Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!

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. Bu...

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...

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 ac...

One 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...

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 revo...

After 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...

In 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 signifi...

Had 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,...

There 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 litera...

For 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...

I 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...

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 w...

Lucas 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 promise...

During 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 t...

In 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...

It 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 f...

Three 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...

After 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 cartoon...

There 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...

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 infam...

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 ma...

Inside 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. T...

There 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 backfir...