El pasado 14 de septiembre el Ministerio de Derechos Sociales y Agenda 2030 que dirige Ione Belarra, Secretaria General de Podemos, lanzó la campaña #BastaDeDistopías para animar el debate en torno al desaliento general, sobre todo entre los jóvenes. La pieza principal es un video de 1 minuto en el que se ve a diversos […]
The article by Héctor García Barnés published in El Confidencial, “There are people in Spain who read 80, 150 or 300 books a year, and it is not as difficult as it sounds”, draws powerful attention both for the cases it presents of constant readers and for the rather negative comments they receive. According to […]
El artículo de Héctor García Barnés publicado en El Confidencial, “Hay gente en España que lee 80, 150 o 300 libros al año, y no es tan difícil como suena”, llama poderosamente la atención tanto por los casos que presenta de grandes lectores como por los comentarios más bien negativos que éstos reciben en los […]
It’s evening, after dinner, time to relax and choose a film to watch from whatever platform you subscribe. This means employing about two hours on consuming a story, leaving aside the fifteen minutes (or more) it may take to select a minimally enticing movie, unless you have preselected and placed some on your list. If […]
At the end of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) replicant Roy Batty shows his humanity shortly before dying by recalling all he has lived and concluding that, with his death, “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain”, a moving line which actor Rutger Hauer contributed to the film, ignoring the […]
The other article that has interested me and, in this case, appalled me is Laura Miller’s “The Unlikely Author Who’s Absolutely Dominating the Bestseller List” for Slate on the current US top best-selling novelist: Colleen Hoover. Miller’s analysis led me to Stephanie McNeal’s similar piece, “How Colleen Hoover Became The Queen Of BookTok” for BuzzFeed, […]
In my last post I argued that highly creative literature is practically dead, and that part of this foretold death is due to the dominance of the novel written by authors who do not care for literary prose. A few days later, Domingo Ródenas de Moya published in the culture supplement of El País, Babelia, […]
My post today continues from the last one in the sense that I want to consider here why the novel occupies the first position in the ranks of all the literary texts. In fact, I want to consider how come we have confused narrative with literature, additionally reducing fiction only to the novel, the novella, […]
Michael Quinion explains in his beautiful online dictionary of idioms World Wide Words the origin of the expression ‘having a whale of a time’, meaning enjoying yourself enormously. The idiom originates, as it easy to surmise, in the idea that whales are big animals to which big things can be compared. Apparently, Quinion informs his […]
I have an immensely talented doctoral student from Australia, and when I asked her whether she has considered applying for a job at a university back home, I got all confused because she started telling me that fees have gone up dramatically, and this makes things complicated. Sure, I replied, but I meant applying for […]