passed away a year after arriving.Gustave Flaubert’s romantic fantasy, for its part, transformed his rite of passage into a first-person novella under twenty thousand words. Naturally, he renamed Eulalie Foucaud simply Marie—a courtesan rather than the young mother he balled—whose backstory she narrates herself, following the classic story-within-a-story framework. Though I like to think that, in truth, the lovers surrendered to quiet confidences between acts of unbridled passion; after all, not everything is meant to be a sexual postcard.Marie, much like the immortal Madame Bovary would be years later, fell prey to her runaway romantic imagin
- Sep 14, 20269 min
Altering History to Serve the Story
To a greater or lesser extent, all authors have Charles Dickens as a pebble in their shoe. No matter how much I want to forget his narrative mastery, he is always there, trashing any delusions of grandeur, making me feel like a complete klutz.My childhood preferences always went to Great Expectations, and later, somewhat more grown, to Scrooge’s second chance in A Christmas Carol. But it is in this wiser age that A Tale of Two Cities astounds me, above all for the perfect musical cadence of its first page. For that very reason, a week ago, I naively thought I could rejoice in the new series Amazon made. And into a well all my joy fell.To excuse the butchery of A Tale of Two Cities, critics offer a lazy false equivalence: Dickens took liberties with the French Revolution, so screenwriters and casting directors can take liberties with Dickens. Égalité, perhaps. But there is a vast gulf between a 19th-century novelist harnessing history to serve the story, and Amazon destroying the story to serve compliance.This “Tale” fits what has become a predictable pattern among literary adaptations, and period pieces in general. The artificiality isn’t just about painted backdrops and CGI mobs. It’s about overly noble characters, their stagy exchanges, the manicured squalor of the poor, and, for the rich, an opulence that might have arrived courtesy of Wayfair. Again, this isn’t something specific to A Tale of Two Cities or its presenters. There seems to be a stylistic monopoly at work among the streamers of “original content” that renders innovative storytelling—and any semblance of cinema—invalid.This afflicts nearly all historical dramas today, and I despise it. I don’t want to watch a period drama with all the characters acting like contemporary people. Part of the allure of period pieces is seeing how people at the time acted and felt, and how profoundly that differs from today.Nor do surface details escape this contamination. A production will invest heavily in authentic townscapes and domestic architecture, only to cap the illusion by adorning the women with modern hairstyles foreign to the epoch. The visual slip is telling, but the psychological anachronism runs deeper: their sensibilities are neatly calibrated to satisfy a contemporary ideological template, entirely severed from historical reality.By the way, I have no problem with Black actors finding employment, but the clear violation of historical accuracy is jarring. The so-called color-blind casting only goes one way. Imagine the outcry if a white actor played Martin Luther King.It is fascinating how we have fallen headlong into such stupidity, how we are wrecking our immense cultural capital without anyone raising an eyebrow or protesting, simply for fear of being called a racist. Though this we actually deserve—we’ve even begged for it! Because I must force my memory to recall any actor playing Jesus who was a Jew, instead of an Aryan with blue eyes and a blond mane. Or an actress playing Cleopatra who was truly Egyptian and not an American beauty like Elizabeth Taylor.George Orwell, in his essay on Dickens: “When one reacts very strongly to an individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have.” While Orwell points to the reader’s kindness toward the author, by the will and grace of the imagination, this gives no moral ground for us to adapt however we please, in accordance with the idiot narcissism of presentism. I remember very well my efforts to reflect the historical truths of a medieval trilogy, thinking how I was going to put down in black and white the fear of being skinned alive in the woods of France by brigands during the Hundred Years’ War.Two thousand years ago, Cicero made the function of the fiction writer quite clear in Latin: docere, delectare, et movere—to show, to entertain, and to move.Call me a dreamer, but if I write, it is because reading Charles Dickens convinces me that one can show without plagiarizing a Wikipedia entry on a historical epoch, and naturally, without appending the clumsy wedges of overt indoctrination; entertain without collapsing into delirious fantasies, endless pursuits, and wholesale slaughter; and move an audience without indulging in the cringing, nowadays-fashionable victimhood, which poses as though we had endured the indignities of a savage African war. That is simply laying it on thick.While Dickens shows, delights, and moves us through the horrors of the workhouse and child labor during the Industrial Revolution—as he did in David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and Hard Times—he never once strains to impose a Marxist analysis, which carries a rich, dark irony, given that he was a c
- Sep 3, 20269 min
Two Eulogies for the Price of One
Truth be told, I am not a fan of writing eulogies for people I haven’t met personally. But today, September 3rd, I will make an exception to this rule. Because it catches me in a soft spot due to my condition as a lunatic who doesn’t want a cure, nor would I want one if it were offered. I have always pampered the sources of imagination and those who awaken it; the more you let yourself be carried away by it, the more it begins to make sense. Just like life itself. And like a good book.I will start with the departure that hurts the most, the singer Cassandra Wilson, to whom I owe a personal debt. For the times she rescued me from the edge of the abyss, so many years ago now, that I don’t consider myself the same person, even though in reality I am.It was the last year of the previous century; I had returned from a trip to the hellhole where I lived, where I couldn’t even fit the white sofa I owned because there was no room. But as long as the desk, the books, and a mattress fit, I could keep writing passionately. By twists of fate, from having a bright apartment on the beach, I had gone to living as if I had been kidnapped in that f*****g hellhole, where at night cockroaches crawled out of the shower drain. Thank goodness it didn’t have a kitchen, only an electric coffee maker. But I couldn’t complain, as I had a window facing west, even if it was barred.I used to write at night back then, rolling myself a cigarette laced with weed—not too much, lest I lose the necessary eloquence. I had the solitary life I always wanted. Because there is a difference between unwanted loneliness and deeply desired solitude.This didn’t mean that from time to time I didn’t miss a redheaded girl I once knew, who had dumped me very sensibly upon realizing she was wasting her time with a textbook lunatic. The thing is, lunatics aren’t in as high demand as achievers, what can you do?For such nocturnal trances, I used to put on some music, but always at a low volume so as not to disturb the neighbors’ rest. Cassette tapes were still in vogue, especially the ones where I recorded my favorite radio show, where a velvet-voiced announcer presented her musical discoveries.And that was how, on one sweet solitary night, I started crying my eyes out listening to Cassandra Wilson covering Cyndi Lauper’s highly famous song Time After Time. Because that redhead, up close and properly intoxicated by alcohol, had for me the spark of Cyndi Lauper and the majesty of Kate Pierson, one of the singers of The B-52s.The human voice is certainly intangible. But when I searched YouTube for that aforementioned Cassandra Wilson cover, I heard it much better than on that tape—not because of the obvious advance in audio technology, but because I am inordinately happy. How could I not be? I must have had a scandalous number of farewells to get to today. And yet, I now find meaning in what I left behind, so much so that I can time-travel at will without any fear.The second eulogy goes out to Glo, a woman of boundless courage, known as Gloria Steinem. I confess I have a certain weakness for the feminists of the ‘60s, when everything was still left to be done. And when I say everything, I mean things we take for granted today, forgetting the defiance and the struggle that destroyed the lives of many activists back then, for they were true pioneers in a world full of cojones.On top of that, she was an intrepid reporter. The night she infiltrated a party at the New York Playboy Club as a Bunny in April 1963 remains for the annals of journalism history. A Bunny’s Tale is a faithful portrait of how women were treated without the slightest respect, even by the very women who never even considered questioning the status quo. Because they mistakenly thought that deep down it benefited them to have a sugar daddy. By the way, I say this thinking about OnlyFans, which is a nightmare return to the past.In fact, a large number of women without education or resources are tempted by OnlyFans. Because they can’t find well-paying jobs or have debts. Even college-educated women find in this odious app a way to finance their university debt.That is why A Bunny’s Tale is as relevant today as it was 63 years ago. I know some will say I’m losing the plot for comparing a harmless app for w*****s with harsh physical reality. But the nature of the transaction, even if consensual and economically beneficial for the girl offering herself digitally, is still a step backward.Just when it seemed women were no longer sexual objects, new ways to reverse the situation arrive. That is why feminism still has so much to do. Because the patriarchy has had the upper hand for thousands of years—exactly since we ceased to be a nomadic hunter-gatherer society.These two goddesses who have left a massive void in me today, even though I didn’t know them personally, once served as my i
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