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. The Uncanny Wordsmith

    12/29/2025

    The Uncanny Wordsmith

    I 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 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 driver cut a deal with me. I could read if I indulged him in reading his favorite book. The Bermuda Triangle by Charles Berlitz. Time after, when I began to write, all those bloody caesuras made a lot of sense. Slow reading made me pore over sentences unfolding every aspect of language; all those sensuous qualities–how many syllables a word had and how long the accent over a vowel–are likely to carry weight, give pleasure, and hold meaning. These poetic qualities are tied up as the purely cognitive. And if I think about them as a mode of communication only, those qualities would not be alive and kicking. That must explain why I feel myself accessing skills I have learned through decades-long narrator performances. I’ll read aloud and look up for the through line. At this stage, all the worms will come out of the can: tiny dialogues, unconvincing characters, sludgy descriptions, totally random, unrelated bits of crap, and b******t that have made it through what I hoped would be an astonishing copy. I have done enough awful rehearsals–I know this for real. But the pain in writing, as you know, it’s a discarding process as well. And I don’t have any partner to reassure me I will make it. Outside the box, I find myself ‘watching’ the story like an audience. Am I bored? Restless? Irritated? Would I tattoo the first line over my forearms? Don’t you dare to think like a wordsmith if you don’t bring along a hammer! Eventually, you will kill your darlings. It will be a drama otherwise. You have to let it go and move on. And I keep asking myself while gripping that hammer over the head, am I really nuts to step out of the comfort zone? Why am I doing this? Because I have no choice! I don’t stop blowing with all my strength until I hear the anvil forging from nothing, a new beat I had never heard of, that sparks of wonder, insight, and hubris that come along with it. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

    4 min

  2. 11/13/2025

    Froth on the Daydream

    I 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 chaotic mess. When did I begin to appreciate a plot? That’s easy! Writing my first manuscript, I ran a free-fall plot, which brought about a large number of characters. So, at the time of ending such an orgy of creativity, the protagonist looked like a bit player. Of course, that little crack went unnoticed until I began to receive the feedback of my first agent, who in a moment of candor, said: “You could have written seven novels if you had had a plot.” Needless to say, Mrs. Kerrigan was right. She had a business to run, books to pitch for big publishers, not a lab of crazy ideas, but a literary agency. A friend of mine was way more graphic: “Next time, cut the bologna in thin slices.” That was bound to happen. So, with the first lesson learned, my second novel was a tour de force. But I missed out on Cervantes’ trick of giving voice to 600 characters. On the contrary, I ran a mix of triangle affair and coming-of-age novel. And yet, I did not run the distance, the 120,000 words that make a good brick of waste paper a beautiful printed ephemera to fill the windows of a bookstore. On the contrary, I fell short because I had no idea what a canonical novel was. A behemoth of five hundred pages. Otherwise, your literary dreams will go to the pile. A younger version of me thought a page turner a thing of the past. Like when Tolstoy wrote novels like War and Peace –or Cervantes ran a carousel of freaks he certainly would have met once in the funny pages of Don Quixote. Lesson learned, the result was the corkboard, the card notes, the three acts, the rolling scenes, and the facts that give speed, flow, and beat to the characters. At the back of my desk, I want now order, not menacing chaos, which might destroy or diminish my creative efforts. No board, no compass to get through the day. And the actual version of me is making peace with the idiot I am self-portraying in this mirror of ink – or whatever are these winged words because you are hearing me. All I want is to run the distance, flow like a f*****g river if I have to, and manufacture something to remember, beyond all sorts of ephemera. Yesterday, Alan Ball was in town, the screenwriter of the film American Beauty and TV series Six Feet Under. And hearing his masterclass was certainly a shock for me. That a multi-awarded screenwriter could blame the poor creative zeitgeist in such terms was mind-blowing. And I’m quote: “It’s depressing. All they want now is something that looks like something that has been successful. The competition is fierce. Everything is tremendously oppressive. It seems that the fear that floods everything is also in the writers’ rooms and especially in the directors’ rooms. Creativity is dead. That’s why I’ve left it. I’m writing a novel. And I’m enjoying it a lot. You know why? I don’t have an opinion on what I do. No one is intervening in my creative process. For once, I am alone. For once, no one is going to control me. Anything is possible. And it’s perfect.” End of quote. I’m already handwriting word by word Allan Ball’s utterance in one of my cards, and punching it quickly on the corkboard, to avoid that such wisdom thins itself out as the foam of days. And all because of you, my silent friend. Nothing I do on a daily basis is because of me. If I had my way, I would settle for being something between a clown and a conman. And certainly I have those personal traits, given the Jungian shadow I cannot see. In moments of extreme clarity, I feel like walking home in a daze and broke after betting all my riches on the horses. Yeah, a struggling writer is closer to a professional gambler than you might think. It helps if you have plenty of courage to fail big and don’t dwell on it, or if you sell your poor soul to the very Devil. Or both. It’s always about faith. I’m not a man of the cloth, but certainly I am a man on a mission. During the pandemic while taking care of my old man, a karmic chance like no other I could imagine, what really changed me was confronting the fact of what shoes I had to fill after he passed away. After mourning him for two years, it’s time to let it go. And it’s time to reach the goal of this podcast. It wasn’t my intention to write essays or a journalist column but fiction, because that was the Substack shelf I chose. Books and Fiction. The goal was narrating my own work, and someday have it all done to upload it to the audiobooks platforms like ACX and whatnot. If Alan Ball, the guy who wrote about a plastic bag dancing in the wind as the most beautiful clip the character named Ricky Fitts could show to Jane, the ultimate and freak teen girlfriend, has switched to the art of sewing words, it’s because he trusts in the might of abstraction without limits of any given written language. The freedom you have in a blank page, the quiet epiphanies you try to tame with just words, and how much craft you put into a simple dash to elaborate a concept. I won’t miss out on those days of heaven ahead of me. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

    10 min

  3. 11/05/2025

    Half rant, half rendition

    What 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 ham. And perhaps, for a moment, you can channel the spirit of that young boy who found inspiration in music and transformed it into poetry. This voice crafter you are hearing will provide you with a full-blown rendition, taking advantage of my privileged condition as a transnational author. See, the translator thought Lorca never used commas or periods or full stops, but he certainly did. Like Emily Dickinson used dashes, including long ones, to create pauses, separate ideas, and add ambiguity to her poetry, a feature often lost in standardized printed versions but present in her manuscripts. I hope you find a suitable time to listen, not because you need to open the doors of perception with red wine and Serrano ham – and prosciutto does not count, because it is sweeter and more tender with a buttery texture, while Serrano ham is from Spain, is saltier and more intensely flavored, and has a firmer texture. The reason for such preliminaries is because of the magnitude of Lorca as a poet. And the tragic fate he found in the first days of the Spanish Civil War, assassinated in cold blood at the wee hours by a bunch of fascists in an unmarked place between the infinite olive trees of Granada, where since then nobody could find his lovely bones. Like the bones of 140,000 Spaniards still lost in ditches, fifty years later to this day of the passing of General Franco, who died peacefully in his bed after ruling for 39 years, while the cowards did nothing else than lie through their teeth about a resistance that only existed in their wildest dreams. Not for nothing, it is rightly said that real heroes cannot tell war stories because they die pretty soon for their exceptional acts of valor. And stolen valor is the sign of any coward that hopes you are too lazy to connect the dots and ask them why they kept their heads in the sand. Get ready and comfy to meet the beautiful mind of Federico García Lorca, a man of the short-lived Spanish Republic, and how he pictured his own demise. Dreamwalking Ballad Green I want you green. Green wind. Green branches. Boat on the sea and horse on the mountain. Shadow on her waist, she dreams at her railing, green flesh, green hair, eyes of cold silver. Green I want you green. Under the gypsy moon, things are seeing her but she can’t see them. * Green I want you green. The great stars of frost, come with fish of shadow paving the path to dawn. The fig tree rasps the wind with its rough branches, and the wildcat mountain bares its sour agaves. Who will come—from where—? At her railing she gazes green flesh, green hair, dream of the bitter sea. * Compadre! Can I swap my horse for your house? My saddle for your mirror -my knife for your blanket–? Compadre! I come bleeding from the Cabra passes. If I could, young friend, the deal would be done. But I’m no longer me nor is my house my own. Compadre! Let me die decent in my bed. A steel bed, if you please, laid with Dutch linen. Don’t you see the slash from my breast to my throat? Three hundred dark roses on your white shirtfront. Blood oozes and stinks in the sash at your waist. But I’m no longer me nor is my house my own. Let me climb way up to the high terrace. Let me climb! Let me to the green terrace. Railing of moonlight and the rushing water. * Two compadres climb to the high terrace, leaving a trail of blood, and a trail of tears. Tin lanterns trembled on the tops of roofs. A thousand glass tambourines, tore up the dawn. * Green I want you green, green wind, green branches. The two compadres climbed. The slow wind in their mouths left a strange flavor of bile, basil, and mint. Compadre! Where is she? Where’s your bitter girl? How often has she waited! How often will she wait fresh face, and black hair, on the green terrace! * Over the face of the cistern the gypsy girl swayed. Green flesh, green hair, eyes of cold silver. A moon icicle holds her, high over the water. The night was as cozy as a small plaza. Drunken civil guards pounded on the door. Green I want you green. Green wind, green branches. Boat on the sea and horse on the mountain. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

    8 min

  4. 11/02/2025

    The Substance

    Physical 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 movie that shamelessly pinched that character from Wilde–they call plagiarism now to be inspired by–changed the gender in order to cater to a feminine audience and moved Dorian Gray from Victorian London to the show business in LA. Coralie Fargeat, the director and writer of this satirical film, had the audacity to convince one of the most iconic movie stars of the 90s, Demi Moore, to take on the lead role. This meant portraying her as an old, broken toy of cable TV, but not in a way we’ve ever seen before. No, this was a fresh take on Demi Moore, one that showed her naked, humiliated, and degraded in front of the last of the nepotistic babies, Margaret Qualley, the daughter of curly Andie MacDowell—remember Sex, Lies, and Videotape? I forced myself to watch twice this true horrorshow, this cinematic nightmare, and the only thing I missed were those eyelid clamps that a young Malcom McDowell was forced to wear in A Clockwork Orange. Because the first act is just brilliant and highly recommended. Instead the lavish beginning of Dorian Gray, we see a conceptual episode: a raw egg and a hand with a syringe with a magical substance in fluorescent yellow that it infuses in the egg yolk. Then, after a second, the yolk duplicates with a blob sound. Demi Moore plays a TV aerobics instructor who’s fired when she turns 50. Desperate to stay in the spotlight, she avails herself in the black market drug, a substance–uh-huh–that births from her body a younger, entirely separate version of herself very squelchily. But there’s a catch. She has to switch back and forth between her two bodies every seven days or things are going to get weirder and somehow even squelchier. I’m not a fan of spoilers. While Oscar Wilde presented in The Picture of Dorian Gray one paradox after another to make us ponder, this completely bonzo, bloody, campy, and unapologetically feminist body horror film loses all its originality of the first scene to follow the rules of this old genre with a fresh coat of paint, where men are depicted under a prism that is almost ludicrous. I wonder how many women must have seen me as well just like that. As my wife, with an American Mid-Western accent, would say: “He’s a dog!” Instead of the utterly sugarcoated Hallmark romance movies, I think The Substance would be a perfect tool for couple therapy and also for understanding each other’s needs, anxieties, and moods. I mean it. Sometimes, a wake-up call is necessary and highly valued. Perhaps eyelids clamps will be handy in the case where an individual rejects to acknowledge that youth and beauty are the only things worth having, so vain we are. And how much self-loathing we have. Demi Moore’s character in the film has a moment that is quieter and truly effective. She is asked out on a date and spends a considerable amount of time getting ready for it. There’s a lot of standing in front of the mirror, examining her skin and noticing how it no longer looks supple, observing the wrinkles, and then looking at her entire body. I admire how that very quiet and somewhat introspective moment in the film effectively conveys that point. Humans have always been drawn to beauty. Of course, beauty standards change all the time. What one culture considers beautiful, another might consider ugly. What our own culture considered beautiful 200 years ago, or even 50, isn’t beautiful to us anymore. But that hasn’t changed the fact that we love to look at beautiful things, and even more than that, we wish to be beautiful ourselves. In our society today, people will go to incredible lengths—makeup, plastic surgery, even harmful things like eating disorders—in order to fit themselves into our culture’s idea of beauty. And once we believe we’ve reached that goal, we’ll do anything to keep it that way, and with our current technology, that is possible. But is this the best thing for us? Oscar Wilde firmly believed in the importance of beauty; he belonged to the Aesthetic Movement, a movement emphasizing aesthetic values over social or political themes. They believed that it was more important for art to be beautiful than to have a deeper meaning—it was “art for art’s sake” alone. The very first line of the Preface of The Picture of Dorian Grey is “the artist is the creator of beautiful things.” That is his true purpose. Beauty is not only the end goal of Dorian’s life, but of all art. For Dorian Gray, beauty is the end goal of his life, a goal that he claims he would give anything, even his soul, for. This is a high price, a price that Dorian eventually pays. Throughout the novel, we watch Dorian become more and more morally corrupt. It begins when he heartlessly rejects his fiancée, leading to her suicide, and he continues to experiment with every vice, eventually even murdering someone, while his portrait slowly becomes more and more hideous. However, Dorian is able to escape all blame, because even though he is accused of many things, society dismisses it all, saying, “Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face. It cannot be concealed.” His beauty has saved him, at least in this life, although ultimately, he will still face a great demise. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

    10 min

  5. 10/26/2025

    Soda Mill Studio

    As 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 f****d it up so soon? I grew up loving books and wanting to write them myself. When I began handwriting, the words flew away. They were whispers, secrets, confessions to a blank page. I never kept a copy because I thought that the original was not original if there was a copy. It was just the other way around. All that is relevant is copy. And no story is relevant without a good conflict. That’s how foolish we are, looking for a fix, eternally head bowed, showing a goofy smile, with the tip of the finger scrolling into a cesspool. Click bait, scroll down, link here, fake news. So intoxicated with notifications. Last time you walked with a book on the street, no one filmed you. And it was lost forever. Don’t overthink, don’t you dare to write anything controversial, be discreet. But look for an alias to leave your poisoned slime. Hate in secret. Vote for the blabbermouth of the day. No check and balances against absolute power, even if it fills the streets with masked fat men, and takes the gardener who mowed your lawn for a fair price. The future that looms on the horizon is dark, as if the Great Depression and then the 30s are coming back. I foresee the brutal Nazi brownshirts coming back, herding Jews and gypsies into concentration camps or whoever is nowadays the sacrificial lamb. Sometimes, I remember why I write, not every day, and when I do, I never suspected that I would have to go back to Homer. There are no more rabbits in this hat, I said to myself this endless summer. I shall write and record in summer as well as in winter, always at a lovely 70 Fahrenheit degrees and 50% humidity throughout the year. I got a vocal chain and a beech wood matryoshka to record in grand style, as I always wanted to do. I rebel against Artificial Intelligence and its robotic readers. F*****s, you won’t be capable to beat my analog sound. This is Soda Mill Studio and if the wind blows and the night has quieted the neighbors and the traffic has stopped rolling, the abandoned pipes that go down from the terrace to the basement, whisper secrets between the owl’s spaced hoots. If I could use the words like scattered flowers and fallen leaves, secluded in an imagined world where I could get fired up, I would never leave the beechwood matryoshka or I would chain myself to the desk and thin myself out in what I tell until I don’t look back. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

    4 min

  6. 10/20/2025

    Pain and Sorrow

    It’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 through it, and that helped to keep a rigorous writer’s schedule for his most accomplished manuscript, In Cold Blood. Local old-timers who met Truman still recalled him doing his errands–two bottles of gin, dry vermouth, and olives for his martinis—the sad day that Marilyn Monroe had tragically overdosed. He was at the newsstand reading the headlines, and with that high-pitched lisping voice I cannot even dare to mimic, because it’s way beyond my range, Truman moaned, “My lady friend died!” He had badly wanted her for the role of Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But Paula Strasberg, her acting coach, deemed it inappropriate for Marilyn’s career to play a “lady of the evening” character, especially after being pigeonholed as the sex bomb of the 50s. Truman was very disappointed and began to spread the rumor that he felt betrayed when Audrey Hepburn was cast instead. The movie producers thought that a whitewashing of a courtesan was needed. And if I have to judge for the cross-generational audience of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, they rightly did so. Another paradox duly noted, it would be now unthinkable for another Holly Golightly than Audrey Hepburn. Truman, feeling so at ease in Palamós, invited some of his friends to visit him. The founder of CBS, William Paley, and his wife Babe, embarked on a journey across the Mediterranean Sea during the summer in a mind-blowing sailboat, eventually dropping anchor in the secluded cove. A terrifying wildfire just outside the villa almost claimed Truman’s life. In that rocky Mediterranean shore, pine groves have always served as both parasols and windshields, regardless of the fire risk involved. Capote only had time to grab his precious manuscript and flee, hoping that a fishing sloop would rescue him from that inferno. In late September, the furies of the equinox unleashed a deadly flood in Catalonia, further terrorizing him. Consequently, he changed his mind and ended his productive stay on October the 1st, leaving for Switzerland. Despite his efforts, he was unable to finish the manuscript until the Cluttler’s killers were hanged in Kansas, due to his decision to sell the future book as a nonfiction novel. Hickock and Smith were on death row from 1960 to 1965, five long years. “No one will ever know what In Cold Blood took out of me,” Capote said. “It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones.” The horrifying book was published, and Truman got suddenly rich. But instead of getting back to work with the same stern and unsmiling discipline that had been a constant since the beginning of his career, he dilapidated his earnings and that rare gift, trying to avenge Nina Capote, throwing epic parties for the privileged ones like the Black and White Ball, and showboating in talk show television about his Proustian adventure—a manuscript called Answered Prayers. Many friends I knew spoke glowingly about the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and sometimes they cannot see beyond the allure of Audrey Hepburn wearing the elegant Givenchy black dress, oversized sunglasses, black gloves, statement pearls, and twisted updo with a sparkling crown beret, eating pastry early in the morning while gazing dreamily into the windows of Tiffany & Co.’s Fifth Avenue store. But the actual fifty-page novella is something else–exactly eighteen thousand words–and I recommend reading it, even if you really think that watching the movie is enough. That’s precisely what this literary podcast is about. An encouragement to read. Unlike the iconic movie, it’s not in the early 60s but in the early 40s, while the Second World War is still ranging. Miss Golightly is much younger, two months away of her nineteenth birthday. While sitting out on the fire escape, she doesn’t sing Moon River with her guitar, but simple songs that goes like “Don’t wanna sleep, Don’t wanna die, Just wanna go a-travelin’ through the pastures of the sky“ Truman used to say she wasn’t a prostitute but an American geisha. Today, we might adhere to woke standards and refer to her as a sexual worker, just like Sean Baker, the director of the Oscar-winning film Anora. I cannot stop thinking that Truman is portraying his own mother as a “lady of the evening.” And all comes together when you read about that Southern belle, Lillie Mae Faulk, later known as Nina Capote. Married too young to Arch Persons, a well-educated man but a lousy salesman, she left the six-year-old Truman to elderly relatives in Alabama and fled to New York to catch a wealthy husband. She was a black swan that Audrey Hepburn brought to life like a disturbing phantasmagoria. Four years before Truman penned Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Nina took her own life swallowing pills. She was just 48 years old. While in her second marriage to José García Capote—the Cuban businessman that adopted Truman—she had a lavish lifestyle for two decades, beginning her descent into alcoholism, often flying into violent rages, that came to an abrupt end in 1952. When Joe’s fortunes changed and he faced charges of embezzlement. Unable to leave Park Avenue for a modest place and start over, Nina killed herself. Truman’s never-ending regret for not saving her life fueled his genius and wrote an inverted mirror of Nina in his character Holly Golightly. I bet he did try to find some closure. As the 13th-century mystic poet Rumi wrote, following the Socratic method: I said what about my heart? He said: Tell me what you hold inside it? I said: Pain and Sorrow. I said: Stay with it. The wound is the place where the Light enters you. He said: Stay with it. The wound is the place where the Light enters you. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

    10 min

  7. 05/18/2025

    Egregious lunatics

    The 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 host frowned. “But it’s the other one who’s the lunatic. The man you’re pointing out is Monsieur Honoré de Balzac.” I'm sharing this story with you to shed light on the hazards of the craft. You cannot see me now, but if you could—and you never will—I am making horrible faces too, showing teeth to hit higher notes, and I do hand gestures like the Italians because it projects my voice and avoids droning. In some recording sessions, my vocal folds have colors unknown to me. I recall the short story Letter for a Young Lady by Julio Cortázar. As the guy of the surreal story, I'm going to vomit up a little rabbit that will nibble the cable of the microphone to create something new. The creative process is a perpetual orgy. The more, the merrier. I understand that you may not always enjoy the soundtrack, but sometimes it works wonders—whether by chance or by design. Cortázar would enjoy this format, considering that his funny Hopscotch has constant musical references. I have listened to all his tapes with the frill of his exotic mix of Argentinian and French accents. In a canon novel—Honoré de Balzac wrote ninety—there are numerous characters. Imagine an author possessed by the characters he just made up. I call it dreaming awake, with good spirits, considering the absurdities I have to rule out to find the one that fits the composition. Some masters scribbled at a stand-up desk, like Thomas Wolfe on top of one of the first refrigerators, and helped keep his mind flowing freely. Or Ernest Hemingway, writing on his feet and thinking on his toes at the first light, as sober as a judge, staying alert, avoiding sluggishness, and enabling him to produce his crisp, fast-paced narratives, felt he was boxing in a ring against the old Russian masters. And to comprehend this competitive attitude, one should consider well the audacity that writing fiction entails from one’s own point of view. What I may think of as an original and somewhat relevant is what a wolf does to feed its puppies—regurgitating what I read somewhere else. I owe what I am to what I've read. And the way to realize an unwilling mimicry is to read more classic literature to reach out to the original sources. An unconventional approach to the craft and a unique narrative voice, that is all I want. Otherwise, I'm not writing a relevant novelty, which is the meaning of the word "novel", but a pastiche. That being said, if there is a keyword to define a contemporary art form, expressed in continuous sagas and prequels and spinoffs and re-dressed and gender-swapped casting, it's indeed pastiche. We fully embraced a culture of mediocrity and boredom, whereby commercial success is all that counts. From now on, I shall include in this podcast renditions of my work. Listed under the category of Books and Fiction, I should sing for my supper as a dedicated author whose goal is leaving behind a legacy, before the vocal folds atrophy leave me whispering, given that I skipped the biological way to be immortal, that is, having children. I really think we are already packed, agree? Not counted by millions but 8.2 billion, the human race has to spread out to the stars, seeking new worlds. The poles and the glaciers are melting because we are unable to control our greed—burning fossil fuel at an industrial scale for nearly two centuries and polluting the oceans with microplastics—even though we have been told about the fatal consequences by the scientific community. Anterior life forms disappeared across the five massive extinctions that mark Earth's history, like the brutal end of the Permian with 96% of species gone, did not stand a chance. But we would if we stopped killing each other and invested in exploration instead of weapons. About seeking new worlds in the heavenly vault, here is the icing on the cake. The German film director Wim Wenders and Martin Scorsese, as producer, released The Soul of a Man, a documentary about a message in a bottle into the cosmic ocean. NASA launched the interstellar probe Voyager, with a golden-plated record, to never return. With the hope of finding a superior live form that could manage a suitable player—that was the analogic era of 1977—Carl Sagan compiled images, utterances in many languages, but also Blind Willie Johnson’s 1927 Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground that you are hearing. Son of a sharecropper, impaired since he was seven years old during an episode of domestic violence, Willie led a peripatetic existence and became a religious busker. Between 1927 and 1930, he recorded an impressive 30 songs for Columbia Records. His celebrity career ended with the Great Depression, after which he continued to perform as a street singer with his last wife, Angeline, playing together the call-and-response format. After extinguishing a fire that left the poor couple sleeping in the burned ruins of their humble abode on a bed of damp newspapers, living that way until two weeks later, Willie contracted pneumonia but wasn't admitted to the hospital. Because he was blind, black, and couldn't afford a hospital bed. He died at 48 years old and was buried in an unmarked pauper's grave. I wonder whether Blind Willie Johnson ever cared, thought, or imagined how far his work would travel into the distant future—and distant time. And the extraterrestrial audience he might—or might not get—in the pursuit of accidental beauty and spiritual bliss. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

    11 min

  8. 05/05/2025

    The Boundless in a Reed

    Last 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 all odds affected Spain and Portugal, I went up to the rooftop terrace to check if the planes’ trails were drawn in the sky, and everything was quite normal for an April day. The tireless sexual revelry of birds mating, the hubbub of swifts flying around me, and the mist of yellow pollen from the mix of pine and oak wood, floating in the valleys of the nearby hills. Why should I be worried? So, expecting to stay without power for at least 24 hours, given that we are ruled by simpletons crowing about our renewable energy production, I set a leftover of stewed beans and peas to warm up under the glorious sun, well covered to avoid the curious wasps and bees and the looming sea gulls, and returned to my desk to sharpen the pencils, gather paper, and get ready to take casual notes to enjoy a wonderful reading. From the book stack, I randomly chose a British author I had adored when he was young, and his literary tricks were a novelty for me. I’m talking about Julian Barnes and one of his latest works, The Sense of an Ending. But since the old friend Julian became a solemn widower of Pat Kavanagh, his writing has become simply sad. It evokes the same bottomless loss and grief I found reading Joan Didion’s The Year of the Magical Thinking. About Julian Barnes, I still recall reading The History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters the first year of the 90s. It was a jaw-dropper, and the unnumbered half-chapter titled Parenthesis was so good to learn the lines by heart. I did many casual renditions; my best one was whispering away in a bookstore to a ballsy sweetheart once I had. So, my actual disappointment is that, after being a loyal reader and reciter of his works for decades, the bond with this author is not there anymore. Surely it's just me, who doesn't find amusing the double sex lives and nor the love triangles as I did in my 20s. I guess everything has its own time. What really set me in reading mode was a wonderful essay from the Spanish scholar Irene Vallejo, originally titled El Infinito en un junco–the boundless in a reed–but the translator Charlotte Whittle tossed William Blake's Auguries of Innocence obvious analogy to simply leave it as Papyrus. To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour. What have you done, Charlotte? You are supposed to translate the concept and not the idea! Which differs in its identity, similarity, opposition, and analogy. The Italian expression 'traduttore, traditore'–translator, traitor–refers to the implicit imprecision of the act of translating. Anyhow, this is a book about libraries of the past and of the present, and also about the booksellers. As Irene will tell the reader, you can create a parallel world when opening a book and reading every word, and yet at any moment you can move your gaze away and return to the world that is. When you think of the first letters on clay to papyrus and move through the ages to leather-bound books to the modern-day books on both paper and then those words read on electronic devices, think back to where it all began in the ancient world. My own Irene Vallejo’s blackout party, and the following is not random, began with her description of the lost world of storytelling, in the small palace of a local lord in a time before writing was widespread, when language was fleeting, made up of air and echoes. The Greek Homer called it "winged words" from the point of view of his blindness. Which isn't yet literature, since it isn't set down in letters or writing. Bards were not only wandering musicians but also skilled memory men, with a repertoire that captivated their masculine audiences for long hours with all kinds of epic. And had no sense of authorship at all, like a jazz musician who takes a popular tune and embarks on a passionate improvisation without a score. Or what we know as variations on the same theme. Individual expression belongs to the time of writing and the prestige of artistic originality had yet to flourish. The night fell, and the power still wasn't back. And for a stargazer, it was beautiful to look up to the vault of heaven with zero light pollution. It was the night of the times. Then, on the other side of Main Street, power came back, and normality was restored. But the other half of the beach town remained in absolute darkness for one hour more. And I was already missing darkness when I finally turned on the light. As anyone who has experienced a blackout can attest, when the power returns, even at midnight, it's a boost for morale. And I have a confession to make. I couldn't wait to know if Apple had saved my work! One has these stupid fears, perfectly normal after some bad experiences with disappeared files. So, I put on the open back studio headphones for critical listening, to resume my slow learning as a sound engineer with the digital audio workstation–always feeling a mix of infinite joy and a pang of shame for my lack of knowledge each time I learn something new–cranking up the volume to hear all my blunders and correct them, and also promising to outdo myself with each new release. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe

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About

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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