<![CDATA[Ara in English - Toni Sala]]> 10 <![CDATA[Ecology and the law of the jungle]]> Sometimes I wonder if the councilors love the object of their department. Does the councilor of Education love education? Does the councilor of Linguistic Policy love language? Does the councilor of Culture love culture?Fifteen days ago, in an article in favor of teachers and professors, I spoke of the poison of superior causes. We must help these students!, said the pedagogues. But the function of teaching was not to help students, but to transmit knowledge. Twenty-five years of turning priorities upside down have destroyed teaching and have harmed students in a terrible way. We must go against the extreme right, we are told today, to justify any blunder. With criticism thus deactivated as in the case of teaching, both things will be achieved, the blunder and the extreme right, which already seem like two stages of the same evolution.

]]> <![CDATA[Intelligence and artifice]]>

It is very famous that, at the beginning of cinema, when it was projectedThe arrival of a train at the stationAnd as the locomotive approached on the screen, viewers jumped up from their seats in fear, thinking the train was about to run them over. Right now, in a chat room, we're also unable to tell if we're talking to a robot or a human. But just as we learned to distinguish between the real train and the one filmed, we will learn to separate artificial intelligence from intelligence.

]]> <![CDATA[Boats on land]]>

I live on the coast and often go for walks in the outskirts. Thanks to these walks, over time I've discovered a scattered fleet of dry-land boats moored on the ground, as if this were the Atlantic and the tide had gone out.

]]> <![CDATA[The free cemetery]]>

The other day Llibori died, an essential presence who gave character and pride to Sant Feliu. I didn't know him personally, but I stumbled across his tall, paradoxically unassuming figure in the street, with his long, straight hair and mustache. It was more than just seeing the great singer of Quercus, the rock band that played "rock music," founder of the fondly remembered Colla Jacomet, and capable of composing so much. Old fisherman as The Last Habanerawhich it truly was. He sang in Velvet's dark, ironic, and radical style.Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance", was introduced by Jordi Riera, another great singer from Colla Jacomet.

]]> <![CDATA[Zombie writing]]> From now on, that column will go from being weekly to every two weeks. Needless to say, I'm sorry to change it after more than a decade of consistent publication, but what can you do?

]]> <![CDATA['So much, so much war...']]>

Rodoreda is made of such fine stuff... We also live in ideal times to understand her. At the opening of the exhibitionRodoreda, a forestAt the CCCB (not to be missed), Commissioner Neus Penalba said thatSo much, so much war…Rodoreda encapsulates everything, and this comment, coming from someone who has written an impressive study onDeath and Spring, has led me to rereadSo much, so much war… 

]]> <![CDATA[Cork from Llop]]> The cold and the forecast of snow drove the visitors away this weekend. The streets were empty, and the sea was so smooth that a jump from the port seemed to be skimming over it. There was only one man. Perhaps he was like me; as I've gotten older, his relatives have passed away, and now there are very few at Christmas and Three Kings' Day meals.

]]> <![CDATA[Urices]]>

"Your uncle had such a good time, with his diving suit and rifle," my aunt says. "Now he wouldn't fish even with a rod. He's seen how the sea has been emptied of fish, and he thinks it's a crime."

]]> <![CDATA[Sunset half a century later]]> I gaze at the bay of Sant Feliu from a balcony of the house where I was born. I remember myself here in front of me, on the sand, when I was six years old, running to the water's edge with Daina, a playful German Shepherd, at the exact same time of sunset, leaving school, just before nightfall.

]]> <![CDATA[The word]]> We're on the top of a bare mountain, overlooking an abyss. Far below, I see the river, thin as a needle, and the high-mountain pond. We laugh, satisfied to have finally reached the top; it seemed impossible. We relax, leaving our backpacks on the ground. The person I love, the one who encouraged me to do the hike, walks contentedly along the rock face, finds a place to sit at the edge of the precipice and contemplate the landscape, looks at me smiling, moves back a little perhaps so I can take a picture, bends down to sit me on the rock, and the rock is dampened as it slopes down to the abyss. It's instantaneous, it disappears, and only a word of surprise and devastation remains in the air, and consciousness ignites this word from the first syllable to the final neutral vowel: shit.

]]> <![CDATA[In Ridaura]]> To ambush me beneath a rain of trees, to cleanse you of news and self-serving opinions, I who grew up at the mouth of the Ridaura, walked up it the other day, leaving through Llagostera and crossing above, from one mill ruin to another, autumn is much better the colder and more of an alder, now of a jay, now of a root, the consciousness of a chameleon above along the paths that run along the Ridaura, mirroring it above, I stepped on leaves that to the eyes were petals and to the ear and feet were crusts. of the rafts like macerated meat, and under each cork there was a congregation of acorns with the brown and shiny shells of young beetles, and I heard an acorn fall behind me, a wooden finger of the forest that had come loose from the thimble and had made a sound tap on my back. Thus, one step forward with each acorn that germinates, the trees wanted to follow me, they stretched, they intertwined, they tensed, the trunks grew muscle, the ivy veins swelled, the poplars opened their arms looking to fly, they were hands and expressions, and there were leaves that were torn off again and again and went to stick among the leaves of another oak, but they were not leaves, they were birds, all the leaves were birds, the forest wanted to fly away and could not, tree by tree it grabbed the sky with its hand, it tied the sky to the earth with the ropes of the trunks, and I noticed. Moss carried by the trees, fine as cloth or thick as velvet, the stones made of soft pillows, green with the green that the trees had lost like transparent fish that lose their leaf scales and you only see the spine, and I arrived by a path to a waterfall of a skull and it dripped onto the thin channel, and suddenly the sun filled the trees with gold coins, the vegetation turned golden, a little drunk, as if champagne were flowing down the Ridaura, the leaves of the bald alders about to fall were effervescent and the birds their color and the still water cracked again with the reflection of bare branches among patches of green and red confetti of floating leaves, and I inside guts that were digesting me, with the writing clinging like ivy to the column of a trunk.

]]> <![CDATA[Responsibility and democracy]]>

No one is surprised that people like Mazón come to power, and it's dishonest to feign ignorance now that it's too late. After accusations of censorship, the documentary was finally released.Flood alertThe program denounces how pressure on the Catalan Water Agency (ACA) has allowed construction in flood-prone areas. Those who were supposed to protect us were the ones granting the permits. The program ended with this quote from a geology professor: "It's not right to play with other people's risks to line my own pockets."

]]> <![CDATA[Romania]]>

I go up to Romanyà after rereadingDeath and Spring.Rodoreda wrote this novel in Geneva in the early sixties. In Romanyà, she only revised it before she died. "I hope that with the cold weather these ladylike desires [to write] will return and that in no time I'll finish a very chilling book," she wrote to Marta Pessarrodona in September 1981. (It makes one think of Kafka telling Felice that he has written a "rather terrifying" story. It is saidThe Metamorphosis"and it would terrify you.") "I finished twenty-five pages and got so tired that I started rewriting," he writes to her a month later.

]]> <![CDATA[Claps]]> I play it in the car, while doing manual labor, or on nights when I have trouble sleeping. More than a voice, it's a tone that accompanies me through these years in a country so in need of shelter and refuge, of spaces where, because there are so few, intelligence can find a home. Success comes when the host—an editor, a theater director, a program producer—has the authority to raise the level of those who take refuge in him. On Toni Clapés's program, the interviewees, contributors, and impersonators become more brilliant. It's instructive to hear the same voices that participate in the program on other shows.RAC1 versionto see how a contributor's performance rises in one place and falls in others. I'm not interested in current films or celebrity gossip, but inRAC1 versionIt's different. And vice versa, I'm interested in literature and politics, but I find many programs dedicated to them unbearable; they pretend to talk about literature or politics but in reality they talk about current films and celebrity gossip.

]]> <![CDATA[Lloret]]> "They're all the same," my grandfather, who had lived through the war, used to say. He died, and my mother also used to say that they were all the same. She died too, and then, the other day, I found myself saying in a conversation: "They're all the same." Lately, the phrase has spread from politics to literary discussions; it floods the streets and shops. "They're all the same" applies equally to public and private spheres. "They're all the same" is a sign of fatalism and a chain of events.

]]> <![CDATA[Machined]]>

At noon, I hung out a machine-made load of linen. It's pleasant to hang it up, fragrant and wet, fresh and carnal, refined not by the pieces but by their use, like laundry after an illness, as if hanging sheets and pillowcases had been hung between them the nights spent, and hanging the T-shirt had been hung the evening I wore them for a sound hike the other day in the mountains, not far away because the dog has grown old and can't keep up.

]]> <![CDATA[Flotsam]]> I've written here before about the slabs, these peaks of the underwater rock ranges, which don't quite form islets because they're only a few feet from the surface and can only be seen when the weather is stormy and the waves are low. The slabs are flat, about the size of a table, and it's fun to swim and stand up on them. It's not easy; the sea has to be flat, and you get stuck in mussels, shells, and snails, but if you make it through, you've reached the summit. Ankle-deep in water, you're standing on the great marine esplanade, and all you see is the view.

]]> <![CDATA[Nations]]> Like magnets, some places attract certain people. That's why the same thing happens to me every year when the tourist rush dries up. I go to the library and I run into her, I go to the fruit stand and she's in line, I go to the tobacconist and she's there too, buying an issue. I go to the mountains, to the outskirts, and I see him from afar, walking alone with an open black umbrella to protect himself from the sun and a bag full of bread, and he crouches down at the turns in the road and leaves wet leaves on the birds.

]]> <![CDATA[Fines]]>

There's no freedom without risk. This very thought was floating around in my head when I got a letter, and it was a fine. A fine is always bad, no matter how well deserved, but lately I'd say it's worse. Driving through another city, I took the wrong street and apparently entered a street where traffic was prohibited. Until now, I haven't been able to tell. Why didn't I see it? Perhaps it was poorly signposted? It doesn't matter, because the fine works through blackmail: if I pay quickly and refuse to protest, they'll give me a 50% discount. Since traveling is complicated and they probably wouldn't agree with me, they encourage me to pay and keep quiet. It's not very edifying.

]]> <![CDATA[Book Week]]>

Last year, since the America's Cup took priority, Book Week was moved from the Muelle de la Madera to Paseo Lluís Companys. Going there now, I thought about that hierarchy in relation to the fate Trump envisions for Gaza and its population once subjugated: to dedicate them to tourism.

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