Sometimes I fantasize about writing under a pseudonym. In fiction, it would allow me to tackle subjects that, for personal reasons, are forbidden to me (if I were to write about them, the consequences in real life would be too significant), and it would also save me a lot of promotional work and, therefore, a lot of insults on social media (we know that no matter what you say in interviews, there's always a reel that will hit the nail on the head: we live in a world with an excessive tendency to hit the nail on the head); in essay writing, a pseudonym would give me the freedom not to remain silent or censor myself (I assure you that often, or even almost always, I bite my tongue; after all, repression is a mechanism of social origin). I fantasize about the idea of not signing my texts, but I immediately realize that this has two problems. The first is that I suspect it wouldn't be difficult to realize it's me; after all, everyone has their thematic, lexical, syntactic, idiosyncratic obsessions, etcetera, what is called a unique voice, so if you haven't hidden behind a false name from the beginning, it will be difficult to start doing so halfway through, at least in a natural way, because, of course, if you have to make a great effort so that it's not noticed that it's you, perhaps everything, by not having truth even for the author, will already be flawed from the start.Imagining that I could overcome the obstacle of being identified, the second problem still remains: in fiction, it would imply that one would have to break new ground from scratch and surely fewer books would sell initially (not that I sell many now, don't think so), so everything would become economically (even) more precarious, even more so because a good part of a writer's income derives from satellite work: book clubs, talks, and the like; in the case of writing articles, the problem would be that I imagine that at least part of the interest in my articles derives from who I am: from the work I do, the background I have, the place I occupy in the world. I believe that when we read an opinion, an insult, or a digression on any topic, it is interesting to know who is talking to us, in order to better appreciate the virtues and biases it will have (let's be realistic: we all have them). So I fantasize and then abandon the idea.Is criticism insincere in our country?

All this comes in the wake of the (slight) dust raised by this magazine called No té nom, which defines itself as "a platform for honest and rigorous cultural criticism with a key difference from conventional media: the use of pseudonyms". Behind it is a foundation and a editorial board with names and surnames (Enric Borràs, Marçal Girbau, Enric Virgili and Anna Tort), who are the ones who filter articles signed with false names. In their manifesto, they affirm that in our country criticism is, in general, insincere, that it lacks in-depth analysis and that it is too marked by egos, self-censorship and cronyism.

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