Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!

Javier Truben
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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

  1. Sep 3

    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 inspiration to try and stop being a scoundrel and a rogue, even if in reality I haven’t succeeded. Heaven knows I try. I think masculinity is in crisis and digital natives are having a really hard time because they are incapable of handling rejection, have lost the spirit of adventure, and end up as involuntary celibates, also known as incels. The poor b******s prefer to w**k themselves to death watching rapey porn. I also think I would have liked to chat with Glo about the mess we are currently in—if not outright calling it decadence—with birth rates hitting rock bottom and baby strollers turned into doggie strollers. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

  2. Aug 30

    Two Irishmen in Paris

    Innovations in literature are born from the author’s natural drive to create. There is an audience that quickly tires of being sold the same story, told the exact same way, over and over again. This claim, however, is countered by the many authors who, once they stumble upon a fictional character that lets them churn out a series, prefer not to risk their good name in the slightest. Look no further than the fictional detective Jules Maigret, to whom Belgian writer Georges Simenon dedicated no fewer than 75 novels and 28 short stories over four decades of cyclopean output. Assuming risks, being willing to lose the favor of an audience that just wants more of the same—meaning the author would have to suppress their natural drive to create—is the succinct reason why modernist writers remain so fascinating. This holds true even when they openly mocked all those cowardly authors who defaulted to writing whatever happened to be trendy at the time. For a good laugh, look at Virginia Woolf’s delightful essay Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. Or the pastiches a young Marcel Proust wrote in Le Figaro, “Filial Sentiments of a Parricide”, a psychological piece written in 1907 analyzing an acquaintance who murdered his mother, exploring guilt and maternal bonds with dark precision. Of course, for savage mockery aimed at cheap, baby-rattle prose—neatly folded and clean as laundry in a drawer, meant for quick consumption without taxing the intellect too much, once known as commercial entertainment—nothing beats two Irishmen in Paris who took the City of Light as their adopted home. Rivers of ink have been spilled over their work, of course, because their innovations were truly mind-bending. While one wanted to trap the entire world within a single day, the other wanted to strip time of all meaning, leaving it in an infinite loop where absolutely nothing happened. Between these two Irishmen settled in Paris—far removed from the suffocating, idiotic nationalism that had taken over their island—a relationship formed that nearly ended in family ties during the first half of 1930. The first was at the very pinnacle of the literary ziggurat following the publication of Ulysses, thanks to Sylvia Beach, an enthusiastic bookseller who poured her soul into the work to publish it with meticulous care. The second was a 23-year-old sorcerer’s apprentice with no published work, save for two pieces in literary magazines dedicated to enthusiastically buttering up the first. I am talking about James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Let the record show I’ve avoided mentioning either author until now precisely to keep myself from buttering them up. While I always crack up reading “Circe”, the 15th chapter of Ulysses, or lose myself in Molly Bloom’s final monologue, the rest of the book is relentlessly over the top. As for Samuel Beckett, I can’t stand his later mental tailspins, nor was I ever a fan of the Theater of the Absurd. Still, his organic transition from English to French is fascinating, as is the reason he gave for it: to write “without style”—the primary motivation for so many other transnational authors. It must be because beautiful books are written in a kind of foreign language, when they strain syntax, alter rhythms, and bring an unprecedented cadence, forcing readers out of their comfort zone to project their own imagination into the gaps of the text. Joyce was in a highly delicate spot as a writer because he had gone completely blind in his left eye and only had about ten percent vision left in his right. This was the result of a severe bout of glaucoma, iritis, and cataracts—a nightmare in that pre-antibiotic, pre-laser-surgery era. Just picturing it makes me blink out of sheer apprehension. On top of that, alongside Nora Barnacle, he had founded the most dysfunctional family imaginable. Even so, his devotion to his daughter Lucia was boundless: possessing an artistic personality just like her father’s, she was already on the verge of being declared schizophrenic. None of Joyce’s disciples—who bent over backward to keep the master productive, taking his dictation or bringing order to his massive piles of paperwork as they came and went from his house daily—caught Lucia’s eye quite like the athletic Beckett, a college cricket star and a prime catch. Nora Barnacle became hell-bent on getting Beckett to date her daughter, who had received an intense, avant-garde, and eclectic education centered on modern dance. To that end, she would invite Beckett over for dinner dumplings, under the threat of banishing him from the literary paradise he had stumbled into. Beckett knew full well that among Joyce’s distinguished disciples and patrons, he either had to cave in or head back to Dublin. So, he chose to have the dumplings. And while he was no dancer himself, he at least knew how to listen patiently to Lucia—a young woman bursting with talent in calligraphy, design, and singing, who actively collaborated with her father on the deluxe editions of his work. Some say that the highly complex verbal associations in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake were actually inspired by Lucia. But then again, they said the exact same thing about Scott Fitzgerald and his crazy wife Zelda. While it is true that an author steals expressions and ideas like a shameless pickpocket, books are not made of ideas. They are made of words. Hence Fitzgerald writing in pencil on cigarette packs, napkins, restaurant menus, envelopes... Once Lucia had filled Nora’s head with wild delusions of an imminent engagement, the charade reached its expected conclusion. Chairs flew, glasses shattered, and the mother of the bride decreed Beckett’s exile. What did Joyce do? Exactly what any father blinded by love for his daughter would do—no pun intended. Beckett was pushed aside among Joyce’s disciples, who were working tirelessly to deliver installments of Finnegans Wake—then known simply as Work in Progress—in both English and French. Joyce claimed the French translation was rigid, literal. Ultimately, the monumental effort by Beckett and his friend Alfred Péron ended up eclipsed by other collaborators in La Nouvelle Revue Française in 1931. And the schizophrenia of Lucia, the brilliant cross-eyed dancer, became intolerable to her parents and to the brutal psychiatric standards of the era the moment her sexuality came into play. They even tried Carl Gustav Jung, who diagnosed her with schizophrenia—a profound psychic regression compounded by an absolute emotional dependence on her father. Had it not been for Joyce’s steadfast opposition, Lucia would have ended up lobotomized, a horrific therapy that would swiftly fall into total discredit well into the ‘50s. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

  3. Aug 22

    Shiny Red Waco

    One of the greatest challenges for a reader of novels is that their way of thinking, their point of view, the scale of their interests, invariably changes. So much so that upon rereading a novel of which they have only a vague memory, it conceals hidden treasures that they will only find when they return to it again, and again, the next day, or years later. In the previous episode of this literary podcast, I talked about the iconic American novels about daredevils. For reasons of time, I only briefly touched upon the great William Faulkner, an egregious, brilliant madman if there ever was one. At least, that was the reason I tiptoed around his novel Pylon, one of the few that escapes the fabulous Yoknapatawpha County. Everything Faulkner wrote in the novelistic genre was experimental, ahead of its time, and sometimes even classified as dirty—sometimes because of his insistence on evoking terror, other times because he insisted on testing the limits of freedom of expression, which was rather prudish in the 1930s. And many of his ideas would have been perfectly feasible if only the publishers of his time had chipped in, like using different colored inks so that slow-witted readers wouldn’t mix up the characters. And then there is the author himself, who, driven by debt, had been working in Hollywood as a screenwriter, rubbing shoulders with another true daredevil, Howard Hawks—not to be confused with the eccentric millionaire Howard Hughes. At that time, aviation was in its infancy, and the film director Hawks introduced Faulkner to flying the Waco biplane for nineteen months, starting in April of 1934. When he was young, Faulkner had enlisted as a pilot in the Royal Air Force branch in Canada; the experience was cut short by the unexpected arrival of the Armistice. Although this didn’t stop him from parading around his hometown in a military uniform, cane in hand, faking a combat limp and putting on a British accent in Mississippi, which earned him the nickname “Count No ‘Count” from his mocking neighbors. Howard Hawks, for his part, before arriving in Hollywood, had been a flight instructor in Texas and a mechanical engineer, which meant that the flying scenes being filmed needed someone who knew the ins and outs of aviation. He went on to direct six films centered on the subject. Faulkner and Hawks shared the missed opportunity of participating in the First World War, following the values of dedication and sacrifice that today seem irrational, mostly due to its meat-grinder nature. But that was the spirit of the time. And the foundation of their friendship. Airplane prices were not exactly affordable in the midst of the Great Depression. The red Waco, an enclosed four-seater with a 200 HP engine, cost $6,000. And Faulkner didn’t let the opportunity pass, because he was receiving a weekly check for $500 from the studios, a far cry from the peanuts he had received in royalties for the novels he had published. Faulkner’s precarious literary reality in the early 1930s is relentlessly reflected in the numbers of his early masterpieces. The Sound and the Fury, published with a meager initial print run of just under 1,800 copies barely two weeks before the crash of 29, brought him a little over $400 in royalties due to its complete lack of initial commercial impact. A hardship that was repeated with As I Lay Dying in 1930, whose 2,500 copies sold left him with about $600, while he scraped by working the night shift at the University of Mississippi power plant for $11 a week. His previous glimpse of commercial success came with Sanctuary the following year, which sold over 10,000 copies and should have brought in about $3,000, but his publisher’s bankruptcy legally froze the funds and left him with only an advance of a few hundred. An economic tragedy compounded by Light in August in 1932, whose initial print run of about 4,500 copies gave him a gross return of $1,100, an amount totally insufficient to cover the mortgage arrears on Rowan Oak and his debts at the town store. I mention all this because of the peculiarity of the matter: that a middle-aged man would decide to revive the broken dream of his youth with the massive weekly paycheck he was receiving, having experienced Franciscan poverty up to that point, betting everything on an uncertain literary career. In fact, the first thing he did was fly over the houses of his mocking neighbors. But Faulkner’s lucky star was about to rise. At that time, he was solely dedicated to surviving disasters with indomitable courage. Like his engine seizing before landing and doing so without facing the wind, or insisting on taking off in the terrible conditions of open fields, having to clear away cow dung first. The hub of operations where he felt most comfortable was Memphis and New Orleans. Vernon Omlie’s school in Memphis, Mid-South Airways, was where Faulkner flew to receive advanced instruction, perform maintenance on the Waco, and take local Oxford teenagers for joyrides, inviting them to rise above the earth. But New Orleans was the long-haul destination and where he found the universe he would write about in Pylon. The inauguration of Shushan Airport in February of 34 was not a simple aeronautical event; it was a display of Art Deco modernity that proclaimed itself the “air hub of the Americas.” Built on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, this complex was an engineering jewel of its time, being the first airport in the world to combine terminals for land and sea planes, anticipating even the great terminals of New York. Faulkner flew there accompanied by his instructor, Vernon Omlie, finding himself immersed in a feverish atmosphere of Mardi Gras celebrations, air races, and aerobatic displays that gathered the pilots of the day. It was in this ecosystem of danger, speed, and ephemeral camaraderie that the author met a mysterious couple of aviators—he a war veteran and she an aerial acrobat or wingwalker—with whom he shared nights of alcohol, flights, and conversations that revealed to him the nihilistic and rootless psychology of the barnstormers. That experience, captured at the exact historical moment when commercial aviation was beginning to eclipse the suicidal romanticism of traveling acrobats, became the emotional seed of Pylon, Faulkner’s only novel set in a prophetic and technological present that he himself described as a nightmare of the future. What is remarkable about Pylon is that, alongside the red Waco biplane, it was altogether an act of procrastination in the face of a manuscript as experimental, complex, and dark as Absalom, Absalom!, which he would not finish until two years later, under contract with Random House. As meticulous as Faulkner was when writing, in real life he was a walking disaster, and his aviation adventure ended badly. It seems he was incapable of denying the use of the airplane to his younger brother, Dean Faulkner, because they shared a passion for flying, like so many pioneers. He financed much of his brother’s activity, which, after the accident, left him with a devastating personal guilt, feeling responsible for having provided the very means that would ultimately cost his brother his life, bringing a close to a nineteen months of happiness in the author’s life. And because of such an outcome, Faulkner never flew again. He would take charge of his brother’s posthumous daughter and ended up finding solace in drinking and in his young Hollywood lover, Meta Carpenter. A walking cliché, he settled into a double life between Hollywood and Oxford, Mississippi. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

  4. Aug 17

    L'Appel du vide.

    Few adventurers, and many idiots among them, mostly adrenaline junkies trapped in alpha-male mind frames, and fewer amazons, had been jumping from cliffs using wingsuits to pilot their descent. Some of them, performing as daredevils buoyed by high altitudes and airspeed, actively hunted the proximity—veering toward the slopes instead of gliding away from them. While it seems impossible to drive what in French is called l’appel du vide—the call of the void—at the edge of the cliff wall, try to add the adrenaline rush of hurling yourself down through a talus slope, where any imbalance of the wingsuit or split-second delay of the parachute’s opening might be fatal. There is a genre about daredevils in literary fiction, like the barnstormers and wing-walkers in propeller-driven biplanes in Pylon by William Faulkner. Or the crowning achievement of New Journalism in The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe, dissecting the psychology of a brave man like Chuck Yeager, whose military duty was pushing the envelope of the first jet aircraft through the sound barrier and into the stratosphere, paving the way for America’s first astronauts. I guess I could drop in between the literary debut of James Salter with The Hunters, drawing directly on his experiences as a jet fighter pilot in the Korean War, cutting through the myth with prose as cold and lethal as the skies he actually flew in. But comparing pilots with idiots, even if it rhymes, does not make the cut. Especially when amateurs are involved, looking for a viral picture for Instagram or helmet GoPro footage for TikTok, trying to emulate with a do-it-yourself weekend project the cold geometry of the movie star Tom Cruise jumping with a motorcycle off a Norwegian fjord—a maneuver forged through relentless rehearsals and obsessive skydives. Add to this fatal equation a pair of minor-league television celebrities and anonymous adrenaline junkies who mix climbing cliff walls with BASE jumping, and then you get not the real stuff, but the real pulp instead—the cum shot of a bloody wingsuit. That’s a real story. Don’t you believe me? Get Netflix and watch To the Max. Lord Byron wrote in Don Juan that “truth is always strange, stranger than fiction; if it could be told, how much would novels gain by the exchange!” With the screenwriter being a solid guy with a proven track record, I guess family constraints made it impossible to illustrate the story of a core group trapped in alpha-male mind frames until their luck ran out. So he wrote a morbid, documentary-style version of Agatha Christie’s classic And Then There Were None. And the real story tragically unfolded in the heights of selfie mass hysteria, almost mixed up with the narcissistic idiots of many genders and tribes, tripping at modest heights, but sufficient enough to break their necks. Youth is wasted on the young. Because the script refuses to engage with the twisted psychology of the call of the void, the middle-aged men simply keep dying paying homage to the first casualty, one by one. By the third death, the film becomes a tragicomedy. As is real life indeed. Watch the raw and unvarnished reality of how quickly one of them crashes against the merlon of a Spanish castle. I’m not taking sides either. Back in the day, I was young and reckless too. As soon as my father could no longer report a teenage runaway to the police, I served two years in the Airborne. Skydiving was wildly fun, and the propellers of the Caribou on a runway made me cry of sheer joy, anticipating the stairways to heaven of that long-winged bird before a high-altitude jump. A few years ago, one of my brothers-in-arms was still serving and shared his experiences with me about BASE jumping. Alas, military guys never gamble and follow procedure and rules, and fortunately his name did not come up in the Wikipedia list of fatalities due to wingsuit flying. A list full of middle-aged men, except two daring amazons. Draw your own conclusions. What I did to drive my own call of the void was trade skydiving for sailing, and as soon as you lost sight of the coastline, listening only to the music of the wind on the sails, yes, you feel the void over the invisible wreckage of sunken ships of the deep sea. That was a peaceful period full of reading, before I got the needed courage to write novels and fail big as often as necessary. I certainly tried many times to describe with only words things like the alpha-male mind frame of that glorious skydiving time, and it’s not easy. Because the reader is always obsessed with the cum shot, and sorry for the abuse of this graphic word to describe the ghoulish fascination for death. But I never was either, until life became too precious for me after dealing with a delayed opening chute, so I couldn’t see anything but a white landscape while dealing with endogenous shock. Then John the Fearless learned at last the true nature of fear. It was a revelation to rejoice. And whenever I try to rewrite passages of that manuscript, I have to forgive myself for being such a pain in the ass. Always whining like Jeremiah because the typewriter I used on the air base was clunky and noisy. And a cold and arrogant fish to those who were sharing the experience with me. Because I was a bookish guy, very quiet, but a natural-born killer when nightly episodes of bullying—always a coward looking for the weakest link in the chain—came close to my quarters. I couldn’t stand bullies then, and I still despise cowardice today. Seeing those idiots in present times filming with their iPhones while someone really needs help, whether it’s a woman being assaulted in the street by some aggressive male or a person getting robbed in plain sight, just boils my blood. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

  5. Aug 10

    Instructions for the Kind Ones

    I’m not an Apple influencer, but a few of you might be listening to this literary podcast on the move—driving or commuting on the subway, many with an iPhone and those AirPods that are sometimes good. And sometimes really bad for certain things. They are good for pushing a heavy beat when you’re running at full speed. But they are not so good for nuanced voices. A song that doesn’t rock in a car because it isn’t mastered properly is a song nobody wants. So, this is the only reason Apple tweaked their AirPods badly enough to drive me crazy. Reversing this tweaking was fundamental this morning in the hacking of that ancient Egyptian serpent the Ptolemaic Greeks named Ouroboros—literally, the tail-eater—and it freed me from countless hours of monitoring. I could finally hear my low end without thinking I was channeling Feodor Chaliapin, the legendary Russian bass performing Modest Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov. I have perfect pitch like a piano tuner due to voice crafting. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be competitive enough for the scant audiobook auditions. And for years I’ve had to deal with tweaked AirPods as the ultimate standard. If you look at the pictures, you will see exactly how to fix them. Believe me, tweak the b*****d. It is classic Apple—hiding the actual math behind sleek visual sliders and assuming nobody will care. And One More Thing. That Spatial Audio for mono does not work, because I’m supposed to be at your twelve o’clock. And that Noise Cancellation, indispensable while commuting, kills the audio signal too. And again, I am not mad because some of you prefer to read rather than listen to me. That’s the way. But I do this narrator performance not for you, but for the illiterate who cannot read anymore. According to my July stats, I have thousands of listeners, and a few hundred readers. And the idiotic doom-scrollers out there looking for a dopamine fix—with their TikTok-reduced attention spans and shallow discourse—that cesspool, you can keep it. It’s true that sometimes the algorithm tempts you to follow the rule of vanity. I never beat the amazing stats of the podcast on the Shakespearean portrait of Trump as Richard the Third, but I’m not here for the likes. I’m here to write whatever I want and in the way I want. And to read out loud for the illiterate generation we have reaped, who cannot comprehend a sentence longer than ten words unless you sing to the muse. Only a century ago, reading a twenty-five-word sentence was quite normal to get to the point. Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne du Maurier had sentences of forty words. Marcel Proust had the same average; however, I could cause shock and awe by reading his longest sentence, which stretched out to 847 words in the original French, and 958 in the Scott Moncrieff English translation. You know what? F**k it. I’m so generous today that I am going to celebrate the hacking of the Ouroboros by reading aloud that Proustian sentence—it’s a masterclass in coming out of the closet. Don’t worry, I will fade the narration out... to mellow audiobook standards when I exceed your ten-minute attention span. Let’s have some fun! “Their honour precarious, their liberty provisional, lasting only until the discovery of their crime; their position unstable, like that of the poet who one day was feasted at every table, applauded in every theatre in London, and on the next was driven from every lodging, unable to find a pillow upon which to lay his head, turning the mill like Samson and saying like him: “The two sexes shall die, each in a place apart!”; excluded even, save on the days of general disaster when the majority rally round the victim as the Jews rallied round Dreyfus, from the sympathy—at times from the society—of their fellows, in whom they inspire only disgust at seeing themselves as they are, portrayed in a mirror which, ceasing to flatter them, accentuates every blemish that they have refused to observe in themselves, and makes them understand that what they have been calling their love (a thing to which, playing upon the word, they have by association annexed all that poetry, painting, music, chivalry, asceticism have contrived to add to love) springs not from an ideal of beauty which they have chosen but from an incurable malady; like the Jews again (save some who will associate only with others of their race and have always on their lips ritual words and consecrated pleasantries), shunning one another, seeking out those who are most directly their opposite, who do not desire their company, pardoning their rebuffs, moved to ecstasy by their condescension; but also brought into the company of their own kind by the ostracism that strikes them, the opprobrium under which they have fallen, having finally been invested, by a persecution similar to that of Israel, with the physical and moral characteristics of a race, sometimes beautiful, often hideous, finding (in spite of all the mockery with which he who, more closely blended with, better assimilated to the opposing race, is relatively, in appearance, the least inverted, heaps upon him who has remained more so) a relief in frequenting the society of their kind, and even some corroborationof their own life, so much so that, while steadfastly denying that they are a race (the name of which is the vilest of insults), those who succeed in concealing the fact that they belong to it they readily unmask, with a view less to injuring them, though they have no scruple about that, than to excusing themselves; and, going in search (as a doctor seeks cases of appendicitis) of cases of inversion in history, taking pleasure in recalling that Socrates was one of themselves, as the Israelites claim that Jesus was one of them, without reflecting that there were no abnormals when homosexuality was the norm, no anti-Christians before Christ, that the disgrace alone makes the crime because it has allowed to survive only those who remained obdurate to every warning, to every example, to every punishment, by virtue of an innate disposition so peculiar that it is more repugnant to other men (even though it may be accompanied by exalted moral qualities) than certain other vices which exclude those qualities, such as theft, cruelty, breach of faith, vices better understood and so more readily excused by the generality of men; forming a freemasonry far more extensive, more powerful and less suspected than that of the Lodges, for it rests upon an identity of tastes, needs, habits, dangers, apprenticeship, knowledge, traffic, glossary, and one in which the members themselves, who intend not to know one another, recognise one another immediately by natural or conventional, involuntary or deliberate signs which indicate one of his congeners to the beggar in the street, in the great nobleman whose carriage door he is shutting, to the father in the suitor for his daughter’s hand, to him who has sought healing, absolution, defence, in the doctor, the priest, the barrister to whom he has had recourse; all of them obliged to protect their own secret but having their part in a secret shared with the others, which the rest of humanity does not suspect and which means that to them the most wildly improbable tales of adventure seem true, for in this romantic, anachronistic life the ambassador is a bosom friend of the felon, the prince, with a certain independence of action with which his aristocratic breeding has furnished him, and which the trembling little cit would lack, on leaving the duchess’s party goes off to confer in private with the hooligan; a reprobate part of the human whole, but an important part, suspected where it does not exist, flaunting itself, insolent and unpunished, where its existence is never guessed; numbering its adherents everywhere, among the people, in the army, in the church, in the prison, on the throne; living, in short, at least to a great extent, in a playful and perilous intimacy with the men of the other race, provoking them, playing with them by speaking of its vice as of something alien to it; a game that is rendered easy by the blindness or duplicity of the others, a game that may be kept up for years until the day of the scandal, on which these lion-tamers are devoured; until then, obliged to make a secret of their lives, to turn away their eyes from the things on which they would naturally fasten them, to fasten them upon those from which they would naturally turn away, to change the gender of many of the words in their vocabulary, a social constraint, slight in comparison with the inward constraint which their vice, or what is improperly so called, imposes upon them with regard not so much now to others as to themselves, and in such a way that to themselves it does not appear a vice, but certain among them, more practical, busier men who have not the time to go and drive their own bargains, or to dispense with the simplification of life and that saving of time which may result from cooperation, have formed two societies of which the second is composed exclusively of persons similar to themselves.” Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

  6. Aug 3

    Two works of fiction failed to get a mention

    I wrote about the bookstores and libraries I knew before the Digital Revolution, but I forgot to mention several works of fiction based on that cultural scene, because I was just warming up with a few brushstrokes. Just as struggling actors fight for their dreams waiting tables or working as baristas, struggling writers end up as clerks in bookshops—as did George Orwell and Penelope Fitzgerald, two British authors who used their experience to craft superior, heartbreaking fiction. Orwell, in the mid-1930s, worked for almost two years as a part-time assistant—just afternoons—at Booklovers’ Corner, a secondhand bookshop in the London borough of Hampstead. He was a real nut job, and probably was dealing with a ton of guilt after his experience in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. Indeed, he was a thirty-year-old, but fast and expeditious in translating his adventures into fiction, always peppered with the current leftist ideas of that decade, when Stalinist commie propaganda still wasn’t exposed as a total fraud. Fitzgerald, in the late ‘50s, worked part-time for four years as a clerk at The Sole Bay Bookshop in Southwold, Suffolk. She was already a forty-year-old mother of three children and the wife of an alcoholic trial lawyer, who was already on his way to disbarment for theft and public disgrace. But Penelope never dared to abandon him, because he had post-traumatic stress disorder from the war, and legend says she began writing fiction just to entertain her husband on his deathbed in the late ‘70s. I say “legend says” because anything you may read about Penelope Fitzgerald is just heartbreaking. Or maybe it’s me, because of the deep connection I feel while reading The Bookshop. That idea about reading for pleasure or entertainment is total BS for retarded, fat, and bored panda bears. I mean it. Reading is dangerous, and good novels are always written on the razor’s edge. That’s the deal. While mourning her alcoholic partner, Fitzgerald sat at her desk and channeled her whole love story with authorial control, writing about a childless young widow, Florence Green, who decides to open a bookshop with a small inheritance in the back of beyond. Call me crazy, but what I feel reading the first page is a dark genius gutting me with a butcher’s knife. Remember the narrative skill required to immerse you immediately in the story and activate your suspension of disbelief? This is it. I’ve read it out loud like a hundred times, and each time my voice breaks. It’s not about empathy; it’s about the narrator’s skill to project Florence Green’s worries onto a heron flying across an estuary while trying to swallow a long eel. That being said, you are right for thinking: what a drag those writers are! Is this one of those books about books? Well, let me cut it into slices for you. Real writers are too busy writing to care about anything other than books, the money they need to remain tightly focused on their next installment, and the amount of love and dedication they can get from their partners or non-committed relationships to survive the constant ordeal that writing entails. Pulling up all-nighters is not for the faint of heart. I wrote a novel about The Chocolate Party, the Barcelonian bookstore of my younger years, because I was immensely fortunate with the bookseller, who took my literary ambitions as his own. And we couldn’t have been more different, as I came to realize. It took me two long decades to find an interesting angle to write about The Chocolate Party, centered entirely on characters, way beyond the usual clichés about the parochial clientele, book clubs, coffee stains, and cigarettes—and I still think it cries out for a third act. Because of the gripping march into the Digital Revolution, and its nefarious consequences both for readership and creativity. While working the afternoon hours at Booklovers’ Corner, Orwell couldn’t turn on the heat because the owner thought it would steam up the window display and drive potential customers away. Nothing serious, but the frail and moth-eaten Orwell had caught pneumonia during his vagrant years that almost killed him. And all his works shared the same noble obsession with poverty and class warfare—which was, on the other hand, entirely reasonable in the era of the Great Depression. In his novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Orwell goes further because he was in love and, suddenly and for the first time, loved back. So the main character, Gordon Comstock, became a caricature of himself, his war against money, and his search for love. But we should read between the lines, as with all of Orwell’s stories. Eileen O’Shaughnessy was a poet and psychologist, a balm for the socially awkward Orwell, and she married a struggling writer and political activist whom his own family described as impossible to live with. Sadly, it was too good to last. But they still lived together through ten productive years before she died at age 39 on the operating table. I know it sounds corny, but without Eileen, it’s hard to explain how Orwell chose to be a fiction writer instead of a fierce political activist after becoming deeply disappointed by Stalin’s purges. That, and the trickle of news about the Holodomor that escaped Soviet censorship—the terror-famine that the Soviets inflicted across Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and the North Caucasus. I can imagine Orwell’s disappointment through reading Homage to Catalonia, which he wrote after witnessing how the commies turned on each other in Barcelona in May of ‘37, where he went from fighting fascists to running with Eileen for the French border, convinced he would be killed by those fools. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

  7. Jul 30

    Fiction about bookstores and libraries

    I remember when and how bookstore cafes arrived because it is part of my reading experience. They arrived in the ‘80s when the number of readers dropped drastically, acting as an invitation so that people who had never opened a book in their lives could find the perfect excuse to enter a bookstore. Sometimes, they would have a quick coffee, feeling completely out of their element, without a television or background music to entertain them. Other times, and not as often, they thought about buying a book as a gift for a loved one with whatever was trendy back then. Like someone buying clothes or checking out whatever is playing at the movies, without showing the slightest preference. For all of this, they relied on the bookseller. Every male bookseller’s dream was to set up a book club with the air of the old casinos. Every female bookseller’s dream was to set up a book club where no man could enter, unless he was trans and promised to remain mute. I was lucky enough to meet a straight couple—everything has to be labeled now—both inveterate readers, who set up a bookstore in the late ‘80s in the Eixample of Barcelona, almost reaching the upper part of Diagonal Avenue. And it was by chance. Because in reality, I was trying to buy a telescope at the department store on the other side of the corner. I lived devouring books in a solitary bungalow in the coastal hills, far from the city lights and traffic. Reading at night was thrilling, and sometimes I rested my eyes by stargazing. Hence, I wanted to acquire a telescope that wasn’t a toy. The small bookstore was close to the chamfered corner, wedged between cafes, parking exits, and other businesses. And the storefront was a windowpane framed by green wooden slats, where pastries had likely once been abundant and the bowls of hot chocolate served, since it kept the same name as the defunct business, The Chocolate Party. I mention this because the mix-up caught my attention at the time and made me browse the lovely window display. In the back, consumed by his reading and without noticing me, sat the bookseller. If there was one thing I detested, it was booksellers who sold books they didn’t read. It was like going to a record store where the clerk had no ear for music. When I walked in, the old shop bell rang. Since I couldn’t find what I wanted, I struck up an animated conversation with the bookseller, who, as he listened to me, jotted down the order I was placing. I was the only customer he had, and he gave me his full attention. And I promised to drop by soon, before locking myself in the nearby cinematheque. Some years later, I also ended up frequenting the university library, totally circular and glass-enclosed in the shape of a flying saucer. I would wait for the girl I lived with to finish her shift, a shy librarian with blond curls who, when she spoke, did so in whispers, while shooting you dead with enormous blue eyes that she couldn’t close even when sleeping by my side. Sometimes, I would make the entire round of the library, as the panoramic view of the city was impressive. The place seemed as silent to me as the library where the angels Damiel and Cassiel wander in Wings of Desire, alongside other angels, which served them as a sounding board to hear the inner monologues, sometimes overlapping, in other languages, the unspoken thought. I wasn’t an angel like the one Bruno Ganz played. But I craved the never-ending flow of unspoken thought. Because there was nothing sexier than a woman who loved to read. It was the first time I was with someone who shared that passion as intensely as I did. I guess I became a hopeless sapiosexual. The pastoral evenings we shared were far more creative than the usual emotional melodramas. Thanks to her, I read a divine madman like Friedrich Hölderlin. And I also learned the fate of the books that nobody reads, which until then I was completely ignorant of: the sordid graveyards of forgotten books. Between the small bookstore and the flying saucer-shaped library, I was giving free rein to the lust for books that I felt, until I wound up in a hospital with an ulcer, alongside that silent sphinx with eyes like hard-boiled eggs, in the X-ray waiting room, while I recited very close to her “The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow,” a short story by Gabriel García Márquez. The bookseller soon knew that I didn’t read to entertain myself or to marvel, but to learn narrative, as much of it as I could understand, convinced of how useless it was to try to write something original while lacking a baseline. It is the sin of Adamism that floods the world of Vanity Press. But this is the world of yesterday, before the Digital Revolution began turning record stores, afternoons at the cinematheque, and the small bookstore into a fading memory; the latter was revived as a bookstore cafe and gave the couple a good fifteen years, until Amazon entered the market and The Chocolate Party closed shortly before the 2008 financial crisis. And the flying saucer was demolished twenty years ago when the university changed neighborhoods. I imagine the same fate for the graveyards of forgotten books. In today’s world, less than one percent of printed editions manage to surpass three thousand copies sold in Spain, and 49% sell nothing at all. By the way, the Vanity Presses are working better than ever. And the bookstores that can afford the rent have no qualms whatsoever about selling you even bread. In a town of German Bavaria, Pegnitz, when the bookseller retired, the baker was an inveterate reader and, understanding that man does not live by bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God, the baker refounded the bookstore with the fitting name: Bread and Book. It was certainly a collective effort that also involved citizen participation. And it demonstrates, in turn, that book clubs are the last bastion against the tsunami of idiocy. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

  8. Jul 24

    The Odyssey According to Nolan

    I thought that this summer audiences would rush to the bookstores to read Homer’s work, instead of splitting hairs between IMAX and regular movie theaters, both populated by popcorn munchers and soft drink slurpers, which I avoid by default. I confess I have lost count of the years I’ve avoided a totally outdated economic exploitation model, which entails sitting in the dark with hundreds of strangers who do not keep the required silence, despite the imposing sound. And of course, they plan to stuff themselves with the same decorum as a capon. That being said, I was once a good moviegoer, back when computer technology was in its infancy and monitors had fluorescent colors. But as soon as I could clearly see the skin pores on a monitor and the sound went beyond stereo to multichannel, the lack of civility from the audience in movie theaters finally convinced me not to go back. From the point of view of the British film director Christopher Nolan, I am wrong. And yes, I probably should have watched his impressive Oppenheimer in an IMAX theater. Because on a 27-inch 4K monitor, the atomic bomb didn’t look big enough. But on a laptop with earbuds it is way worse. And on an iPhone, simply ridiculous. Nolan has taken his camera to the Mediterranean locations where the Homeric epic is based, a visual luxury for those who do not know them. Or if they have been to these shores, it was to ignore history and focus exclusively on their selfies with Italian gelato and cool tans, eating pasta and asking the waiter, completely out of place, for gravy. Odysseus’ nautical tale, getting lost in treacherous seas, has happened to many people throughout the centuries. In fact, nowadays, the mafias smuggling African immigrants in makeshift boats to Europe subject them to a real odyssey that they sometimes pay for with their lives. Indeed, there is historical data showing that the Mycenaean Greeks, once their civilization collapsed in 1200 BC, became a scourge of the Mediterranean, known as the Sea Peoples, because other groups displaced by famines joined them, looting the Mediterranean coast, raiding unfortified cities, and especially the fabulous Egypt. Pharaoh Ramesses III made a strategic retreat and lost all his possessions in Asia Minor, which reached Byblos, in what we know today as Lebanon, to focus on driving them out of the Nile Delta, mobilizing every man who could wield a weapon. Homer comes after this turbulent time known as the Greek Dark Ages, or simply the Late Bronze Age collapse. It is known as the Dark Ages because no written documents were left behind, and the little we know comes from the funerary monuments of the pharaohs and Assyrians. This is the simple reason for Homer’s oral tradition, situated in 800 BC, a figure surely composed of several people, lacking documentation or historical evidence as solid and monumental as Ramesses III, mummy included. Nothing exceptional, on the other hand, because ordinary lives passed without glory or trace. However, upon the myth of that blind man capable of reciting the warriors’ heroic deeds by heart rests the rebirth of Greek literature. First with the poetry represented by the rhapsodes, and then with the birth of tragedy as a performative art. Thanks to the written word, mythological superstitions and organized religion began to gain strength in the Mediterranean. The Pentateuch, the oldest scroll of the Jewish Torah, which out of bold, sheer ignorance we rename as the Bible, was also written in Jerusalem in 800 BC. But at the same time, in almost all the excavated Jewish houses of the time, small terracotta statuettes with a column-shaped base have been found, representing a female figure holding her breasts. They are associated with the cult of Asherah—the mother goddess and deity of fertility in the Levant. Common people in 800-700 BC practiced a marked syncretism: they worshiped Yahweh in the Temple, and in turn, kept these statuettes at home as amulets to pray for fertility, breast milk, and a safe childbirth. It is clear that Christopher Nolan has a devotion to the lavish imagination and ingenuity of the Homeric tale, which we still use today in words like Trojan Horse. It is the first literary figure—a catachresis that has traveled down to our days to describe a malicious code executing stealthily, while disguised as a legitimate application—long before scapegoat, another catachresis, was written in the scrolls of Leviticus. And that is why he has depicted the famous horse with better fortune, even allowing himself an anachronism, because it is armed like a Viking longship, with overlapping wooden slats, known as clinker construction. It is easy to sneak absurd things like these into a Hollywood blockbuster. I still crack up laughing when Ridley Scott showed Napoleon shelling the Pyramids of Egypt, just to scare the living daylights out of the Mamluks of that time. Therefore, I expect that in The Odyssey the actresses will in turn show off porcelain smiles, because it seems the Greek mortals had abundant toothpaste at hand, and the American actors will even make a ridiculous effort to achieve an Oxford English accent—as if the Mycenaean Greeks in 1200 BC were loyal subjects of the British Empire. In Book 3 of the Iliad, Helen of Troy is described as leukōlenos, which means “white-armed.” In the Odyssey, she is xanthê, “golden-haired” or “fair-skinned.” Homer portrays her as the daughter of Zeus, the ultimate archetype of Achaean beauty. She was white, exactly because the world that gave birth to her was the cradle of the European identity. But in our Hollywood frame of reference, the Woke narrative is way more important than the truth, so Nolan chose a Kenyan actress for Helen of Troy. What can you do? The bottom line is, in short, that the public is discovering the Greek hero upon whom the art of storytelling rests. And since this is a podcast about books and fiction, I recommend the celebrated translation by Emily Wilson, published by Norton. We should celebrate the return of the original tale and its reading, because the ability to read is no longer required but remains a personal option of the National Education Association of teachers. The classics were all lost from the education system when the left trashed classical education. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

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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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