Shows
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!Froth on the DaydreamI suppose it’s because I had a good night’s sleep that I feel better than yesterday. I thought I couldn’t write a single word because of the alarming lack of relevance. Writing fiction requires a massive focus on a story that sometimes makes no sense, and sometimes it truly does. Navigating between these two extremes is quite intense and certainly not for the faint of heart.I had the bad luck of growing up in a time when the plot seemed useless. In fact, I could say the novels I loved were a kind of cha...
2025-11-1310 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!Half rant, half renditionWhat can I write about Lorca? He was not just a poet; he was also a dedicated pianist. Manuel de Falla was his mentor, and he learned from him about the profound songs known as Cante Jondo. Therefore, reading Lorca is an experience that evokes a deep sense of Duende, an ethereal quality that transcends mere poetry. Many scholars believe that translating Lorca into American English is an impossible task.However, if you dare to attempt it, I highly recommend reading this translation by Sarah Arvio while having a glass of red wine and some delicious Serrano...
2025-11-0507 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!The SubstancePhysical beauty must be the most bitter of gifts because it carries the seed of its own destruction, and its absence mortifies more than any. We all more or less know how the young and handsome Dorian Gray had problems to deal with this, and whoever does not should stop listening this literary podcast right now, shake off the mental sloth, and dust off the master of paradoxes, the great Oscar Wilde, who remains still undefeated a century later, so unparalleled and unique was his genius.Some French film director has lifted a big fuss with a...
2025-11-0209 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!Soda Mill StudioAs the dog days struck in August, I declined a gig to record audiobooks. And I was so low that I didn’t stop thinking, not even when I did laps in the Olympic pool. Climate change, many hellish summers this century, seas infested with microplastics and jellyfish and anisakis. And prawns expensive as f**k.I have no choice but to buy an AC if I want to work during the next summer. What world is this, how have we fucked it up so soon?I grew up loving books and wanting to write th...
2025-10-2604 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!Pain and SorrowIt’s been a while since I have sailed to Palamós, still a small fishing town in 1962, where Truman Capote sought refuge for three semesters—always escorted by his obliging life partner Jack Dunphy and various pets—alternated with his cottage in Verbier, at the top of the Swiss Alps. In Cala Sènia, a secluded Mediterranean cove, the American author found the necessary peace, far away from New York’s social life. The fishermen went out to sea in the wee hours, causing such a ruckus that, according to Capote, not even Rip van Winkle...
2025-10-2010 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!Egregious lunaticsThe German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt told a friend, a Parisian doctor, that he wanted to meet a certifiable lunatic. He was invited to the doctor’s home for supper. A few days later, Humboldt found himself placed at the dinner table between two men. One was polite, somewhat reserved, and didn’t go in for small talk. The other, dressed in ill-matched clothes, chattered away on every subject under the sun, gesticulating wildly while making horrible faces. When the meal was over, Humboldt turned to his host.“I like your lunatic,” he whispered, indicating the talkative man. The...
2025-05-1810 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!The Boundless in a ReedLast Monday, while monitoring and mixing this podcast at midday, a massive blackout plunged this beach town and the entire peninsula into a real-life episode of an apocalyptic future. I was fortunate to be seated at my desk, unlike the poor b******s trapped inside lifters or commuting on trains and subways, standing and packed one against the other like a can of sardines. The only lifeline was the juice of my iPhone, which kept me connected abroad until the network coverage collapsed as well.As soon as I heard it wasn't a local blackout but by...
2025-05-0509 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!Progress through technologyI have news for you, my silent friend of many distances. Since I published last February a podcast about Bob Dylan, dealing with his recent biopic A Complete Unknown, where I argued the many reasons why he deserved the Nobel Prize for Literature, it turns out that I have found an audience in Apple Podcast.All because of a Dylan's fan site called Expecting Rain, which linked my podcast, and suddenly the statistics graph of downloads looked like a rocket on a mighty lift-off in outer space. I, who am as much a theatrical Cyrano de Bergerac...
2025-04-2909 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!Pain and SorrowIt's been a while since I have sailed to Palamós, still a small fishing town in 1962, where Truman Capote sought refuge for three semesters—always escorted by his obliging life partner Jack Dunphy and various pets—alternated with his cottage in Verbier, at the top of the Swiss Alps. In Cala Sènia, a secluded Mediterranean cove, the American author found the necessary peace, far away from New York's social life. The fishermen went out to sea in the wee hours, causing such a ruckus that, according to Capote, not even Rip van Winkle could sleep throug...
2025-04-2010 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!Wacky as Richard IIIThe plays of William Shakespeare serve as an encyclopedia of human nature, and their characters are complex and rich, portrayed always with contradictions and nuances like real people. Some of these portraits are delightful and full of life, such as the character Puck, who appears in the comedy of Athenian wild fantasy called A Midsummer Night’s Dream.I believe the first tragedy I read was Antony and Cleopatra. Shakespeare’s ingenious use of blank verses, which are unrhymed iambic pentameter, is more eloquent than any historical account of the actual Cleopatra. But I must acknowledge that popu...
2025-04-1009 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!Devil's PenYesterday, I had a lovely spring morning. I had to take care of some paperwork in Barcelona, which left me at the doorstep of my favorite bookstore, La Central del Raval. I hope it will remain open for many more years. I recommend its patio for quiet reading, although I don’t like the self-service and the long queue for those who are undecided about which cake to choose.When I returned to my studio, the rain blessed me again with its music. But the new cause célèbre in the publishing industry truly irked me. I co...
2025-03-2710 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!The SubstancePhysical beauty must be the most bitter of gifts because it carries the seed of its own destruction, and its absence mortifies more than any. We all more or less know how the young and handsome Dorian Gray had problems to deal with this, and whoever does not should stop listening this literary podcast right now, shake off the mental sloth, and dust off the master of paradoxes, the great Oscar Wilde, who remains still undefeated a century later, so unparalleled and unique was his genius.Some French film director has lifted a big fuss with a...
2025-03-1510 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!DylanesqueI 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 Bo...
2025-02-2510 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!The secret drawerLong before this era of senseless over-sharing, there was an intriguing piece of furniture called a rolltop desk, where our ancestors used to sit and write. It had secret drawers to keep handwritten letters and faded portraits of their loved ones. These secret drawers were kept locked, and the key to open them was hidden. Sometimes, the women wore the key sewn into their garments. I've just opened this Substack with the same intention as those women of the past -- that is, to keep these inklings hidden, unreachable -- unless you’re a subscriber, wh...
2025-02-0904 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!Back to BrunelleschiKeeping 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 befo...
2025-01-1509 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!Fisherman's BluesFarmers, ranchers, and fishermen, the pillars of the primary sector, have been frequently depicted in literature throughout history. Growing up in the shoreline, from the Caribbean to the Mediterranean Sea, and even the Atlantic Ocean for extended periods, I’ve developed a stronger connection with those who make their living as fishermen.Yesterday, I was stunned while reading an interview with Vicenç Comí, the skipper of the trawler Sinera. He has been struggling to survive the absurd regulations imposed by the bureaucrats of the European Union. However, the most recent decision, which granted him only a 27-day fish...
2024-12-1509 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!The past is never dead.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 hi...
2024-11-2810 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!The SubstancePhysical beauty must be the most bitter of gifts because it carries the seed of its own destruction, and its absence mortifies more than any. We all more or less know how the young and handsome Dorian Gray had problems to deal with this, and whoever does not should stop listening this literary podcast right now, shake off the mental sloth, and dust off the master of paradoxes, the great Oscar Wilde, who remains still undefeated a century later, so unparalleled and unique was his genius.Some French film director has lifted a big fuss with a...
2024-10-2209 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!A Notorious Dark HorseIn my very long mailing list—which this platform insists on distributing a newsletter instead of leaving the reader alone at his own free will—I also have writers whom I admire. One of them, Antonio Muñoz Molina, a well-known Spanish novelist and columnist, wrote last month in El País that he is fed up with unsolicited emails.Twenty years ago, in the early days of the blogosphere, there was no newsletter at all. If one wanted to add the blog he loves to read as a bookmark in his browser, he just did it, instea...
2024-10-1507 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!Gold PlatedThe 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...
2024-09-3017 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!Steamed FishSince I quit drinking alcohol and smoking pot or tobacco to avoid running out of steam and finish sentences skidding at the top of the gravel voice, my journaling has regained the life it once had, which is a pleasant surprise and a valuable benefit. When I did thick spirals of smoke, my quiet thoughts were lost forever. Or worse, if possible, from the deep buzz only reached to the edge of awareness such bland trifles as "I smoke. And I draw the leak from my breath." Of course, with that trivialities, I missed out on the precious foam...
2024-09-2309 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!1999I 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...
2024-09-1509 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!The Dog StarSeptember is my favorite month for several reasons. Once the haze dissipates, the crowds that come with summer in a beach town also disappear, especially now that social networks have attracted swarms of people to remote places. It is also a time for farewells to summer romances, a theme often found in coming-of-age novels. The posh urban girl promises to keep in touch with the besotted villager but ultimately doesn't, as the intense passion often fades with the return to daily life.I'm fortunate enough to sleep in front of a folding window. Until the cold arrives...
2024-09-0308 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!Wise BloodWith 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...
2024-08-2210 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!The Long Way BackMarcel Proust had an epic quarrel in 1895 France with the literary critic Charles Sainte-Beuve on what the reader should know about any author and also wrote that every detail of the author’s life had to be kept in mind because his characters were simply an elaborated extension of the self, not natural creations.The most celebrated French author of the past century strongly disagreed. Consequently, he wrote an essay about that issue, Contre Sainte-Beuve. Readers who tried to make associations with people the author could or may well have known were always lost in the fog of...
2024-08-0904 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!Truman's SwansYesterday, 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 use...
2024-08-0305 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!All Memory is Fiction, and All Fiction is a Memory.Today, the Olympic Games in Paris will finally open after the mayoress has tried to convince us that the Seine River is cleaner than ever by taking a dip in a wetsuit, which offers some protection. The last time I visited Paris, I didn't even consider swimming in the river. However, I did enjoy my morning run along the riverbank, and it was priceless.The only time I had swum by myself in a river was a day before a rowing competition, and it was scary to do it, in fact, I did not stray just twenty...
2024-07-2610 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!Mary Flannery Full of Grace.Last week I suggested a biopic called Wildcat, based on the brief life of the American writer Flannery O'Connor and the extraordinary work she was able to write before lupus, a chronic and complex autoimmune disease, the same one that her father suffered from and that left her half-orphaned at the age of 15, took her at the age of 39. In circumstances such as those described, it is by no means accidental that her work is imbued with a premature spirituality.I, during my thirties, was free of family obligations that stressed me, in excess of health and...
2024-07-2107 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!The French WolfOne day in June, during the three-year period of covid, a girlfriend whom I lost track of at the turn of the century so that her phone fell out of the agenda–like so many others before–despite the fact that I tried in vain to keep in touch at the time, suddenly appeared on Telegram, that app that is supposed to be better encrypted than WhatsApp.From what I found out, when such apparitions happen it is because they are looking for you. And she would probably write a message and then delete it. Since I prom...
2024-07-1407 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!Hither, Thither, and Yon.Emerging from the dark and foreboding forest, the jongleur made his way to a stunning glade adorned with a vibrant array of wild flowers. Over five hundred peasants had gathered around red flags with a palpable spirit of resistance. Those humble folks, known to the Parisians as Jacques Goodfellow, bore the weight of displacement caused by the harsh trials of war, plague, and famine. And their revolt was somewhat a consequence.At twilight, beneath the ominous shadow of the storm-ravaged castle, a scene of macabre celebration unfurled. The Jacques with their spoils dripping with the scent of...
2024-07-0818 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!The Jongleur's ChantAfter the February killings of the marshals, the new governor of Paris Étienne Marcel was having trouble finding supplies in a city suffering from scarcity, using its last resources to fortify the walls against the imminent retaliation of the Dauphin, who ordered his allies to confiscate all property from their lands and raised taxation to his subjects, causing more harm and rampage than the Black Death and the Hundred Years’ War combined.That cold and rainy spring, the peasants rose in revolt, unable to support their families anymore once all the resources were depleted, disrupting or...
2024-06-3010 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!Portrait of the Artist as a PerformerI was a boy wonder, and I loved to hate the guts of whoever was a killjoy. And mostly, any authority figures who were poorly paid teachers, so I was bound to be a rebel and a self-taught. However, I had a professor who taught me to channel all that hate by reading aloud about any historical character of my choosing.Soon, I also became a performer aboard the school bus, which had loudspeakers and a microphone; I learned to read a comma and a semicolon and pause after a period without missing a beat. The bus...
2024-06-2203 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!Portrait of the artist as a performerI was a boy wonder, and I loved to hate the guts of whoever was a killjoy. And mostly, any authority figures who were poorly paid teachers, so I was bound to be a rebel and a self-taught. However, I had a professor who taught me to channel all that hate by reading aloud about any historical character of my choosing.Soon, I also became a performer aboard the school bus, which had loudspeakers and a microphone; I learned to read a comma and a semicolon and pause after a period without missing a beat. The bus...
2024-06-2203 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!Point NemoIn my younger and starry-eyed years, like many other Jules Verne readers, I only knew Nemo as the daring and somewhat megalomaniacal captain of a submarine called Nautilus. It wasn't until later, while I was expanding the field of knowledge and therefore increasing the horizon of ignorance, that I realized the name was an homage to The Odyssey by Homer. This ideal everyman is found in many significant stories, creating what is known as the Monomyth, the framework that underpins all legends, fairy tales, spiritual awakenings, and of course organized religions. You can learn more about this concept in...
2024-06-1709 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!The Pact and The DreamerHad my fill of Karen Blixen for a long time. Because all the dramatizations I have watched this week about her are based on corny clichés, masquerades, and debatable constructions that cannot stand the passing of time. Anyhow, I have learned from her a lesson in courage to bear in mind. My intention, to share all that as it came to me, like a private investigation.Well, first of all, for a year, I was waiting for the release of The Pact by Bille August, based on the memoir of the Danish poet Thorkild Bjornvig. So, whe...
2024-06-1307 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!The PactHad my fill of Karen Blixen for a long time. Because all the dramatizations I have watched this week about her are based on corny clichés, masquerades, and debatable constructions that cannot stand the passing of time. Anyhow, I have learned from her a lesson in courage to bear in mind. My intention, to share all that as it came to me, like a private investigation.Well, first of all, for a year, I was waiting for the release of The Pact by Bille August, based on the memoir of the Danish poet Thorkild Bjornvig. So, w...
2024-06-1307 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!Wisdom ArtThere was a long-past era when I used to rely on my shameless sex addiction to keep me feeling creative, lively, and protected from more harmful addictions like emotional co-dependency and the very stupid ones, alcohol and drugs. It felt like the energy and passion within me were pouring onto the blank page, creating an unstoppable force. Not for nothing, the stream of consciousness was the literary device I was fond of.I didn’t fuel my wild imagination with corny MTV music videos–the sign of the times–but with the nihilistic characters of The Rules of Attraction...
2024-05-2908 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!Up Close & PersonalFor the last two months, I haven’t cut any podcasts. Oh, wait! A clarification is needed. Some people still think this is another newsletter, but if you look closer, will see a green rectangle over these words with the “play” symbol. And the one who reads aloud is me, a professional voice crafter, and not a lifeless synthetic voice or a famous actor. I know from my own experience that when I read a book, I miss the storyteller and the performance of the narrator. But some people don’t, because they use the written words of the author to...
2024-05-1808 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!FrillyI have a confession to make. A friend of mine who still lives in Lausanne taught me a long time ago the only attractive thing about the internet, something that has brought me infinite joy over the years, to wit: being a ruthless pirate of content in the form of the many films, books, and series I couldn’t afford while I was a digital nomad living on the road without two cents to rub. Certainly, I admit it was against the law and looked awful for an author. Where were the principles to protect the sacred copyright? I te...
2024-03-1911 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!Joseph Roth, Igor Stravinsky, and Rutger Hauer.Writing is all about juggling two completely different ideas like when you’re on deck back-stitching a broken sail that the wind tore apart while you were sleeping. But today I feel so confident to do it with three—just to live up to the title which is not wanton.One of my dear literary heroes, Joseph Roth, was a German Jew writer born in Brody in 1894, East Galitzia, in the easternmost of what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, actually Ukraine. Roth began a career in Vienna as a best-paid journalist for left-wing newspapers as “Der Rote Joseph...
2024-03-1404 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!Uncut BookLucas Folch took at random a book from the stack of copies, placed by reflex the reading glasses at the top of the nose, and without noticing it, began to move his lips, as if instead of reading perhaps was counting money. Every morning, he went to the book distributor to restock some backlist and widely-publicised frontlist titles as well, many of which were the repetition of the same old promises: you are going to be captivated by this and by that, even for what follows beyond the first page.Those highfaluting promises were diluted pretty soon...
2024-03-0109 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!Offensiphobia and the Destroying AngelDuring the past week, I have learned how to drive on Substack without fear, as I did one summer on the narrow paths of the island of Majorca while taking a literary retreat in Portocolom; the olive fields had stone walls so that I stood my ground and hoped the other driver was not intoxicated, and if such was the case, he would not brake in time, and we might crash head-on.The locals advised me to honk the horn repeatedly, but I was fearless and loved the peace of the inland too much to bother people...
2024-02-2508 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!Mighty BooksIn the first month, my New Year's Day happiness went wrong. I donated my old printed books to a friend, thinking sixteen years of storage would not go badly. And Hell, yes! It did. More than half went to the fire due to its moldy state. Paper is alive like a mummy and cannot be moist. The last picture I had of all of them was on a luminous loft above the club Razzmatazz where I lived in 2008.When I became a Digital Nomad, I left my mighty books behind because I read them all during my...
2024-02-1908 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!A Transnational AuthoressHad my fill of Karen Blixen for a long time. Because all the dramatizations I have watched this week about her are based on corny clichés, masquerades, and debatable constructions that cannot stand the passing of time. Anyhow, I have learned from her a lesson in courage to bear in mind. My intention, to share all that as it came to me, like a private investigation.Well, first of all, for a year, I was waiting for the release of The Pact by Bille August, based on the memoir of the Danish poet Thorkild Bjornvig. So, w...
2024-02-1707 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!PanderingSometimes, I wonder why the mere reading of some books stirs in me the irrepressible appetite of writing. Like just yesterday, when I watched with an old friend of mine a French movie about the creation of the first restaurant, Delicious by Éric Besnard, and we ended up so hungry that we checked if we had enough butter on the fridge. Lucky me, the craving vanished, otherwise I would have ruined my one-meal-a-day diet.Nonetheless, I swear I was hungry until I fell asleep reading Erasure by Percival Everett on which is based the highly recommended film A...
2024-02-1107 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!Truman's SwansYesterday, 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 use...
2024-02-0305 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!KapuscinkiIt came to my attention in Russia by Antony Beevor, a British military historian whom I have followed since he wrote the astonishing Stalingrad, the story of the Devil’s apprentice that he quotes from Sentimental Journey by Viktor Shklovsky. In the story, to reforge the old man into a young one, the Devil’s apprentice needs to set the old man on fire. Leave the old and embrace the new. After the fire, the Devil’s apprentice tries to perform the miracle. And he finds out that could not revive the old man. How could that be that age an...
2024-01-3005 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!Mighty BooksIn the first month, my New Year's Day happiness went wrong. I donated my old printed books to a friend, thinking sixteen years of storage would not go badly. And Hell, yes! It did. More than half went to the fire due to its moldy state. Paper is alive like a mummy and cannot be moist. The last picture I had of all of them was on a luminous loft above the club Razzmatazz where I lived in 2008.When I became a Digital Nomad, I left my mighty books behind because I read them all during my...
2024-01-1708 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!Using A.I. to Talk to the DeadThree weeks ago, I lost my father. He was 92, a retired pediatrician revered and loved by many generations of patients, and I was his caregiver in the last years, a unique chance to reconnect with him after having a long and stupid battle of wills and pride. My old man wanted for me the same prosperous career that he had as a doctor, instead of the risky and ambitious adventure of being a fiction writer. I was only 13 and solemnly declared to him that my goal in life was not healing the bodies of patients, but the souls of...
2023-12-1305 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!After a summer like the one we enduredAfter a summer like the one we endured, it's an honor to write again and record a podcast without a fan whirring at my feet. Still, the paradoxical issue I want to explore in the following post is the AI in Substack that is totally robotic, and it made me think about standards for narration.I’d always thought that reading aloud and faking another identity made the craft of narration sound cartoonish, despite my respect for the artist who recorded Donald Duck in the Walt Disney early days. Can I do that? Of course! But it so...
2023-11-0704 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!Joseph Roth, Igor Stravinsky, and Rutger Hauer.Writing is all about juggling two completely different ideas like when you’re back-stitching a broken sail that the wind tore apart while you were sleeping. But today I feel so confident to do it with three—just to live up to the title which is not wanton.One of my dear literary heroes, Joseph Roth, was a German Jew writer born in Brody in 1894, East Galitzia, in the easternmost of what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, actually Ukraine… But not for long, if you have read the news about the raging war. Roth began a career in Vie...
2023-11-0404 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!Memories of Outlived SorrowThere is some kind of relief when old flames reach menopause and practice ghosting by default. For starters, I have more time to read the many books I badly ought to know like the back of my hand, and of course, I can write more focused than ever. A big improvement compared to 25 years ago when I began this wandering in the wilderness. Most of the time, I was deeply hurt. Because I found myself opening the mailbox for an awaited letter that never came. It was like constant bleeding. No wonder why unrequited love was t...
2023-10-2604 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!The Long Way BackMarcel Proust had an epic quarrel in 1895 France with the literary critic Charles Sainte-Beuve on what the reader should know about any author and also wrote that every detail of the author’s life had to be kept in mind because his characters were simply an elaborated extension of the self, not natural creations.The most celebrated French author of the past century strongly disagreed. Consequently, he wrote an essay about that issue, Contre Sainte-Beuve. Readers who tried to make associations with people the author could or may well have known were always lost in the fog of...
2023-10-2203 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!LatelyLately, I’m trying to know summer constellations by heart, and not the real stars but the ones that twinkle in my imagination. Two novellas, one of 47K words and one of just seventeen with the author’s drawings. These novellas have the right length to be read aloud. In my twenties, I did it with small audiences, and I was always reading certain common nuances, especially the fact I could feel as if I were talking to a distant woman. So, over the years, I read about authors who cannot be d...
2023-10-1803 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!Agfacolor, Technicolor, and Kodachrome.Bored to death with these ramblings of the so-called modern cinema, where all the novelties are about superheroes as if the audience became idiotic, I had no choice but to find some thrilling films harking back to the 40s. When cinema was the ultimate art form. And Agfacolor challenged Technicolor and Kodachrome.The twelve years of nationalist revolution and collective delirium that was the infamous German Third Reich, besides a brutal war in order to achieve the same privileges as the declining British and French colonial empires, also brought back a fair amount of propaganda films with...
2023-10-1404 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!Faulkner, Cortázar, Coltrane, and Gillespie.William Faulkner is the best writer I have ever read. He first got me with The Sound and the Fury, which he wanted to print in four different inks, to make it abundantly clear that they were four different monologues. As you might imagine, the publishers of that era were too focused on profit to take risks and alter the intensity of black letters on white paper.Even today, nobody has tried to make good on Bill’s wishes in 1929, and I quote, “I wish publishing was advanced enough to use colored ink… I’ll just have to save...
2023-07-2002 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!The knife-grinderInside my head, I knew it was a summer morning. But I didn’t know anything else in my childhood. And yes, indeed. I could hear the thirty-second notes coming from that wooden pipe, a pan flute. Like a migratory birdcall, blew many times announcing the peddler’s arrival, after a full year of absence. All of a sudden, the help comes with big scissors too, and many men pack the knives with a cloth.The knife-grinder, maybe the last of his kind, bends over the stone rolling fast, and everybody is expecting luminous sparks when the blad...
2023-07-1601 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!Sam Phillips to Johnny Cash“If you was hit by a truck and you were lying out there in that gutter dying, and you had time to sing one song. Huh? One song that people would remember before you're dirt. One song that would let God know how you felt about your time on Earth. One song that would sum you up. You're telling me that's the song you sing. That same Jimmy Davis tune we hear on the radio, all day. About your peace within, and how it's real, and how you're gonna shout it? Or... would you sing something different. Something real. So...
2023-07-0701 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!Xavier Vidal, llibreter. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit javiertruben.substack.com
2023-07-0602 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!No Milestone Reached¡Oh no! ¡Otra vez tú! Sabía yo que con la bonanza embarcarías, confidente queridísima, pero no puedo esperarte porque ya he tomado la decisión de partir y desembarco al amanecer, en cuanto acabe este último garabateo, recoja mis cosas y consiga esta vez desconectar las baterías del velero, operación que con las prisas olvidé la temporada pasada, cuando empezaste a ofrecerme este mundo flotante tan acogedor, con tal que conquistara sin plazos, la concentración requerida de cualquier arte solitario.En prenda de tu impagable hospitalidad, bajo el pupitre de esta mesa de cart...
2023-07-0502 min
Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!Mesmerised by a thousand halyardsThere are lazy sounds that are coming one at a time to me. As if these sounds rose slowly from the underworld. Or they would have crossed a remote distance before ringing, a tintinnabulation that fades out to come back higher after a few moments to drift again into silence. Flags and rags --both at the sailboat and fishing trawler fleet-- keep gently awaiting the offshore breeze.There are backfires from a diesel motor that comes rough, and afterward, it goes away, followed by an aquatic gurgle and an anchor drop. A fish auction voice comes amplified...
2023-07-0402 min