A few weeks ago, David Uclés spoke at the CCCB about Mercè Rodoreda with such ignorance that, with a clear masochistic tendency, I was curious to read La ciutat de les llums mortes, with which he has won the Nadal prize. I had to stop at the second chapter: I'm too old to waste time on bad literature, especially when, moreover, it is a poorly disguised attempt to de-Catalanize Barcelona.Unlike Àngels Barceló, the experience of reading a foreigner talking about my city did not make me recognize it, quite the opposite. I could only shake off the bad mood by returning to a truly recognizable past. This is how I ended up on the pages ofEstrella fugada. Sideral (Editorial Contra), the biography about Aleix Vergés, written by his friend and cultural journalist Héctor Castells.Nineties, Plaça Joan Llongueras and the nights when DJ Sideral spun records on Nitsa's rotating dance floor. Castells describes very well what made Sideral special: a self-taught musician and DJ with an insatiable curiosity for music, an eclectic and hard-to-classify selection, and, above all, an almost physical ability to feel the pulse of the dance floor and intervene at the right moment. I have a memory of a night that, at times, seems like a dream. I was going through a very bad time at home and, at one point, I stopped dancing and stood to the side, looking at the venue with a sense of alienation. Then, one of my favorite Sade songs started playing, mixed with electronic music. I raised my head and it seemed to me that Sideral was attentively waiting for my reaction. The current of empathy, recognition, and warmth allowed me to return to the dance floor and spin again on another of those nights that seemed magical.All the memories of that time are scattered for me, as if I were seeing them through water. But the feeling of freedom and belonging that I felt in that place is not erased. Looking back, I have the impression that many of us were people who didn't quite find a place in other spaces, but there we recognized each other without yet being able to put words to it. It was a world that resembled Neverland. There were many lost children (Castells explains that many of the friends were literally orphans, or with absent parents) and, like Peter Pan, Sideral was the leader. Charismatic, intuitive, capable of creating a place where everything seemed possible and where, for a few hours, the outside world and adults ceased to exist.Sideral did not want to grow

Like Peter Pan, Sideral did not want to grow up and said he would die young. Indeed, he died at thirty-two, just when neuroscience today places the end of adolescence. The myth remains fixed here, at this suspended point.The rest of us lost children had to learn to grow up. Perhaps that's why I'm surprised by the gaze with which Castells unfolds the story. The book was published when he was already forty years old and was revised a decade later, but, on the other hand, he explains that world to us as if he were still twenty. Like when he describes a sixteen-year-old girl as "another minor who could unleash eight hundred cases of pedophilia in a second, Asian gaze, strawberry mouth, and long eyelashes" (it seems that no one, neither in 2013 nor in 2023, found it problematic). Or when it presents Barcelona as if it could be explained apart from the political tensions that have crossed it in recent years, with a mental framework that ends up resembling more that of a David Uclés than that of a Barcelonian. Perhaps it is here that the Land of Nevermore ceases to be magic and fascination, and also becomes a prison and a nightmare. The bad mood, therefore, I have not managed to drive away.

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For several years now, the Catalan Letters Institution has had an exhibition space at Catalan Book Week and commissions a handful of writers and illustrators to create cartoons on a specific theme. Last year they dedicated it to a meta-literary exhibition, a self-parody of the obvious things about the Catalan literary world and writers, to celebrate the centenary of the publication of Next year by Francesc Trabal, with a prologue by Josep Carner. I wrote a piece about the reality of Catalan writers: we are the first link in the book chain, but the only ones who can hardly make a living from our work. The illustrator Marc Torices turned it into a fantastic comic strip.

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The other day I went to the movies with my high school friends. It had been years since we'd done that because, as Juliana Canet once said, our get-togethers have been planned for a while now and are just a way to catch up. I have to say that meeting up to catch up with them is something I always look forward to; especially since half of us can no longer live in Barcelona and our regular get-togethers around the neighborhood are a thing of the past, for reasons beyond simply getting older and having more responsibilities.

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According to the dictionary of the Institut d'Estudis Catalans, the definition of heroine can be: "A person distinguished by their great courage, by their fortitude in suffering. The main character of a legend, a story, etc." But also: "A diacetyl derivative of morphine, with the formula C₂₁H₂₃NO₅"...from which it is obtained by treating it with acetic anhydride, and whose consumption creates dependence."

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A characteristic unique to humans is the amount of time we spend thinking about what isn't happening: the past, the future, or hypothetical situations. This type of thinking, known as mental wanderingMindfulness is considered a key capacity for learning, reasoning, and planning, but various philosophical and religious traditions suggest it can have an emotional cost. Based on this hypothesis, a team from Harvard University analyzed the relationship between mind wandering and emotional well-being in everyday life. Using a mobile app, the researchers, led by MA Killingsworth, collected real-time data from more than two thousand adults, who reported what they were doing, what they were thinking, and how they felt at that moment. The results showed that the mind wanders almost half the time, with little variation depending on the activity, and that happiness levels are lower when thoughts are not focused on the present activity. In other words, when it comes to explaining emotional well-being, what we think about is more decisive than what we are doing, and that a wandering mind, despite its cognitive value, carries a measurable emotional cost.

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A few weeks ago I heard a conversation with Jordi Puntí, in which he talked about his novel Confetti, about the life of Xavier Cugat (Proa). At one point, Puntí says that "or"A writer is a liar par excellence," because fiction creates plausible worlds that are not real.

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When I was little, one of my favorite books was The island of the blue dolphins, by Scott O'Dell (published by La Galera, translated by Josep Vallverdú (with illustrations by Isidre Monés), an adventure book that tells the story of Won-a-pa-ley, a Native American girl who lives on an island off the coast of California. Otter hunters exterminate her tribe, and the survivors are taken away on a boat. Her little brother, Ramo, is accidentally left on the deck. When she realizes this, she jumps into the sea and swims back to be with him.

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Most people have heard of therapy dog programs that provide companionship to people in hospitals, nursing homes, or special education schools. The dogs' company makes difficult situations less burdensome and has shown benefits for the mental and physical health of the participants. What may be less well known is that these dogs can also help children learn to read.

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In the essay Critique of the victimIn his book published by Herder, Professor Daniele Giglioli of the University of Bergamo describes how the victim has become "the hero of our time." Being a victim confers prestige, demands to be heard, promises recognition, generates identity, and immunizes against criticism. The victim, he says, does not act: they suffer; they do not respond: they are irresponsible. And, for that very reason, they are "the dream of any kind of power." It is no wonder, he concludes, that battles are being fought today to establish who is the greatest victim, who has been one before, and who has been one for the longest time.

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We live in a time when the quality of a book is often judged by its adaptability to audiovisual formats, or we learn about stories through the films or series that have been made about them. That's what happened to me with Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus I knew Mary Shelley's novel from its first film adaptation in 1931, with Boris Karloff playing the creature, or from the hilarious version by Gene Wilder and Mel Brooks in 1974. Since Guillermo del Toro released a new, captivating film this year, I finally decided to read Mary Shelley's original story and decide for myself whether I prefer the book or the movie (I need to find out if Mr. Noriguis's Morgan Freeman has already trademarked this line; I'm sure he has).

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A few years ago, I had a creative writing professor who, on the first day of class, solemnly declared, "I won't accept romance or fantasy novels in my course. You can change your project if you come with these ideas." This statement, unbecoming of someone who should be guiding the development of new voices, goes beyond a mere literary preference and encapsulates an old legacy: the idea that there are serious and lesser literatures. It's no coincidence that this disdain tends to fall from the corner of genres traditionally considered feminine: romance, fantasy, and autofiction; while thought, culturally associated with the masculine sphere, has been considered the emblem of serious literature.

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In 2018, anthropologist David Graeber published Bullshit jobs. In theory.This essay reflects on a central paradox of the contemporary capitalist system: its capacity to generate unnecessary jobs within a structure that, in theory, should strive for efficiency and resource conservation. It has been published in Catalan by Descontrol. Absurd Jobs. A Theory, with translation by Miquel Sorribas.

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A few weeks ago I wrote an article praising my friend and editor Ignacio MoretaHe shared it on the network formerly known as Twitter, but claimed that I was blinded by friendship. I couldn't disagree more, and I'll explain it with an example. Last year, Oriol Pérez Treviño wrote a critique of my essay. You shall honor father and mother, published by Fragmenta, To which I responded with an article in that same space, considering it misogynistic, at the very leastIgnacio let me know that he believed my reply was infinitely crueler than the original article and, for this reason, he wouldn't share it on social media or post it on the publisher's website, while Treviño's criticism would. I thought it was unfair and inappropriate, but I still value him as a friend and editor (it should be said that this situation has since been corrected, and my article now also appears on the publisher's website).

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I met Ignasi Moreta in 2017, a year full of contrasts in my life: a referendum was won, but a country was lost; and Ordre i Aventura lost the elections to the board of the Ateneu Barcelonès, but I gained a handful of dear friends. Ignacio is one of them.

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A few months ago I wrote about the creature-men through Ernest, the protagonist of Game theory, by Arià Paco. In the same article, I quoted the words of another literary protagonist, Eloi from the novel The screams, of Victor Recort, as a vaccine against the progressive infantilization of many young Catalan men: "A man is only a man if he is capable of returning at least the same number of goodnight kisses he received as a child."

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At the end of July, Salvador Macip, director of the UOC's Health Sciences Studies and professor of molecular medicine at the University of Leicester, wrote an article about his autism diagnosis at the age of 54. Macip explains that most autistic people develop compensation mechanisms to hide their autism, which is known as masking or camouflage: the effort to hide autistic traits and fit into the social norms that the environment dictates as "normal."

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Melanie Joy is an American social psychologist and writer who in 2009 wrote Why we love dogs, eat pigs, and wear cows, a book where she expounds on the concept of "carnism": the belief system that considers eating certain animals so natural and necessary that it justifies structural violence against them, a belief that most of us don't question because, as Joy points out, all violent ideologies try to remain invisible in order to perpetuate their power of limitless exploitation and maximum profit. This requires killing as many animals as possible in the shortest amount of time possible, and these animals cease to be considered living beings and become things that can be accumulated, processed, and killed in any way.

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I'm arriving in July feeling short on energy. It's been an intense year, and this week I wanted to write something light, something that wouldn't require too much emotional effort. But karma literary had other plans for me and it has come into my hands the latest novel by the Valencian writer Enric Pardo i Ramírez, The man of the house, published by La Magrana.

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This week the list of writers who will travel to Mexico was published. for the Guadalajara International Book Fair and my friend Elisenda Solsona is one of the guests. When we publish Natives: ten beastly tales (Comanegra), my daughter asked me which of the friends we had written the book with was my favorite writer. The joke made me laugh and made me think about when she liked them. The real spies and made me choose which one I liked best. Just like before, I felt bad about having to choose because, like the spies, my friends are all fantastic, but if I had to, I'd go with Alex and Eli (via Solsona), respectively. When she asked me why I chose her, I reflected on it: because of her overflowing imagination, I answered.

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Today I begin with some uncomfortable data: 25% of the adult population has suffered physical abuse in childhood, and 18% of girls and 8% of boys have suffered sexual abuse (UNICEF, 2017). Polish psychoanalyst Alice Miller delved into the concept of Black pedagogy, which she defines as a parenting model based on emotional repression, humiliation, and uncritical obedience, where violence (physical, verbal, or symbolic) is presented as necessary for education. This pedagogy not only wounds, but teaches us to justify the wound ("They did it for my own good," "The standards of the time were different"), and in this way, the pain is buried under a layer of loyalty, and the cycle of violence can perpetuate itself unchallenged.

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